[HN Gopher] Reddit Strike Has Started
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit Strike Has Started
Author : Freddie111
Score : 825 points
Date : 2023-06-11 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
HTML web link (reddark.untone.uk)
TEXT w3m dump (reddark.untone.uk)
| causality0 wrote:
| Has anybody done a writeup on the old vs new API costs compared
| to what it actually costs Reddit to provide the service? How is
| Reddit still not profitable?
| cute_boi wrote:
| 662/5279 = 0.12540253836
|
| looks too tiny tbh.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Can someone clarify how they decided to feature these 5279
| subreddits? Are these the subreddits whose mods decided to
| participate? Or are these the largest subreddits? Or is there
| some other factor?
| Timon3 wrote:
| The subreddits didn't organize around a single point in time
| across all timezones. It's generally the 12th and 13th, but
| it's not yet the 12th everywhere. Give it a couple of hours. In
| the last 8 minutes alone 14 new subs went private.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Why didn't they? UTC all the things.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Is it? It's not about the size (lookup how many subs are in
| total). It's about sending a message
|
| There's more than 5000 subs. There are millions of them. These
| are big subs
| cornedor wrote:
| It was 662 for me too when I opened the site, i've been
| scrolling a bit trough the site and it is 668 already, and the
| site showed notifications for those extra reddits. They seem to
| be closing fast.
| yareally wrote:
| 12.5%? That's roughly 1 in 8 subreddits
| ferngodfather wrote:
| That's 12% - nothing to laugh at
| rvz wrote:
| Lets see how the strong Reddit's network effect is when tested.
| klyrs wrote:
| https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
|
| As of now, six of the top ten subreddits have disabled posting.
| That doesn't seem tiny to me
| Quequau wrote:
| 2 subreddits with more than 20 million subscribers, 1 subreddit
| with more than 10 million, 23 with more than 1 million
| subscribers, 18 with more than 500K, 32 with more than 250K...
| seems like it's beginning to add up to me and it's only 7:40
| CEST.
|
| I'm shutting down roughly 50 just before midnight CEST and I
| expect things to accelerate with the date change at GMT.
| constantly wrote:
| Small subreddits are largely not participating. Large subreddits
| I just browse from the All or Popular. I'm thinking if the large
| subreddits don't inject things into the All subreddit than
| largely identical content will be injected and this will be a
| blip as small as the last protest that only saw the main
| subreddit names change and nothing more.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| We know about reddark, but is there a list of the subs that are
| consciously _not_ participating?
| DowsingSpoon wrote:
| This whole fiasco leaves me shocked and surprised. I never
| considered that Reddit would sink themselves this way. It's
| incredible. Until the AMA, I really had hope they'd back off and
| implement a sane API pricing model. That apps like Apollo would
| survive, diminished, and things would mostly continue on
| business-as-usual. But now, well, that's it I guess. It's been a
| long, slow decline, but I guess this is the end of the road.
| nunez wrote:
| hell yeah. burn baby burn. i fucking love reddit but i'd rather
| it die by implosion than see it live long enough to become
| slashdot
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| My website, my rules, my API prices. Don't like go somewhere
| else. Ez pez.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Is the inevitable fate of any social media site to be
| antagonistic to its most dedicated users?
| yanderekko wrote:
| When the most dedicated users are fundamentally hostile to the
| idea that the social media site may need to limit features for
| the sake of profitability, it seems likely. Rhetorically the
| activists here are a step or two away from treating Reddit as a
| public utility and free API access as a human right. At least
| until they shift focus to finding wrongthinkers that they want
| to ban again, then we'll shift back to the usual "it's a
| private platform sweetie and your presence has negative value"
| smugness.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You are fighting a straw man you yourself erected. Nobody
| believes they have a right to reddit but nor does reddit have
| a right to viewership. They are trying to leverage the value
| their communities bring to the platform. There is nothing
| morally wrong with this.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >Nobody believes they have a right to reddit
|
| When people castigate the mere idea that Reddit should be
| trying to guarantee a return to its investors - and I can
| point you to examples of this if you wish - it's hard to
| interpret this as anything other than people saying that
| their interest to unfettered API access is more important
| than the interest that investors have in a positive ROI. I
| guess you could say that this isn't establishing a "right
| to Reddit" but that seems like hair-splitting to me - "we
| don't have a right to Reddit but anything that would take
| Reddit away from us would be evil."
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > t's hard to interpret this as anything other than
| people saying that their interest to unfettered API
| access is more important than the interest that investors
| have in a positive ROI.
|
| Reddit is removing all api access to for-profit apps.
| Anyone willing to pay who contacted reddit has been
| ignored. By acting in bad-faith, they lost all moral
| ground at all.
| atemerev wrote:
| Yes, if you want to keep that sweet growth. If you are OK
| staying where you are as a relatively niche outlet (like HN),
| you are safe. But transitioning to the general public stage
| will require you to sell your soul. No getting around that.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I've long thought that the only way to make a sustainable
| social media platform is to have it be controlled by its
| contributors.
|
| Governance is human problem and not a technical one. We have a
| few millennia of experience organizing and governing human
| effort, yet the control structure of every subreddit is akin to
| some kind of Oligarchy with unelected moderators wielding
| considerable power. These moderators in turn are at the mercy
| of the Oligarchical Reddit admins.
|
| A better system would be to offer different governance types as
| a choice for organizing the subreddit. Have different types of
| built in voting mechanisms if people want to use them but still
| allow 'dictator' subreddits if people want to use them.
|
| Set up a revenue sharing system where each subreddit gets the
| portion of money they generate for Reddit. Allow the governance
| structure the subreddit has decided on to dictate the way those
| funds are split between moderators and contributors.
|
| Then set up some sort of governance structure that rolls up the
| Subreddits. As an American I'm biased towards the way the US
| does things but I'm sure there are other good ways to do this
| as well. You could have the equivalent to 'states' similar to
| the sections of a newspaper: Sports, Entertainment, Money,
| Technology, Travel, etc. with the equivalent of 'counties'
| within those (football, baseball, basketball or books, video
| games, movies, etc).
|
| Replace the corporate Reddit structure with the equivalent of a
| federal government: have the 'states' hold a 'constitutional
| convention' and delimit powers that the corporation should have
| and reserve every other right to the individual 'states'. Then
| you can have some kind of election system that governs the
| corporation, CEO being equivalent to president, etc.
|
| Then you have a system that broadly aligns the interests of the
| participants and provides mechanisms for information to be
| transmitted when needed for decision making.
|
| ---
|
| The other problem that social media needs to solve is that of
| anonymity and content presentation. Here I think Reddit fails
| by having a global karma count instead of one that's localized
| to the 'state' and subreddit you're on. If they did that then
| users could actually gain reputation and credibility within the
| context of a space.
|
| They also should offer identity services that allow the
| verification of information like employment, citizenship,
| education, etc. that some subreddits have their own haphazard
| mechanisms for verifying. This would allow moderators to
| leverage this type of credential more easily and users to have
| more trust in sharing them (because they're sharing with Reddit
| proper not some random subreddit moderator).
|
| Finally, they should have some sort of verification system that
| lets users tie their accounts to their real identity. Obviously
| anonymous accounts should still be allowed but this type of
| verification system tamps down on many of the problems that
| social media platforms face.
|
| ---
|
| If anyone wants to fund the development of a platform like this
| let me know lol
| shagie wrote:
| > Here I think Reddit fails by having a global karma count
| instead of one that's localized to the 'state' and subreddit
| you're on.
|
| This information exists and is maintained on the backend.
|
| Pull up your profile on old.reddit and click on "show karma
| breakdown by subreddit".
|
| Note that this isn't publicly available (/u/johnsmith1234568
| has 1k karma in /r/someIdeoligcalSub - they're banned from
| participating here).
| maccard wrote:
| I don't know if it's inevitable, but it's clear at this point
| that people are unwilling to pay $ for access to the content in
| the forms we know now. I think until we find a better way of
| having people pay for content and curation, we're likely to see
| this happen again. That said, Reddit has (so far) lasted a
| decade on the throne, which is a third of the life of the www.
| It's not like there's anoter competitor sitting there ready to
| dethrone it so I suspect it's here for another while.
| Ekaros wrote:
| When was a last time a big and popular social mediaish or
| like platform properly died? Media companies have not
| survived, but platforms seem to have been sticky or then I
| just haven't used them.
| philistine wrote:
| I would be interest in seeing Pinterest's usage numbers.
