17 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: AskHistorians and uncertainty surrounding the future of API access
Why not just make askhistorians its own website?
Its always been the case that reddit doesnt listen to its community, and none if these protests have ever made any impact before. If reddit is going to get worse and worse, maybe it's time to jump ship while there are still enough of us left. Personally onxe third party app access Is removed I'll never see an askhistorians post again, and i know I'm far from alone.
If any community on reddit can make the jump, it's this one. Besides the community is going to get gutted in terms of numbers, and the way things work on the backend is going to change anyway. Might as well do it on your own terms this time so that in the future, when reddit gets worse again askhistorians doesn't suffer too (the alternative seems to be the death of this community as reddit removes the moderation tools nessecary to keep things high quality).
Good luck with whatever you decide to do, and goodbye to every one of you who decide to remain only on reddit, was nice talking and listening to all of you :).
Comment by jschooltiger at 07/06/2023 at 10:12 UTC
40 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Because of the audience.
I spent 15 years teaching at a big journalism school in the Midwest. This came up time and time again -- "why do we post our content on [platform]? instead of on our own site?"
And the answer always comes down to "because [x] million people use that site and [y] thousand people came to our site organically over the years..." which is unfortunate but is how the Internet works.
We have a (perhaps inadvertently created) great platform here to do public history; as its own site, perhaps we're shouting into the void more than we would like. One of the great things about this platform is that we shout into the void less often than we would otherwise do.