I'm expecting the CEO to push back the date of the API implementation by a month or two (still a bit doubtful) but I don't see him changing his original stance given his narcissistic attitude.

I’m expecting the API change to happen exactly as planned. As a result all 3rd party apps will die by the end of this month, and the user count will take a severe hit. Many essential mod tools will stop working, so those who actually found the default app tolerable, will get to see all subs go downhill since they aren’t really being moderated anymore. As a result, the user count will continue to decline in the following months as people come to terms with Reddit sucking harder than before. Oh, but then it gets even worse when the spam bots and official ads start taking over every sub. Most likely the next year is going to be very rough in terms of user count.

Unlike other social media sites, where people stick around because of family and friends, at reddit-like sites, people stick around for the content and discussion. Once the content gets taken over by spam-bots, it's over.

There's some apps I hate like Instagram and WhatsApp, but stick around because it's the only way I can contact some friends and family. The network effect is strong and I can't really leave.

With Reddit, I don't care. If there's enough content somewhere else, even if it's a fraction of the volume (there was no way I could get through everything on Reddit anyway) then it's an easy switch.

I just revolted and said, if anyone wants to communicate with me, they need to use e.g. Signal.

I'm absolutely not installing this spyware on my phone

A good chunk of my close family all use iPhones and iMessage to communicate with each other - but they won't add me to any group conversations because "green bubbles bad"... I spun up a Matrix server, created an account for everyone, pre-joined them to a room with all of us in it and sent everyone their credentials along with a link to Element for iOS so that all they had to do was download an app and copy/paste into two fields.

This worked great for about two or three months until most of them went back to their group chats over iMessage and I was back to being excluded. Only one of them still uses Element to communicate with me, but I suppose that's still somewhat a victory since previously we were using Facebook Messenger (bleh) to chat.

I guess there are some sayings that still ring true, such as "Old habits die hard" or "Humans are creatures of habit"... 😮‍💨

It sucks, because it's incredibly difficult for me to not take that personally as "They don't seem to care about me to try to meet me half way to keep in touch". I don't know what more I could do aside from purchasing an iPhone, which is just not going to happen.