| That place has turned into a Wish.com ad farm faster than
| you can blink.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| So I think it's relatively clear that Reddit doesn't _want_
| to reach some kind of deal with 3rd party apps, but honestly,
| I think that if they _had_ wanted that, most of these apps
| could have survived with a much smaller userbase of paying
| customers. I would have paid the $3-5/month it would have
| cost to keep my preferred app. And while yes, it definitely
| would have been fewer people, my guess is that it would have
| been enough to worth continuing. And if Reddit had been
| willing to figure out some kind of deal with ads, it might
| have been even more.
| fnimick wrote:
| Yes: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-
| doctorow/
|
| First, platforms are good to users to attract them. Then, they
| abuse users to attract advertisers. Then, once they think they
| have a moat, they abuse both sides to extract as much money as
| possible before it all crashes down.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Link to the same article on his personal blog:
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
|
| Why? It's right the header:
|
| > No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy
| policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever
| period.
| chx wrote:
| It is astonishing to watch the enshittification of Reddit and
| StackExchange at the same time.
|
| I would say, as much as there is such a thing and it can be
| dated, Jun 9, 2023 was the end of Web 2.0 -- we found out
| reddit is not backing down and SE has disabled the backup job
| to archive.org. For SE the death march to enshittification
| has been much clearer, starting with the hiring of the new
| CEO, the firing of community managers to recently first
| completely ignoring and then going against the community on
| AI. Reddit just has been mostly wasting their time and money
| until they realized they need to make money and as Doctorow
| says, the siren song of enshittification is irresistible.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| This is not happening at the same time by pure chance. Once
| the Fed turned off the free money, all of the negative
| profit companies need to adapt or die.
| chx wrote:
| Yeah but it's surprising to see neither have better
| ideas.
| Systemmanic wrote:
| [dead]
| JasserInicide wrote:
| That's just how most VC-funded projects run. Give away the
| product for free to build a community. Once it's large enough,
| start building the _real_ money making products and start
| exploiting said community. Then IPO /get acquired and fuck off
| with money.
| cragfar wrote:
| This is 99% manufactured drama by the power mods wanting to be
| able to keep modding 100+ subreddits with their 3rd party tools
| and AI companies wanting to mine reddit data for free. The fact
| that Spez has let them do it for this long has probably put him
| in the hot seat.
| TX81Z wrote:
| The fact that he isn't keeping his free labor force happy is
| the problem. Other companies put hundreds of millions of
| dollars and thousands of staff into moderation. This moron
| has people doing that FOR FREE and he's pissing them off.
|
| Seriously, do you have any clue how much just YouTube alone
| spends on content moderation? Or Facebook? These are
| absolutely massive investments.
| BrotherBisquick wrote:
| The powers that be have deemed that they don't care what
| the "free labor force" wants or thinks. They care about the
| experience of the users, not the experience of the rulers
| of petty internet fiefdoms.
|
| Reddit has indicated that it wants to pay for content
| moderation. So be it. Who are you to tell them how they run
| their company?
|
| Maybe when we move away from "volunteers" then the
| "volunteers" can get real jobs that pay real money! It'll
| be good for them.
| cragfar wrote:
| There's always another power hungry person to step up. The
| site would probably be better if the entire crop were
| removed outright. How many social media websites have you
| used where you can't even comment on a basic news forum for
| the first two months?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Why don't you mod then? Everyone thinks it is an easy job
| with all these 'power' perks, then when they get onboard
| they figure out it is actually a lot of work and mostly
| just pissing people off because you can never please
| everyone.
|
| It is like people who say 'those who cannot do, teach'.
| Hey, maybe teaching is hard work and most people suck at
| it?
|
| The type of person who thinks mods are all power tripper
| do-badders who could be easily replaced is usually the
| type of person who doesn't bother reading the rules of
| the community before posting, or who resorts instantly to
| insults in disagreements, or who think it is funny to
| piss people off.
| cragfar wrote:
| Do you even use reddit? I'm genuinely curious because
| your post comes off as someone who doesn't know how it
| works. To be a mod I would have to cozy up to the current
| mods and play politics to become one. I was banned from
| r/news years ago for saying the migrant caravan existed
| in response to a comment saying there was no evidence
| that migrant caravans existed and linked one of the
| multiple videos. The message was simply "get out"
| followed by a presumptive muting so I couldn't respond to
| it. I was also blanket banned from ~70 subs because I
| made one post correcting someone in r/nonewnormal.
| delecti wrote:
| I've used reddit regularly for 14 years and have never
| been banned from any sub. I share Eisenstein's
| assumptions. Also, having looked up what r/nonewnormal
| was, I don't fault any mod for noticing a pattern and
| trying to save themselves some trouble, even if casting a
| wide net has false positives.
| [deleted]
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > To be a mod I would have to cozy up to the current mods
| and play politics to become one.
|
| _Anyone_ can start a subbreddit. And in _your_
| subreddit, you can do all the work it takes to create a
| community, and then you can ban people for whatever
| reason you want and feel that tasty power that the mods
| love so much, and see how awesome it is to get cursed at,
| told how terrible you are and how much your community
| sucks, and how they are going to dox you and plant meth
| on you so that you lose custody of your children.
| TX81Z wrote:
| "If you think everyone around you is an asshole, chances
| are..."
| cragfar wrote:
| That's not even close to what I was saying. Were you just
| hoping it was with that response?
| BrotherBisquick wrote:
| And that there is why the system of volunteer moderators
| doesn't work.
|
| You bring up legitimate concerns and you're met with
| either stony silence, or you get called an asshole.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| How do you propose to engage with people who are
| antagonistic?
|
| Have you ever worked a customer service job?
|
| By thinking that people who deal with the public and
| their complaints and entitled attitude constantly are the
| ones who are unreasonable by default, you show a powerful
| ignorance about how many people act when they want
| something and can't immediately get it for any reason.
| BrotherBisquick wrote:
| > Why don't you mod then?
|
| because the current crop of powermods have a stranglehold
| on who and who cannot be appointed to be a mod, and they
| refuse to take applications from anyone with opinions
| right of Trotsky.
|
| No one's saying being a mod is easy. We're saying we want
| the power-hungry extremists to get out of the way, and to
| let reasonable professionals do the job instead,
| professionals whose only interest is to enforce the rules
| as written, and not to exclude people who disagree with
| them.
|
| Your argument is circular, and is perverse. Your powermod
| friends are hurting the community, and everyone is
| calling for them to step down, and you respond with "hey
| you do the job if you think it's easy!" WTF? We can't do
| it because you won't get the hell out of the way!
| paulddraper wrote:
| Hug of death
| ZachSaucier wrote:
| It'd be nice if there was a count of the total # of subscribers
| across all of the subreddits that have gone dark
| seydor wrote:
| Honestly good riddance to most of the mainstream subreddits with
| powertripping mods. The same people have been moderating for free
| (because they are power-addicted) for more than decade and this
| is a good opportunity to start new subreddits.
|
| Could it be that reddit actually wants the 'strike' to shake up
| the stagnant subreddit/moderation situation which hasnt changed
| for so long? If any of you is starting new subs, please post them
| here. It's more likely they will be better than the tired old
| ones
|
| This is one of the dumbest reddit protests and that s a high bar
| to cross
| darkstar999 wrote:
| > Could it be that reddit actually wants the 'strike' to shake
| up the stagnant subreddit/moderation situation
|
| Not likely. Reddit already controls the r/popular feed which is
| the default experience and highly influences traffic.
| [deleted]
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| Having watched literally hundreds of sites rise and fall over the
| last 3 decades.
|
| All I can say is this mess is not the exciting show it seems to
| be.
|
| Quite frankly I'm most surprised reddit made it this far.
| baby wrote:
| This is so sad. I hope Reddit doesn't die, because there's
| nothing to replace it, but I also hope that it stops all the
| horrible decisions it's been taking in the last like 5 years? I
| miss the old reddit.
| revskill wrote:
| What is reddit replacement then ?
| spicyjpeg wrote:
| Most communities seem to be moving over to Discord, which is by
| no means a valid Reddit replacement (in my opinion at least)
| but it is the only option with decent popularity and moderation
| tools that are not completely unusable at scale. Lemmy is being
| thrown around as a "proper" Reddit alternative, but
| realistically it will probably meet the same fate as Mastodon:
| plenty of people will try it for a week or so, only to realize
| that the platform sucks and the content simply isn't there.
| IvyMike wrote:
| The user experience is easy to duplicate; getting good mods
| with good participants, blocking spam and bots, and scaling are
| the thing that will be hard to duplicate.
| applesan wrote:
| I've seen some move to tildes.
| nXqd wrote:
| yes, we are waiting, the main thing would be their content and
| their communities. it's definitely not about the platform, but
| how it would be built and govern by the creator.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Lemmy, probably.
