Also, look, I don’t use reddit enough to be a huge reddit supporter but maybe I can come from a slightly balanced perspective because I’ve worked in large corporations and VC-backed startups and also currently working on a startup. So if I’m using inappropriate example below it’s because I want to get people to think about it. And Andrew knows how much I admire him when we talked in Vacouver so don’t take anything personally.
Reddit CEO (trust me, CEO is a really hard job), thinking what’s best for Reddit going forward (not saying he’s right or wrong just saying in his opinion), decided to charge for API calls.
Zig Founder (Andrew, sorry, but you are in that leader position so have to use you as example), decided to shut down /r/reddit thinking it’s best for Zig.
Btw, I’m NOT equating Andrew with Steve Huffman but you can see that any decision you make is not necessarily going to be approved by everyone. The sad part is that in anyone’s mind, he/she is doing the best thing for the employee/people/world/company.
Also I’m fully aware that it’s never one person’s decision except one person will have to stand out and be the public face in any organization.
In this case, I think it’s the regular people like me (not app creators, not reddit itself) that suffers the most as they lost a good subreddit.
I’ve personally google’d for Zig answers in the last several days but the answer is not viewable because they are on reddit.
Reddit is NOT profitable hence they need to make money to make IPO more appealing. A company that doesn’t make enough money to cover the expense is not profiteering…
I sincerely doubt this about the Reddit leadership.
Debt is one of the greatest inventions of humankind but VC capital does have some easily recognizable issues that come with it when the people involved can’t find a sound business model and / or the company plays the “grow forever” game instead of at some point settling down and actually trying to become good at what it does.
That’s because you’re using the search engine of an ad company that is playing the “grow forever” game, and it’s starting to lose :^)
This is just somebody’s theory so it shouldn’t be taken as a gospel, but I think it’s clear that bumping up like crazy the API cost is not going to make them sustainable.
Article:
https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/06/14/reddit-moat.html
HN comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36325958
Considering the ties between YC, Reddit and OpenAI, it does make some sense. I personally also find interesting how Musk did the same with Twitter right away (lock down the APIs), considering he too is involved with OpenAI.
What other search engine is there? Bing?
I tried using YaCy, but it’s not that good… sad 
Louis Rossmann pointing out more ridiculous stuff from Reddit:
I dunno, but yes Google is indeed suffering because of Reddit shutdowns:
The problem is that newcomers need somewhere to be pointed to. And search engines need somewhere to be pointed to.
Yeah, “being decentralized” is nice for the Zig leadership monetary outlays, but not so much for the Zig hoi polloi. Newbies are going to gravitate where it is convenient–a de facto consensus will form without external direction. In this case, Discord is probably going to win–which has several downsides (the lack of searchability being what I would regard as the big one).
I am NOT suggesting to reopen the Reddit. However, if we want a Zig “community” to form that lands somewhere that SYCL would approve (as opposed to something like Discord which is clearly NOT SYCL), it needs to be given a place to land and possibly a bit of help.
Logged in to post Louis’ video 
One thing he’s absolutely right about is that Reddit’s value is in the posts and comments.
Users provide 100% of the value. Service provided by Reddit as a hosting platform is relatively easy to replace, but Reddit without user content is nothing.
I agree with this sentiment, and I’d like to propose a “solution” similar to how the community of one of my other hobby groups does it.
I’m also a watch enthusiast so I partake in several watch forums and let me use one particular example of rolex since everyone knows rolex.
There is the rolex forum (self-hosted, unofficial but de facto), there is the rolex subreddit, and there is the facebook rolex group as well. They are actually all moderated by different groups of people. The rolex forum is very active and even though it is open for everyone to register, it’s heavily moderated and it has a certain “ideology” and will kick people for “spams” and “scams”. There are a lot of Q&A and knowledge base that’s only available after registration. It’s also not openly searchable.
The rolex subreddit is run by another set of people and they are mostly there to brag about what they wear but there are legitimate questions and answers as well. The posts and Q&A are openly searchable.
The facebook rolex group is another outlet for yet another different set of enthusiasts. They are almost like the discords that we have.
What I mean is that we can make something like this ziggit.dev or whatever operate like the rolex forum with ideology and discussion but open up something like reddit for Q&A for the general public that people can land on using search engine.
Ooooh, I hate forums that let you search or, for example, view attachments to posts only after registration!
“Here’s the wiring diagram you’ve been looking for, but you can’t view it unless you create an account”.
I agree but I guess they don’t want people’s privacy infringued for exposing all forum conversations. Also there is a potential criminal element being that Rolex are worth a lot of money.
Well, I always thought forums are, by their nature, public.
So if you don’t want your private information exposed… don’t post it publicly 
Their actions have been predatory on end users. I don’t understand why anybody except investors would worry about a company’s IPO. Community discussions should be decentralized.
Speaking about search engines, my go-to is Duckduckgo, and has been for many years.
One of the first things I do when I install any browser, is to change the default search provider to DDG.
Sometimes, and this is really a rare situation, when I can’t find what I want via DDG, I use their “!g ” syntax to switch to Google.
But that happens once in a blue moon.
I used it for some time. Got really disappointed when I realized that DDG is basically a frontend for Bing. There’s many other search engines, but they all depend on bing. Running a crawler isn’t cheap I suppose… That’s why I’m crossing fingers for YaCy…
I don’t think it matters, as long as my IP / other identifiable information is not passed to their back end.
For anyone who hasn’t seen yet, it looks like the zig subreddit is open in read-only mode and refers people here for new discussions
And someone has requested the subreddit and reopened it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zig/comments/15yoxok/rzig_is_reopened/
I wouldn’t normally care, but they 100% appear to be a troll based on their comment history.
How is it possible to “request” a subreddit?
Like, “hey, I have noticed this subreddit is read-only, could you please make me a mod?”.
“Sure, here you go!”
Worst part is, r/Zig is probably going to go down and disappear completely as a result of this.
I REALLY should start saving the posts I care about.
How is it possible to “request” a subreddit?
Like, “hey, I have noticed this subreddit is read-only, could you please make me a mod?”.
“Sure, here you go!”
That’s exactly what it looks like, and you also get all previous content too