To me this is clearly a future step. Obviously reddit hasn’t cared about the user experience in years and have been slowly maneuvering to make changes that benefit profits at the cost of user experience.
For me personally I look back to when Victoria was fired as the first moment I said “oh OK, it’s gonna be like that”. The value she brought to the site could not be overstated imo. AMAs were a true spectacle before. Ever since then it’s felt like reddit was attempting to “make frog soup” by slowly making everything worse and hoping each individual change wouldn’t be enough for the frog to jump out.
They’ll learn the hard way that it doesn’t work I guess lol.
Death of the apps was the line in the sand for me and many others. Old.reddit will inevitably be taken behind the shed one day and I imagine that’ll be another line in the sand. And eventually I really do believe reddit will fade out to the level of digg/tumblr/whatever else.
Love the fediverse idea though. He’s hoping it takes off.
One final thought… I swear it’s amazing how quickly any company goes to hell once it goes public. To me it really feels like the people making these decisions do not understand the products/services they provide and why they’re successful.