| CostcoFanboy wrote:
| So far the best alternative that I've seen was Squabbles.io A
| lot of communities seem to be moving towards Discord. It has
| announcements, posts, chat, etc.
| macintux wrote:
| If Discord wins, we all lose. Even dead forums, online and
| searchable, are more valuable than live chatrooms.
| ferngodfather wrote:
| I wish Imzy was still around
| srj wrote:
| It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to clone the
| main elements of reddit. Hopefully someone is building one.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Typically Discord, but Discord has its own issues. When the
| Digg meltdown happened, Reddit was already a Digg clone at the
| time (this was the days before subreddits).
| ronnier wrote:
| TikTok is def eating into Reddit. People only have so much time
| to look at stuff and TikTok is taking a lot of it.
| saos wrote:
| Just deleted the app. Not returning until Reddit undo this stupid
| decision.
| bstar77 wrote:
| Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of
| Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most
| significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly
| hoped for.
| Loveaway wrote:
| Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days,
| but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel
| all that is needed is to add sub-hn's. Reddit got Digg's
| business because Digg gambled away all of it's good will. That
| was a long time ago, Reddit since been going down the same
| path.
|
| Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate
| profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users
| are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python
| scripts.
|
| Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board
| and you don't own a single word your users type.
| clnq wrote:
| > wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over?
|
| I really hope not. It would be the eternal September for HN.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I'd be really sad if HN turned into Reddit, tbh.
| lordnacho wrote:
| You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest
| group, like soccer and German politics.
|
| You probably also want to make it a bit more modern,
| supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here.
|
| Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the
| nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.
| Loveaway wrote:
| Start small, add things that would naturally fit here.
| /hn/apple, /hn/crypto, /hn/gpt. Don't need images and
| video, it's fine as is I think. Probaly not going to happen
| right? This is the only place that has the momentum to pull
| it off though.
| oilchange wrote:
| > You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable
| interest group, like soccer and German politics.
|
| People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during
| the digg migration because it was pro free speech and
| minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people
| migrated to reddit instead of here.
|
| The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company
| prided themselves on being a "free speech platform." It was
| explicitly stated on the reddit website.
|
| The selling point of reddit back in the day was that it was
| not censored like HN! It's amazing how censorship created a
| pro-censorship mentality in just a few short years.
| TX81Z wrote:
| They shut down a sub called "jailbait", I'd say the vast
| majority of people are ok with that type of "censorship".
| And if being against that disgusting trash makes me "pro-
| censorship", fine.
| lkt wrote:
| That wasn't the case back then, there was a very strong
| "if it's legal, it's allowed" sentiment on reddit. It was
| only after it started getting attention in mainstream
| media that it was banned.
| TX81Z wrote:
| Yes, exactly, that sentiment isn't mainstream. It goes
| against dominant social values and norms.
|
| The dominant view in society is stuff like "jailbait"
| shouldn't be tolerated. The reason it's not outright
| illegal is in a non-prurient context a yearbook photo may
| just be a photo. It's when you post it to a forum for
| gutter creeps that the qualitative nature changes.
| twelve40 wrote:
| > it was not censored like HN!
|
| I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is
| censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to
| break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can
| this really be called censorship? of course, you can take
| a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that
| as well.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Agreed, especially compared to modern Reddit, HN is a
| free speech haven.
| [deleted]
| nwienert wrote:
| It's super heavily moderated here.
|
| Reddit is heavily moderated too, but there you can get
| into an argument, and it depends on the subreddit.
|
| Here the tone policing is far, far stricter. Also the
| homepage is incredibly tightly controlled, politically
| and pro-YC. I've seen many articles on YC companies or
| associated people changed, removed, etc despite being
| highly relevant.
|
| Titles are changed to suit the mods tastes here. There
| was a good recent example where a very negative article
| on OpenAI skyrocketed the the top of the homepage,
| fastest rising post ever with a few hundred upvotes
| within like an hour - first the title was completely
| neutered, then the post was removed entirely.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The difference is that here I've been able to see many
| opinions expressed and given a fair shake which would've
| resulted in a ban on most of Reddit. The title moderation
| also helps with keeping them neutral and/or informative
| (biased titles set the tone of the conversation).
|
| The tone policing is far stricter, but the actual content
| policing is a lot less absurd. The result is that
| controversial topics and opinions don't result in as much
| of a toxic cesspool of name calling. On top of all that,
| here you can enable the display of deleted and flagged
| comments.
| nwienert wrote:
| I think that thinking of HN as anything close to being
| free speech though is a really wrong take. Sure it's less
| leftist biased which is nice, but for example the title
| changes aren't just to reduce controversy, they
| consistently favor the in-group. If you believed the HN
| homepage and comment section as anything close to the
| zeitgeist you'd be doing yourself a disservice.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I said that it was free speech relative to Reddit. Not
| that it's outright free speech. I have a personal misskey
| instance for that.
| nwienert wrote:
| I still think relatively it's possible more moderated
| here, if you just remove the most popular reddits which
| I'd guess most here ignore.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| If a comment or post is particularly unpopular, it can
| get flagged here, even if it is perfectly civil.
|
| Example: The problem with "doing your own research"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334034
|
| Yes, there is censorship on HN, but it's typically
| enacted by users instead of mods.
| twelve40 wrote:
| I'm not sure this qualifies as censorship. There are a
| bunch of posts and comments that get flagged and unfairly
| downvoted for no apparent good reason, yes. It might
| depend on the mood of the users with voting power on that
| day, and that's unfair, yes. But from what I've seen
| there is no central agenda to systematically filter out
| topics or people. Subjectively, I find HN to be much less
| judgemental than Twitter (musk or not) and other places.
| lordnacho wrote:
| But you at least need someone to clean up spam? Not sure
| whether there was a forum spamming business back then,
| but there certainly is now.
| TJSomething wrote:
| The neat thing is that Reddit is community moderated.
| Each community is allowed to set their own standards, but
| they also need to clean up their own spam. So, /r/science
| doesn't allow any jokes at all while /r/Antiwork bans
| anything that's pro-corporation.
|
| But several times, mostly when the controversy got too
| hot, the admins have killed subreddits, like
| /r/The_Donald, /r/incels, and /r/FatPeopleHate.
| oilchange wrote:
| Yes. Subs had moderators and they got rid of spam, but
| that was about it. The mods themselves were heavily pro
| free speech just like the founders and corporate. Back
| then, reddit was predominatly american and we all adopted
| the free speech as an ideal. Then as reddit gained a
| larger foreign following, they slowly chipped away at
| free speech. It's pretty much what happened to social
| media and the internet in general.
|
| The prononents of internet censorship are canadians,
| brits, europeans, middle easterners, indians, chinese,
| etc. After all, the only place "hate speech" is protected
| is in the US. If you think about it, you have to protect
| "hate speech" if you are to have free speech. You can't
| have free speech without "hate speech". The idea of
| censoring "hate speech" is an alien concept in america.
| It was imported from abroad.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Then as reddit gained a larger foreign following, they
| slowly chipped away at free speech.
|
| I don't think so. I would rather say Reddit made Trump
| president, so the US establishment got pissed off. Then
| Reddit appeases them.
| goykasi wrote:
| Wut? People migrated to reddit, because it was one of the
| few similarly featured platforms at the time. HN was (and
| still is more or less) a niche forum revolving around
| startups and SV. reddit was literally the only
| centralized place on the net that was positioned to
| handle the posts, discussion and users.
|
| Two completely different platforms that were never in
| competition with each other. I think you dont know what
| youre talking about.
| treis wrote:
| I'm somewhat hopeful this gets the far left activist
| class to move to their own echo chamber like the Trump
| peeps did. Wish Reddit would go back to the let the
| upvotes handle it days. Would be nice to be able to sort
| by controversial again and see some reasonable takes.
| [deleted]
| jbaber wrote:
| Shhhhh! They don't all know about HN!
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these
| days, but wouldn 't HN be in the prime position to take over?
| I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's._
|
| Then where would all the hn users go? I'm still mad I
| couldn't get a lobster.rs account 10 years ago, so I'm not
| going there. And I most definitely don't want to use a
| website that the average person has heard of.
| [deleted]
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I think its important to remember that digg was changing the
| way content was generated and promoted to users. They
| kneecapped the entire democratic principles of the site, and
| reddit, a site entirely based on democratic promotion, was
| waiting in the wings.
|
| Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on
| their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of
| that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those
| users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.
| hinkley wrote:
| What's the new Reddit though?
| mikrl wrote:
| I don't know, but hey you heard about that Ukrainian cat
| themed dating sim?
