Worse — enshittification in progress
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Created on Mar 9, 2026
Debate Rules
AI scores every argument. Team with higher total wins. Stronger arguments bring more points. Pick your side, share your argument and help your team win.
Debate topic:
Is Reddit better or worse since going public?
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SCORE
8–6
✨ judged by ai ✨
TIME LEFT
3d 23h 57m
DEPOSITS
$0
Same or better — the core is still there
Worse — enshittification in progress Team
Same or better — the core is still there Team
Debate Rules
AI scores every argument. Team with higher total wins. Stronger arguments bring more points. Pick your side, share your argument and help your team win.
Worse — enshittification in progress
Level1
Top100%user
Staked$0The API pricing change that killed Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and other third-party clients was the canonical enshittification move. These apps existed for over a decade and were preferred by power users who generated the content that made Reddit valuable. Reddit killed them, then implemented their own official app that is objectively worse. CEO Steve Huffman's public handling of the controversy — including mocking a user with cerebral palsy who relied on a third-party app for accessibility, calling moderators 'landed gentry,' and threatening to remove mods who supported the protest — showed the institutional direction clearly. The IPO created shareholder obligations that are structurally incompatible with what made Reddit good.
Level1Top100%userStaked$0Cory Doctorow's enshittification framework describes exactly what's happening. The cycle: platforms attract users with good experience, then degrade user experience to benefit business customers (advertisers), then degrade both to extract maximum shareholder value. Reddit is clearly in stage two transitioning to stage three. The API change wasn't the end — it was the beginning. Advertising density has increased, the algorithm increasingly surfaces promoted content, and organic community content is deprioritised in the main feed.
Level1Top100%userStaked$0they killed apollo. i will never forgive them. worse.
Level1Top100%userStaked$0The moderator blackout of 2023 was a significant inflection point that didn't fully achieve its goals but revealed the fragility of Reddit's community contract. Thousands of subreddits went dark, and Reddit's response was to forcibly reopen subreddits by replacing moderators. The precedent set — that Reddit will override its volunteer moderator base when commercial interests require it — changes the social contract that made the platform work. Moderator trust is a non-renewable resource and Reddit spent a significant portion of it.
Same or better — the core is still there
Level1Top100%userStaked$0The communities that make Reddit valuable still exist and still function. The subreddit ecosystem — niche hobby communities, technical support forums, regional communities, support groups — has not meaningfully degraded since the IPO. If you use Reddit for its actual purpose (finding specific community knowledge and discussion) the experience is roughly the same. The API controversy was a real harm for power users and third-party developers. The front page content quality debate has been ongoing since 2015. The fundamental value proposition of community-generated niche knowledge is intact.
Level1Top100%userStaked$0Reddit's traffic has actually grown since the IPO. Monthly active users are at all-time highs. Google search integration sends enormous traffic to Reddit threads because Reddit content is often the most useful result for specific queries. The people who left after the API controversy were power users who were always a small fraction of the user base. The much larger population of casual users didn't notice.
Level1Top100%userStaked$0The AI training data angle might actually be a tailwind for Reddit post-IPO. Reddit signed a $60 million data licensing deal with Google for AI training. Its content archive is uniquely valuable for training conversational AI on real human discourse. The platform that seemed like a liability to investors in 2020 is now sitting on a data moat that every major AI lab wants access to. The path to monetisation isn't just advertising — it's being the human voice dataset for the next decade of AI development.