How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
This will ultimately increase the number of users who can be advertised to.
For every person who is engaged about this there are a dozen that don’t understand what an API is and will happily switch over to another app from the app store if it has cat gifs.
True, there will be enough users that doesn’t care about all of this, but there’s still a non negligible part of user (and those are probably the best contributors), and more importantly moderators that will leave Reddit. It will probably disrupt the site, without all of the leaving moderators, Reddit will quickly become the wild west, and it would be really difficult for them to moderate the site themselves, there’s probably users that would want to replace the leaving moderators, but not enough.
Honestly I won’t care that much when it comes, because the “new” Reddit will not be the same Reddit that I loved.
I hope they’ll reap what they sow tho.