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| I don't think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as
| everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the
| concept altogether. Nobody _needs_ a vote based link
| aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of
| social media in sight.
| laserDinosaur wrote:
| >Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their
| lives
|
| A link based aggregator, you are correct. There's more of
| them out there than TODO app tutorials. What I do find hard
| to separate from is the communities that have constant
| ongoing daily conversations. Cooking, AskCulinary, all the
| science subreddits, some indie video game ones. Having one
| non-discord like hub for a community is great, and I do
| miss checking in on my daily AskCulinary questions and
| helping newbies out.
|
| Really all I want from it is just a forum with the ability
| to upvote threads (rather than replies bumping them up) and
| the ability for anyone to be able to create their own sub-
| forum, but to heck if I can find something in that category
| that replaces reddit.
| hinkley wrote:
| The hobby and craftsmanship forums are a lot less link
| farming. You can take or leave politics and current events
| I suppose, but something like discord or slack can't
| sustain a conversation over hours or days. It gets flooded
| out by other conversations in four to twelve hours and then
| poof it's gone.
|
| And there's also the "better moderation than YouTube
| comments" aspects. Whatever Reddit is or can be, it's lot
| as toxic as YouTube. And better organized.
|
| I think we want something more cooperative. Not Reddit
| centralization, not full fediverse. For some reason I'm
| thinking of the local farmer's market, where sometimes the
| vendor has to run to the bathroom, and their neighbor keeps
| an eye on things, possibly even processing sales.
|
| The thing with coops though is you need a way to tell if
| people are contributing fairly, and a process to deal with
| it, and I have no idea what that looks like. I don't know
| if that's because it could never work, or we still fully
| expect other things to work so no one has tried.
| chefandy wrote:
| There's a whole lot of inertia opposing people either
| replacing or discontinuing using reddit. Alternate
| subreddits gaining prominence is much more likely. Your
| average redditor has no clue what an API is or why some
| users and mods care about them. Generally, people need to
| have significant positive or negative incentives to change
| a years-long daily habit, and using r/radXYZ instead of
| r/XYZ will be a negligible change for most. I think reddit
| has a greater likelihood of strangling themselves by
| hobbling the overall UX with monetization efforts but their
| user base is entrenched enough that they could take it
| pretty far with the "boiling a frog" approach. Who knows,
| maybe what they've done so far combined with the blackouts
| will be enough to push people away, but I doubt it.
|
| I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free
| service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics
| they've used seem to be so off-putting.
| jeltz wrote:
| > I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free
| service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics
| they've used seem to be so off-putting.
|
| I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to.
| They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The
| reason they are not is because they have hired way too
| many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan
| to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and
| investors make a profit.
| chefandy wrote:
| You clearly know more about their finances than I do. I
| don't really follow that stuff.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The thing is, killing or hobbling third-party moderation
| tools will significantly degrade what is available on
| reddit.
| danieldk wrote:
| Many communities are not simple link aggregators. Eg. I was
| active in the ergo mech keyboard subreddit and there it is
| mostly people showing their latest keyboard creations,
| sharing PCB gerbers, case STLs, and helping each other
| debugging issues with their keyboards.
|
| There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would
| be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't
| replaced.
| afavour wrote:
| If that were the case people would have left long ago,
| Reddit has plenty of downsides.
|
| Personally I know of no other place where I can get
| discussions on such a wide range of topics (AskHistorians,
| biking, my local neighbourhood) presented to me in a simple
| format. I hope there will be but I'm not holding my breath.
| ketzo wrote:
| Why would the vast majority of users stop using Reddit
| because of, to the average person, a totally meaningless
| policy change?
| chx wrote:
| Because who wants to engage with an inane nazi cesspit?
| We know what happens to unmoderated spaces.
| DANmode wrote:
| Discord
| dingusdew wrote:
| The fediverse has places like https://kbin.social/ or there
| are instances of Lemmy, (https://join-lemmy.org/instances)
| but most people will want to avoid the "main" lemmy instances
| for places like https://beehaw.org/
|
| The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins
| definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not
| comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a
| different one or make your own instance.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > its admins definitely have their own political slant, and
| if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best
| to find a different one or make your own instance.
|
| From casual use alone this isn't clear to me can you
| explain?
| shagie wrote:
| The admins of the main instance have displayed a
| distinctly pro-authoritarian and anti-US stance. The
| pejorative for this ideology is "tankie" (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie ).
|
| Searching for that pejorative and Lemmy will find
| discussions about it with links (though not links to
| Lemmy itself since those sites are poorly indexed by
| Google).
|
| This came most recently to visibility with the comments
| on an NPR article posted to Lemmy about China tightening
| access to Tiananmen square and Hong Kong detentions in
| /c/worldnews a week ago.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| Lemmy, tildes, and arguably pixelfed for those subreddits
| that were image heavy.
| oilchange wrote:
| > I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that
| event played out...
|
| People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit
| alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit
| know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you
| go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly
| bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable
| stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It
| just stagnates and rots.
|
| The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting
| alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people
| unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try
| reddit.
| TX81Z wrote:
| Necessity is the mother of invention.
|
| A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use
| third-party clients isn't exactly a moat. Half the people
| here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
| bstar77 wrote:
| To prove your point... https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-
| clone-react-firebase/
|
| Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like
| this could be iterated on. The challenges are around
| infrastructure and funding to function at scale.
|
| I would personally rather see something that improves on
| the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely
| new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
| TX81Z wrote:
| Yes and no, the tech of a forum is not interesting, but
| fostering a healthy community that generates value is an
| eternally novel problem as every success has been the
| result of good timing more than anything else.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The moat is that it has users, not that it's impossible to
| clone.
|
| Though developers vastly underestimate the difficulty in
| cloning something as well. As someone who thought it would
| be trivial to clone phpbb, it's a lot of work to reach just
| feature parity. Your clone isn't even going to have users
| to motivate you beyond the first 0.1% of the work.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is different. Maybe you are referring to the Voat thing
| a few years ago when people were mad about the
| "fatpeoplehate" subreddits being banned. As it turns out,
| only a vocal minority opposed that move and left Reddit.
|
| This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with
| millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting
| alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people
| unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try
| reddit.
|
| You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of
| Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama,
| too.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit
| specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg
| refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the
| fact that right now there is no immediately obvious
| alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Voat won the show last time, then it capsized and sunk.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Voat didn't win shit. This is one of my favorite quotes
| from Slate Star Codex:
|
| > The moral of the story is: if you're against witch-hunts,
| and you promise to found your own little utopian community
| where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will
| end up consisting of approximately three principled civil
| libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a
| terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely
| wrong.
|
| Voat immediately turned into a cesspool of overt racism,
| anti-Semitism, and harassment. If you think there is a
| place on the mainstream Internet these days where people
| can gleefully host "FatPeopleHate"-like forums and _not_
| capsize and sink, good luck.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I think they're right. Lemmy/Kbin exist, but they're not
| ready for it. They're in a worse (less mature) place than
| Mastodon was with Twitter, and even that was rough.
|
| With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this
| storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit
| addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche
| people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even
| know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit
| will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable
| problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to
| solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist.
|
| Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has
| brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc.
| I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my
| own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem.
|
| I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse".
| If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling
| woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this
| happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to
| leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Reddit wasn't in great shape when the Digg thing happened
| either. Reddit is just a platform for forums. There are
| literally thousands of alternatives.
| joseph8th wrote:
| Interestingly, I've found Lemmy to be surprisingly engaging
| and active after just a day of Reddit Migration. Sure,
| there's still a lot of "Reddit sucks" posts, but certainly
| not all, or even close to the majority.
|
| I was on Mastodon for the Great Twitter Migration of Nov.
| 2022, and yeah... it was pretty hard to watch. Never have
| used Twitter, but I saw a lot of Twits struggling with
| Mastodon. I don't think the migration went well. The
| Twitter experience didn't translate.
|
| Reddit, I think is a more traditional forum. And that does
| translate well. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds
| of comments on Lemmy, and it's really the same experience
| as Reddit. Reddit users find Lemmy familiar in a way that
| Twitter users did not find on Mastodon.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Agreed, and i should clarify that i didn't mean it was
| inactive or w/e, i just think it's less mature of a tech
| stack, less active as a whole, etc than Mastodon was in
| it's time of need. That difference i think has a
| meaningful impact on how quickly new instances can spin
| up, tooling available, UX of users, native mobile apps,
| etc.
|
| The shiny things that keep "normal users" around.
