I'm no longer supporting Reddit
5/5/2025
I don't like to start the week this way, but I'll list the reasons that forced me to stop supporting Reddit:
- Gradual deterioration of its API. I remember when I started this project the freedom of use that its API offered, and I even collaborated on several third-party apps. But over the years, they began to restrict parts of their API, and the critical point was two years ago when they killed third-party apps and sent everyone to the official app, loaded with ads. This has led to a complete abandonment of the developer community to maintain Reddit plugins that allowed me to auto-publish from my website. For the past week, it's been impossible for me to log in to Reddit from my website with the C# plugins, and frankly, I'm not even thinking about creating and maintaining a plugin when not a single C# plugin has been updated in the last two years.
- Shadowbanned my sub. I'll be honest, it's not motivating to support a social network that shadowbanned me without warning or even had the courtesy to respond to my requests. For those who don't know what a shadowban is, it boils down to: "We'll let you operate, but forget about appearing in search engines or Google results." Frankly, I didn't care, but later I found out that the moderators of /r/gamedeals were charging official stores money to gain ranking in search engines like Google when posting on Reddit. These moderators reported any users who might compete with them and took advantage of Reddit's incompetent administration. However, by implementing this modus operandi, they've killed /r/gamedeals because there are no longer any active users on that sub.
- Drop in visits. Another factor that isn't motivating. To give you an idea, in April 2024 I had about 250 visits from Reddit, while in April of this year I only had 20 visits. Reddit has made a series of disastrous decisions in recent years that have only driven away active users, and this is slowly killing subs (if I could sell my 12-year-old account, I would do it right now).
I try to be as open-minded as possible about the half-million social networks out there today and give you the best support possible, but between the collapse of Reddit, Discord, and Twitter, and the slowdown of Bluesky, I'm very tempted to stop supporting social networks.