Comment by TFNA
1 month ago
As a deeply involved Redditor (even a sub mod) you should already be aware that things like RSS and Old Reddit are used by a minuscule amount of people. The world moved on, and the vast majority of users are on the app or on the New Reddit website, generally on smartphones -- and that is precisely why the culture of the site has long since degenerated into what it is now.
So, Reddit killing old features isn't about trying to chain freethinking people to the algorithm, since there just aren't enough such people left to be significant. You can take the site's statement at face value; this really is about stopping unpaid scraping by bots.
> there just aren't enough such people left to be significant
Right, and the reason for that is because of the previous actions they'd taken - killing third party apps, refusing to do more than the bare minimum to support moderators, etc.
At some point, they realized they wanted people to be on the New Version & the App. And hell, it was probably the correct business decision - they're not running it out of the goodness of their own hearts on free hardware. But it definitely means that Reddit is just not a place I use anymore.
People may still be taught that RSS is not an xml protocol that bla bla, but that it is one of the few remaining windows to get content delivered to readership in their own very terms and not in the ones of some pro-enshitification shareholders. There will always be people preaching rss and open platforms, the need is not gone.