|
| Which isn't to say that it is plagued with problems or
| anything. I just think we have to remember that
| Federation and a FOSS development model alone will bring
| a large pile of challenges and confusion to the average
| user. As you said, we saw it with Mastodon. That friction
| is survivable if framed right, but any additional
| friction will be meaningful for normal users. Just my
| opinion of course, not making any factual statements
| here.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| > but that's a solvable problem
|
| This requires explanation. If they staff the moderation in-
| house, costs will rise significantly and there is no chance
| they can ever profit. The people with the time, expertise
| and patience necessary to mod will know of alternatives.
| Mods are niche niche.
|
| But the bigger issue that you allude to for reddit here is
| that they aren't pulling off the band-aid in one go. Once
| the apps die, they still need to kill old reddit and RES,
| they still need to end NSFW. Each time they do this the
| federated clones will be stronger, and each time more and
| more will jump ship.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > the difference is that they are betting on the fact that
| right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like
| Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
|
| Discord.
|
| I know, I know--it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to
| search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have
| associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities
| naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap,
| maybe permanently.
|
| Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things
| I would think belong on a forum.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Another thing they're betting on is that most users could
| care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very
| popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users
| get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the
| C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back
| later after this is all done.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Don't agree with that. While people may have been unaware,
| the news is literally plastered all over reddit at the
| moment - it's impossible to miss. Most people may not care
| about it that much, but the "zeitgeist" if you will of
| general anger at reddit management permeating nearly every
| subreddit is impossible to miss. Just one example: https://
| old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is...
| com wrote:
| Have you checked out https://tilde.net - I'm not connected to
| it (not even a registered user) but it looks solid.
| forbiddenlake wrote:
| That gives me a cert error then an Outlook Web Acess login.
| What is it?
|
| edit: presumably, https://tildes.net/ with an s
| HeckFeck wrote:
| The Reddit source is out there, mercifully sans all the
| redesign code. It would just be a matter of funding + will.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Having the code is fine but they do have infrastructure and
| the architecture of it which is necessary to run the site.
| That part someone else will need to figure out again over
| time and optimize.
| andruby wrote:
| Have the makers of the 3rd party clients considered creating a
| reddit clone?
|
| Technically that's not too hard. Moreover, these clients have a
| large user base. Some even have revenue. I guess the most tricky
| part is content moderation.
|
| Has this been discussed or proposed anywhere?
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| As an example, Apollo has around 50k paying members currently.
| Even if we say 10% are really hardcore ones and will jump ship
| (and not just use Reddit's default app which is decent if not
| feature rich), how many of those 10% will still retain Reddit
| as a parallel app, and how many of those will get frustrated
| very fast because growth is very hard in this space owing to
| federated nature of upcoming social networks and growing
| personal server costs and the time it will take for that social
| network to become mature like reddit. Will the remaining ones
| who stuck with the new ship and probably brought new members as
| well as part of scaling, be enough to generate enough revenue
| for those apps to continue investing in the new social network?
|
| Also, what I have understood with these Reddit 3rd party app
| developers - seeing multiple ones over the years from Alien
| Blue to Readit to Apollo - is that these guys are pretty good
| at understanding complexity and solving it via their good
| designs but a social network is not just all this as we have
| seen with Reddit itself and now twitter. It's about moderation,
| nurturing communities, formulating effective user friendly
| policies across communities and much more. Which none of these
| app developers have experience with.
| raverbashing wrote:
| One "easier" middle ground is that if they would work on
| aggressive caching of requests and then maybe building a
| "shadow reddit" in the background
|
| You could make your Api usage go really down this way
| drumhead wrote:
| The cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken
| hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and
| yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem
| to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook
| like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app.
| Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour,
| creativity, stories, humour, talent, wisdom, advice, skills of
| their users to try and make themselves billionaires whilst
| delivering a hopeless piece of tech in return, thats only been
| made useable by others people writing software to make the site
| bearable, Reddit Enhancement suite, Apollo, RIF. And yet here
| they are ready to make it rubbish again to get their filthy
| lucre. The more I think about it the more infuriated I get.
| Kiro wrote:
| What makes Apollo better than the official app and why is there
| such a discrepancy? (I haven't used either.) I know the classic
| take is that the app is made for advertisers and not users, but
| I'm interested in what the actual difference is.
| EscargotCult wrote:
| It uses the native iOS video player APIs, which (to my
| knowledge, it's been a while since I tried) the official app
| doesn't. Also overall, it follows a lot of the "recommended"
| iOS design guidelines and has the look and feel of an Apple-
| made app (fonts, long-press behaviour, slide elements to
| perform actions, haptic feedback, etc).
| realitythreek wrote:
| The "official app" on iOS is AlienBlue which Reddit bought.
| So to start with, Reddit relied on the work of a 3rd party
| developer to make it for them. They've since made it bloated
| and slow and full of ads.
|
| Whatever right? Pretty typical for an official app. But it's
| slower and less efficient than all of the 3rd party apps now
| as they've continued to improve.
|
| But to me the problem is not only all of that, but they're
| publicly ridiculing other apps (especially Apollo) for their
| "inefficient" use of the API when they're all better than the
| official app.
|
| It's all just insulting and tone-deaf and speaks to the
| narrative that they no longer care about a community and see
| users as $$$.
| cragfar wrote:
| Reddit app used to preload all kinds of shit that would
| absolutely destroy your data usage. They appear to have fixed
| it. I used Apollo for a little bit and didn't have any strong
| opinion on it.
| nunez wrote:
| A number of things. I'm comparing it to the website, though I
| think a lot of this holds true to the app as well.
|
| 1. It loads content significantly more quickly than New
| Reddit (Reddit has done a lot to improve on this, but for a
| long time, the New Reddit(tm) was horrifically slow after
| scrolling through a few posts.)
|
| 2. It doesn't support any of the social media functions that
| the New Reddit provides, which, for me, is perfect because
| that's not what I browse Reddit for. (You can turn all of
| that off in the New Reddit, though.)
|
| 3. Way less busy than New Reddit, even if you use "Classic"
| view inside of "Card" view.
|
| 4. You can disable infinite scroll in Apollo, whereas you
| can't in New Reddit (and it's not even supported in Old
| Reddit unless you use RES)
|
| 5. The Apollo developer was insanely responsive to user
| feedback and was really, really good about incorporating as
| much as he could into the app (an iPad-native experience
| being the biggest exception).
| tgv wrote:
| Did you see the post where someone had reversed engineered some
| key encryption/obfuscation(?) function from the Android app
| which was just a substitution cypher and had a 66 byte memory
| leak on every call?
| goykasi wrote:
| No. Do you mind linking to that?
| bushbaba wrote:
| The Reddit iOS app and mobile redesign are improvements from
| past UX. In app media seems to also be better than the past
| link outs. And the ads have overall gotten better and less
| intrusive feeling.
|
| I wouldn't call all that "nothing"
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Getting a popup, sometimes undismissable, to read the thread
| in the mobile app (with no option for alternatives) is the
| opposite of what I would call an "improvement", even if the
| before is old.reddit on mobile (ignoring mobile specific
| sites like i.reddit et al).
|
| There is no "past UX" for the iOS app. If anything, it's a
| downgrade of Alien Blue, the 3rd party app they bought out
| then neutered.
|
| Making the experience worse for mobile users for the sake of
| tracking engagement is certainly not "nothing", you're right
| about that. It's worse than nothing.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees.
|
| I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in
| the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Effectiveness of capitalism.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Normally I'm the one saying "well there's a lot more going on
| behind the scenes than you know".
|
| But in this case: yeah it's bizarre. How the hell are their
| official apps and mobile site and new desktop website so
| fucking awful, when solo/small team app developers can
| actually provide a good experience working on the outside
| with a fraction of the resources?
|
| I've tried to switch from old.reddit to new.reddit a handful
| of different times now, every time I go screaming back after
| my eyes feel like they want to vomit. I don't generally have
| a huge problem with modern web design, but their particular
| implementation just really sucks.
| [deleted]
| Panoramix wrote:
| That's their main problem. No the APIs but wasting an
| enormous amount of resources and for what? so they can host
| videos and gifs themselves? Greed is a very effective way to
| destroy things.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| They raised $250m 2 years ago and have tripled their
| workforce since. Now they're losing money of course but why
| do they need to IPO if they raised so much money recently?
| civilitty wrote:
| Everyone wants to cash out before the ship sinks.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Are you saying that you don't use the _groundbreaking_ one-on-
| one chat functionality that is a) running against the entire
| point of their anonymous discussion platform and b) total crap?
| morkalork wrote:
| The only thing I've seen PMs used for is harassment. And how
| about the "reddit cares" suicide prevention tool? Just
| another tool for abuse by trolls.
