Visionaries: Gaming, Media and the Internet Explained - Unraveling the Threads: Reddit's Descent into Chaos

Unraveling the Threads: Reddit's Descent into Chaos

06/23/23 • 64 min

4 Listeners

Visionaries: Gaming, Media and the Internet Explained

In a hunt for profitability, Reddit's begun limiting access to its API behind a paywall, functionally killing extremely popular third-party apps like Apollo and Infinity. The policy change's started an entire revolt, with volunteer moderators on the site taking some of their subreddits private, ensnaring the website in a battle between its administrators and its community. So how did this all begin? And how is it demonstrative of a larger issue with the Internet and access to free information?

Journalist Alex Pareene, the former editor-in-chief at Gawker and a writer at Salon, joined Jacob to discuss how the Reddit saga is impacting the Internet as a whole.

"It became much more about these communities and about the user generated content, which has become so important to Reddit. But it's sort of important to the Internet in general. A lot of people were very seriously saying all of their Google searches were broken when the subreddits were down because everything, if it was a particular tech support issue or all these other subjects, that you wanted to Google these things, the first page of links would've a bunch of Reddit links."

You can read Alex's piece on Defector here: https://defector.com/the-last-page-of-the-internet

Follow Alex on Twitter here.

Journalist Alex Pareene, the former editor-in-chief at Gawker and a writer at Salon, joined Jacob to discuss how the Reddit saga is impacting the Internet as a whole.

You can read Alex's piece on Defector here: https://defector.com/the-last-page-of-the-internet

Follow Alex on Twitter here.

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Follow John on Twitter here.