What is it with social media? It all starts so nicely, providing a platform to permit at least relatively free discourse, often for little or no charge. Funds are raised usually through advertising, and mostly people accept that they (or more correctly, information about them) are the product being sold to pay for the service.

All goes well for a while, a reasonable balance is obtained. Then something changes: maybe it’s greed, maybe a desire to control the narrative, and the disconnect between site owners and users comes into sharper focus.

In very recent memory Twitter was the obvious example: a system that had become ubiquitous, providing a quick and effective way of communicating between two parties, be that for personal or commercial use. Then a self-obsessed narcissist (is there any other kind) bought it out and proceeded to try and divert it to his own interests while also attempting to recoup his costs resulting from the purchase. His agenda succeeded in screwing the system up for everyone, driving both monetary value and utility down. Ok, it’s not dead yet, but it has suffered a significant drop in usefulness, at least in part from the loss of worthwhile input.

We’ve seen similar, if not as obviously self destructive, issues with other social media giants: Facebook and Flickr to name just two, the former lost trust, the latter value, as both tried to control what people could say or do.

Now Reddit: with an imminent IPO the management team obviously want to raise value. So what do they do? Alienate a significant group of people, content creators and subreddit moderators, by trying to force a ridiculous and clearly punitive rate for API access on third party app developers. These apps provide functionality that the native Reddit app lacks, very obviously, but often do so while also blocking adverts. This is viewed as one of their great advantages by the users, but as anathema by Reddit admins, as advertising provides income for the site. So in a clear and deliberate step Reddit gave an ultimatum to the third part app developers: you will pay us a punitive sum, and you will do it with only a month’s notice.

To be fair, most developers accept the need for API payments, but not at the inflated rates Reddit wants to charge, an order of magnitude more than the actual costs and lost profit to the company. Many would try and comply with a reasonable subscription model – but not with only a few weeks notice, it’s just impossible to retool and cover costs in the meantime.

This has played out badly for Reddit: in a rapidly developing spat between one the major 3PA developers and the CEO of Reddit, the latter accused the developer of threatening Reddit with blackmail. Unfortunately the dev had kept a (perfectly legal) tape of the conversations, something that disproved the allegations clearly. Not content though, the CEO doubled down on his story in a public AMA session – to be immediately challenged by the dev to back up his claims. The result was as might have been expected, dead silence from Reddit and an outcry from the people who had witnessed the disagreement.

The CEO has a history of editing others’ comments to make himself look good, displaying a megalomaniac tendency not unlike Elon Musk, and the AMA seems to have been an attempt to whitewash over the issue. However it has backfired spectacularly, the whole thing being a public shaming of his attitude and behaviour that won’t go unmissed by investors in any upcoming IPO. An opportunity to enhance the organisation’s value has turned into an indictment of the management’s ability and driven a significant wedge between the groups.

Undoubtably Reddit will survive this, as Twitter and many other mismanaged groups have done, but at the cost of driving users towards a more decentralised and open concept, something designed to avoid the sort of imposed control. So far the fediverse (don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with the name) hasn’t gained much public traction, but at some point in their history neither had the current social media giants. Just keep an eye open for Mastodon and Lenny, their or their successors’ time will come. Anyone remember MySpace or Digg? The same thing can and will happen to Twitter and Reddit as freer alternatives build up support and the old guard entrenches itself ever further in the pursuit of profit at the expense of service.