| whyenot wrote:
| I'm telling you, the avatars that are also NFTs are
| absolutely the bees knees.
| kbenson wrote:
| I open that chat at least once a month.
|
| Then I immediately close it when I realize I clicked the
| wrong thing. I wonder how much that inflates their stats for
| it and what the real compared to accidental usage rates are.
| It's probably very telling.
| infoseek12 wrote:
| I think you are taking too pessimistic a stance. For instance
| the new one-on-one chat feature is great, I've had some
| OnlyFans creators send me messages out the blue to tell me
| about what they're up to and I've received info that will get
| me in early on some very lucrative crypto investments.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Do you mean "Legacy chat" or "Chat"?
|
| Apparently the chat feature released in 2020 that nobody used
| is now "legacy" and was replaced by a new tab which people
| will continue to not use. Why they didn't migrate old chats
| over when deprecating is beyond me.
|
| No wonder they're burning through money.
| fotta wrote:
| The chat which doesn't show up on old.reddit? So if someone
| sends you a message on it you miss it? The one you have to
| disable on new.reddit so people only use PMs? I missed tons
| of sales on BST subs before realizing people were sending me
| chats on that.
| martini_p wrote:
| This sounds a lot like
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
| endisneigh wrote:
| Doubt anything will come of this, but Reddit will probably not
| miss these folks.
|
| I'll see them on the new site
| cprecioso wrote:
| I saw r/kpop in the list. You better not anger the most powerful
| collective in the internet.
| [deleted]
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| As I've continued to repeat, a change in user preference (mostly
| from one ideology) is to blame for this.
|
| Reddit went from pretty much complete free speech to one of the
| most censored websites in existence.
|
| Huge portions of America now prefer censorship so Reddit has in
| essence created a moat for themselves.
|
| If Americans were more accepting of all speech like before,
| Reddit clones would be easy to switch to. Now, you're not only
| battling new censorship standards, but good luck getting on the
| IOS and Android store as a free speech forum.
|
| On top of that, there are political benefits to this censorship.
| So that adds even more defense to the moat.
| htag wrote:
| I've come to associate online platforms marketing themselves as
| free speech havens as being extremely far right ideologically.
| Are there any examples of non-censored media that either
| doesn't cover politics or covers the entire spectrum?
| miniBill wrote:
| No? This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or
| censorship. What are you on about?
|
| [nitpicky note: it's iOS, not IOS - the latter being Cisco's
| one]
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| If the original Reddit popped up today it would be rejected
| by most users for allowing certain content, and rejected by
| all marketplace stores for the same thing.
|
| This in turn gives Reddit much more control and a very
| powerful moat.
| depingus wrote:
| Reddit didn't censor itself because Americans are not accepting
| of free speech. Reddit started censoring itself to appease
| corporate overlords. And the only reason those corpos embrace
| censorship is to stay out of the political crosshairs. How long
| did /r/jailbait exist before getting shutdown in 2011...and
| only because it was featured on Anderson Cooper?
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| My point was even given an alternative, most users agree with
| and support the censorship.
|
| This in effect discredits almost any alternative by the user
| base itself, thus giving Reddit control.
| EscapeFromNY wrote:
| They put an impressive amount of work into that site. There are
| notifications and an autoupdating counter, and even a livestream.
| https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Doesn't show the sub I mod though, and the search box isn't
| working for me.
| valine wrote:
| It's honestly better for subreddit discovery than anything
| reddit has made in the last 5 years.
|
| Off topic, but giant lists of things are seriously underrated.
| I'd speculate that a large majority of the sites with a
| "Recommended for you" section would be much better served by a
| giant list.
| ec109685 wrote:
| 1st gen Yahoo agrees.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| The site is frequently breaking for me.
| capableweb wrote:
| There is a IRC channel for the same effect (useful as it uses
| less cpu, ram and bandwidth), #reddark at irc.hackint.org:6697,
| hanging out with the people from Archive Team too, who are
| achieving reddit at the moment (in #shreddit, same server)
|
| https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/reddark for a
| webclient
| justinhj wrote:
| Forgive me if I'm making a simplistic reading of this, but it
| seems the CEO has said that whilst apps and bots are making some
| good money, Reddit is losing money. Assuming Reddit has already
| taken cost saving measures (with 2000 staff maybe not), then how
| can they continue as a business losing money? I wonder if a model
| would work where all monetization of api calls has to be done
| through Reddit and the API itself, and they do a 30% revenue
| share with the apps?
| rchaud wrote:
| > then how can they continue as a business losing money?
|
| The same way Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and other loss-making
| companies do? Bring in new financing and new advertisers, fire
| staff.
| HaloTop wrote:
| >how can they continue as a business losing money?
|
| You can't. Imagine you started a website, you're losing money,
| and 3P devs are serving your data, ripping out your ads,
| profiting themselves, and then staging entire public campaigns
| against you ask them to contribute or get lost.
|
| If I had a small website and asked HN for advice in this
| regard, 100% of replies would be to boot the 3P dev. Nobody
| would say, "Dude, let him/her keep doing it! You're being
| greedy and stupid!"
| Monotoko wrote:
| Apps were always willing to pay money for their usage, but not
| the insane pricing Reddit put in front of them ($12k for 50
| million calls)
| anonred wrote:
| > all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit
| and the API itself
|
| How does this work with IAP and ads? Or do you mean that only
| Reddit Premium users should have access to third party apps?
| Because that would be much more expensive than the $2.50/mo
| that people are riled up about with the new API pricing.
| justinhj wrote:
| I would say that making money from sites content by putting
| it somewhere else with your own ads is simply not allowed.
| What I would allow is you to charge a subscription to use the
| api which goes to Reddit and you get some cut like 30%.
| asd88 wrote:
| They can stop losing money by slashing their workforce and
| stopping working on features nobody wants (e.g. chat, an
| official mobile app, etc).
|
| The core site functionality has not changed in over a decade,
| there's no need to try to be Instagram.
| sahaj wrote:
| I think they are fixing this by making bots?
|
| I got more followers in the last 5 days than I've had in the
| last 15 years: https://i.imgur.com/hjeVvtZ.png
|
| Something is up for sure.
| graiz wrote:
| Remember IRC? /alt/? We just needed IRC clients but instead we
| got Digg and Reddit.
| darkstar999 wrote:
| Apples to oranges. I'm not interested in live chat.
| aendruk wrote:
| Screenshot: https://cloudflare-
| ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbjkWVyHEhwkwCZ6yfTEkz9fM1...
|
| The live site has been difficult to reach.
| (https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/issues/49)
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| I have to hand it to those app devs. The way they managed to dupe
| millions of Redditors into protesting was masterful.
|
| They didn't produce any good evidence that the new API price is
| excessive (some cherry-picking here, a deceptive comparison
| there) but they still managed to convince 99% of Reddit that it
| was true anyway.
|
| Bravo! It was a beautiful exercise in propaganda and the delusion
| of crowds.
| coufu wrote:
| Even if the API price was reasonable, Reddit only gave 3rd
| party apps 30 days to prepare. You can't come up with a decent
| pricing model, billing infrastructure, and incorporate the
| logic in your app in that amount of time. It's just overall
| very hostile and unreasonable from Reddit leadership. The
| biggest apps are forced to shut down because if they stay up,
| the millions of dollars in bills are going to start flooding
| in.
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| I agree with you that the timeline is tight.
|
| Relay For Reddit has just announced their preliminary plan to
| offer a $2-3 a month paid version. They sound cautiously
| optimistic and are hoping for some flexibility on the tight
| timeline.
|
| This is in stark contrast to a week ago when they were very
| doom and gloom.
| coufu wrote:
| The doom and gloom honestly is mostly driven by Reddit's
| leadership being incompetent. If Reddit leadership reached
| out and worked things out privately and in a productive
| manner with 3rd party app developers to create a plan and
| agree on reasonable timelines, none of this drama would
| have surfaced at this magnitude. Would people still be
| pissed at the API charges forcing apps to charge
| subscription fees? Probably. But you wouldn't have peoples'
| favorite Reddit apps shutting down and creating a much
| bigger stir as we have today. And I think everyone is in
| agreement at some level that Reddit deserves some
| compensation for API usage. But again, this has all been
| handled very poorly by Reddit leadership.
| poisonborz wrote:
| It has nothing to do with the amount of the price, the scheme
| (charge per request, not /user/month) makes third party apps
| impossible on purpose. Not to say that this abrupt and
| unannounced dumping of beloved community apps is just the
| latest misstep of a long string of anti-user moves from Reddit.
| They had it coming, but their estimation is that a large
| majority will keep silent. Let's see - Twitter had also not
| truly crashed yet on their grand way to profitability...
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| If it made 3rd party apps impossible, then all or most of
| them would have announced they were shutting down by now. In
| fact, only three have done so. The rest are still trying to
| work out the economics.
|
| I expect that quite a few will survive, despite people saying
| it is "impossible."
| skilled wrote:
| Do let us know about the math, once you are done with it.
| [deleted]
| sva_ wrote:
| It seems that the site broke down and now redirects to a Twitch
| stream
|
| > Can I watch the website myself!
|
| > Afraid not, our site recently broke down due to the amount of
| requests, and for the time being we've resorted to livestreaming
| it. When traffic dies down we'll put it back up.
| balozi wrote:
| Reddit has been purging subs and users with reckless abandon for
| some time now as they cleaned up the place in the name of
| "community safety" (aka advertisers). I guess the monetized
| government kids that stayed believ(ed) they were the good ones,
| the worthy ones. If y'all think it will end at the API changes,
| you'll be sorely be disappointed.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >I guess the monetized government kids that stayed believ(ed)
| they were the good ones, the worthy ones.
|
| Yep, this is the great irony. When capitalist logic was being
| used to justify Reddit going after hate speech, powerusers
| loved it. When it's being used to justify closing API access,
| they hate it and the rhetoric shifts entirely. We'll see the
| same thing when Reddit starts tightening the screws further on
| NSFW content as well.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > When capitalist logic was being used to justify Reddit
| going after hate speech, powerusers loved it.
|
| So, being anti-hate-speech is a bad thing, to you?
| dom96 wrote:
| I honestly didn't expect this from Reddit. It seems like
| investors are really tightening their grip and they are banning
| subreddits and long-time users who oppose these changes left and
| right.
|
| I built a free API emulating the Reddit API[1]. It was returning
| the same data as the existing publicly accessible .json endpoints
| on reddit.com (for example
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps.json). They not only
| blocked my requests, but also banned the subreddit I created and
| my 13 years old personal Reddit account (permanently!).
|
| 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
| neilv wrote:
| Maybe Reddit can turn a this-could-be-a-Digg-moment _to their
| advantage_ , in _increased_ appeal to users, and maybe
| investors...
|
| Given lots of revolutionary-lite public sentiment in recent
| years... when some other platforms are in the news for abusing
| and neglecting users, and the users being impotent property...
| Reddit ownership could renew its aura of empowered community of
| people with agency.
|
| While Reddit still owns it, yet looks like corporate is aligned
| with "the people", and not a doormat for backing down.
|
| I don't know the exact messaging to nail this optimally, nor how
| to reconcile that with revenue and investor optics goals (but a
| bunch of mainstream news newly muttering about supplanting
| Twitter, and a burst of adoption, can't hurt).
|
| My gut feel is that it could work, and I'm guessing that Reddit,
| of all companies, probably still has the institutional DNA to
| swing it better than most.
|
| (Disclaimer: Am computers expert, not people expert.)
| mikerg87 wrote:
| I just can't imagine this is the Reddit that Aaron Swartz would
| have wanted
| hker999 wrote:
| Ironically, /antiwork is not on strike
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Doing a strike is perhaps too much work.
|
| ... I'll see myself out.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Yet another heavy-handed action taken by out-of-touch leadership
| who doesn't seem to grasp their very reason for existing - their
| customers.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What's the endgame here? Why even turn the subs back on? The
| admins have made their intentions clear enough, I think.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| Eventually people would just start replacement subreddits and
| the powermods would be left with jack shit
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's a demonstration of power; a sampler. This is a common
| strategy. You want to show them that you have the power so that
| serious negotiations can begin anew without disrupting the
| service you want to provide.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What power? Reddit can just takeover the subs and turn them
| back on.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| And then who will moderate them? Does Reddit have 18,000
| employees ready to take over? Or a bunch of scans waiting
| in the wings?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Surely there is enough people who would apply to take
| position of power in subreddit. And plenty of them would
| ignore any principles for that power.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I think you overestimate the number of people willing to
| take on that job. The vast majority of people lurk. Of
| those who are active, most just comment. Of the
| remainder, most just post. It's a vanishingly small group
| who actually want to moderate given the time commitment
| and all the headaches involved.
| davewritescode wrote:
| Yes but unless they're well moderated they'll turn to crap.
|
| There's a lot of moderators out there moderating by hand
| and using bots to run some of the bigger subreddits, much
| like IRC. Without those bots having access to the APIs,
| that job gets harder and it's less likely to be done well.
|
| Personally I think Steve Huffman is the fall guy here and
| this is coming from the money people who have zero interest
| in where Reddit is beyond 6 months after the IPO. Reddit
| also has a history putting people in place to make
| controversial decisions only to fire them months later as
| appeasement to their community. Ellen Pao was the most
| recent example.
| bredren wrote:
| I also think the CEO is a scapegoat. I'd argue that
| Huffman showed more courage than Elon did, though.
|
| That said, Huffman's handling of this was bumbling at
| best.
|
| It demonstrated a failure to understand his own users or
| the culture of the site.
|
| For that alone, he should go.
|
| But there are plenty of other reasons company leadership
| has failed its community, particularly it's unpaid
| workers moderating content.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Lol. What IPO? Do you think anyone is buying reddit stock
| after this clusterfuck?
| davewritescode wrote:
| I'm not saying it's a good idea to IPO but if Reddit
| shows a 25% increase in ad impressions and minimal loss
| of users this might end up being better.
|
| Personally, if I were in charge with Reddit I'd go for an
| approach that required 3rd party clients to show ads that
| come back from Reddit's APIs and allow users to opt-out
| of adds for a small monthly fee directly from the user or
| even from the app developers who choose to incorporate it
| into their fee structure. Apps who don't comply get
| banned.
|
| The approach Reddit is going for is stupid and is burning
| goodwill earned over more than a decade.
| guerrilla wrote:
| The power of an organize and commit to a strike obviously.
| Reddit is nothing without mods. Going private is, as I
| said, just a sampler. The endgame would be for the mods to
| just leave if Reddit doesn't change course. This signals
| that that is a definite possibility since they've shown a.
| their unanimity of objection b. their ability to organize
| and c. their commitment to action.
| ben_w wrote:
| And do they want to put in the same effort to curating
| those communities as the moderators there've just
| overruled?
|
| Communities can thrive or fail depending on who is in
| charge.
|
| (What happened with regard to the mod banning an artist
| because they thought their art looked like it came from an
| AI? Last I heard the artist was able to show their workflow
| but the mod was unwilling to back down...)
| 0xr0kk3r wrote:
| They'll just put the same effort in that Twitter does.
|
| Problem solved.
|
| No one has left twitter, despite Elon's tantrums.
|
| Do you really think CEOs care when their site has so much
| momentum and mods can be replaced in a snap?
| foota wrote:
| Twitter and reddit are substantially different though.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Are you serious? Twitter is in shambles right now. Ads
| were pulled (59% revenue lost) and musk is throwing a
| hissy fit he does not want to pay the GCP bill and rent
| on the office space. Twitter is the walking dead
| 0xr0kk3r wrote:
| That's literally my point. CEOs don't care. Reddit is
| following suit. Reddit will become "a shambles". Although
| I think my sarcasm needs work.
| jachee wrote:
| If you're being sarcastic in text, throw us a `/s`.
| ben_w wrote:
| Yeeeas, it really wasn't clear and still kinda looks you
| were suggesting the board would be fine with a 2/3rds
| reduction in their estimated value right before an IPO.
| yanderekko wrote:
| I expect that disrupting the powermod cabal would be a
| net positive for the site.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Most of the powermods seem to be opposing this blackout.
| spiralx wrote:
| Didn't both KotukuInAction and TheDonald get shut down by
| the sub's original creators due to them going off the
| rails and then forcibly re-opened by the admins and
| handed over to new moderators who were happy with the
| massive growth in a direction the original owner never
| intended and actively did not want?
| ben_w wrote:
| I wouldn't know, but the question is more "can/will they
| do this to order?" rather than "can it ever be done?"
| macintux wrote:
| They just have to keep the communities viable until the
| IPO; I'm sure they can find new moderators who are
| unsympathetic to the strike to keep the lights on that
| long.
| bhaak wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to go all-in all at once. You need to
| have leverage afterwards as well.
|
| Also you have to think about the media coverage. This way you
| have two times the possible media coverage instead of just once
| and then everybody forgets about it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The endgame should simply be:
|
| 1. Reddit management gets their head out of their asses and
| negotiates a better change to API fees and structure.
| Throughout this whole ordeal everyone else (Apollo dev, mods,
| etc.) has made extremely reasonable points, but Reddit
| management seems to be gaslighting and arguing in bad faith at
| every turn.
|
| 2. If management doesn't change, Reddit should die. Why should
| all these mods donate huge amounts of time to a platform that
| disrespects them at every turn?
| x86x87 wrote:
| Ideally yes, but the opposite is going to happen. They're
| gonna push their heads so far their asses they're gonna hit
| the stomach.
|
| CEO and everyone that though this is the way to monetize need
| to go.
| breadsniffer01 wrote:
| Mods get free API usage. It's only for 3rd party apps. It
| seems the Apollo dev has been throwing around some
| misinformation.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > It seems the Apollo dev has been throwing around some
| misinformation.
|
| Please point out, specifically, where he has done this.
| Otherwise, STFU.
|
| To be clear, it's not like I've been following every one of
| his posts, so it's quite possible he said things that
| aren't accurate. So far, though, I've seen nothing but
| vague accusations against Christian, and when he _did_ call
| bullshit and brought the receipts to back it up, u /spez
| said he was "leaking a private call". Queen please, he
| libeled Christian and then when Christian brought evidence
| to prove him wrong he complained!! What an asshat.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| 1. He said he spends $166 / 50 million Imgur API
| requests. He must have a sweetheart deal because I see
| the prices at $3,333 / 50 million API requests (and if
| you go above that, it gets crazy expensive FAST)
|
| 2. Moderator actions are exempt from the API charges...
| But I think this decision was made after things had blown
| up.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| So fine, he was grandfathered in at a lower price
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214427) - that
| doesn't mean he was being untruthful in any way, and as
| that linked thread shows most API changes have a much
| longer lead time. Reddit's sole goal was to kill all
| third party apps, and they were obviously successful.
|
| The thing about "moderator actions being exempt from API
| changes" is just plain silly. If you're going to put time
| into making a third party app, you still have to shut
| down even if the mod parts of your app are free if the
| cost of other users is untenable.
|
| _Every single_ 3rd party app that I 've even heard of is
| also shutting down, so how people can try to spin this as
| something specific that Apollo did is baffling to me.
| lewisflude wrote:
| Do you have an example of the misinformation?
| dharmab wrote:
| Reddit has taken over "abandoned" subreddits in the past and
| replaced the moderation teams. By making this temporary, the
| moderators of topic-based subreddits can continue to organize
| their communities, including organized migration to new places
| like Discord.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Subs are not some abstract things where you just slap a new
| mod on and it's all fine. You may be abke to do this in
| extreme cases but there is no way this works for thousands of
| subs
| yanderekko wrote:
| It seems unlikely that they'll have to make it work for
| thousands of subs, and quite frankly if they do then
| they'll likely have a new cooperative group of powermods
| that they can delegate most of the work to.
|
| I think the real thing that Reddit has to worry about is
| that upset activists could directly start spamming the site
| in order to justify their warnings about what will happen
| without mods. "Nice subreddits you have here, would hate to
| see anything happen to them if you don't accede to our
| demands."
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Yeah, I do honestly think that that would be the only way
| this works. If the majority of mods were just like "yup,
| we'll shut it down and leave", forcing reddit to replace
| _large_ swaths of moderation, things could get ugly for
| them. As it is, as far as I have seen, very few subs are
| committing to being permanently closed, and Reddit will
| only boot mods from a _very_ small number of subs over a 2
| day closure, so they don't have to find much replacement
| talent.
|
| Right now, admins will probably replace a few dozens of
| mods, and then the rest of the site will be back in 2 days,
| and nothing will change.
| chx wrote:
| That number is growing by the hour and we shall see what
| happens on the 14th. There's not much stopping the
| participating subs from continuing indefinitely. If it's
| not declared as infinite, it's even harder to justify
| replacing them.
|
| For example, /r/askhistorians is going private for 48h
| and reopens readonly indefinitely after. /r/pathofexile
| as far as I understand won't be going private but goes
| readonly once again indefinitely. etc
| golemotron wrote:
| Wouldn't boycott be a better word than strike?
| coufu wrote:
| I think boycott is more passive. Like I'm not gonna use or
| support their product.
|
| This strike includes moderators actively locking down
| subreddits (whether making them private or read only) thus
| making Reddit less usable during the strike.
| davemp wrote:
| I'm planning to build up an RSS feed or two to stay up to date
| with the niches I go to reddit for and supplementing with discord
| when I want to read general comments.
|
| I'm actually somewhat excited because the quality of most
| subreddits has tanked over time.
| htag wrote:
| > I'm actually somewhat excited because the quality of most
| subreddits have tanked over time.
|
| People have been complaining about decreasing quality of
| content on reddit since the beginning of reddit.
| Cannabat wrote:
| It's true, though - over the past few years especially.
| Substantial rise in spam, paid accounts trying to sell you on
| some product or service, direct message solicitation, bots
| with political motivations... it really has gone downhill
| recently.
| khalladay wrote:
| Does subreddits going dark for 2 days matter? Seems like an
| insignificant ampunt of disruption to make much of a difference,
| or am I wrong?
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| Many are now committing to either going dark indefinitely, or
| to reassess after the 14th, maybe with a poll to their members
| on how to proceed. This will definitely be going on for more
| than 2 days.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If my Reddit communities are making polls, I won't even know
| to vote "keep it dark". I don't cross picket lines.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, I think it does.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283553
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| If they do it for more than 2 days , other subs will spring up
|
| Do people forget that making a subreddit is free?
| 404mm wrote:
| Only means Reddit is going to end for me a few weeks early :(
| dv_dt wrote:
| It would not matter if that were the only thing occurring, but
| as a discrete event in a significant cluster of events, this
| leads to more awareness and more reassessments by communities
| looking at what value and future reddit actually provides.
| joecot wrote:
| The initial plan was 2 days. Then Spez did his AMA where it was
| clear they were not interested in compromising, not planning to
| change anything, even seeing the enormous protest forming.
|
| So while some subreddits are still planning on 2 days, a
| growing number of them are going dark indefinitely until reddit
| rolls back this plan.
| danieldk wrote:
| Also, quite some people seem to be removing their accounts
| along with all their post history. Maybe not in numbers that
| are significant to make it a ghost town, but in some
| subreddits you already see gaps appearing in prior
| discussions.
|
| For some niches, Reddit's comment history is basically like a
| knowledge base and it's slowly being torn apart. If the group
| of signal-noise contributors that nukes their whole history
| grows, it devalues Reddit in another way as well.
| bredren wrote:
| History is littered with fits and starts of people working
| together to bring about change.
|
| It does matter that people have identified a trend of corporate
| behavior, and are finding ways to take stands against it.
| afavour wrote:
| Don't you remember the Reddit net neutrality blackout? That
| did... uh... raise... awareness... kinda?
| 0xr0kk3r wrote:
| Victoria Taylor blackout in 2015?
|
| also ... nothing.
| wvenable wrote:
| That one was trickier because there were no demands that
| could be met. Victoria didn't want her job back after all
| this.
| seydor wrote:
| does anybody remember what net neutrality was about? That's
| right redditors memory is probably less than 48h long
| comfypotato wrote:
| Some subs are going dark indefinitely
| x86x87 wrote:
| Why only 2 days? This could happen again or it could keep
| going. Thus shows reddit what they are without all the freely
| contributed content and mod work.
| macintux wrote:
| I don't know how widespread the sentiment is, but some mods
| have decided after the disastrous AMA that they're going dark
| indefinitely, until Reddit walks back the changes.
| CostcoFanboy wrote:
| I fund Squabbles.io to be EXTREMELY promising. I have no stake in
| it. I just really dig the simplicity, format, layout, etc.
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is why strikes are not that effective unless everyone does
| it. A handful of subs striking for a few days out of hundreds of
| big subs is not going to change anything. But sub-level Reddit
| censorship has gotten so bad over the past 5 years I find it hard
| to muster much sympathy, tbh . I try to share links or make posts
| and half to 3/4 of them are removed even when trying to follow
| the guidelines perfectly.
| MrPatan wrote:
| Reddit has been doing a great job for my use case. Since I
| decided to quit it a few years ago they've made so many absurd
| changes that every time I land on it by chance I can't make head
| or tails of it, can't find the post, the comments, nothing.
|
| It works great!
| honksillet wrote:
| Let's hope Reddit consumes itself in this peer struggle.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Hopefully this starts a "battery" approach to dealing with APIs,
| 3rd party apps, keys and a way for end users to quickly and
| seamlessly sign up to use services via 3rd party apps.
|
| Why not..
|
| 1. User installs 3rd party app
|
| 2. You accept reddit TOS, an API key is attached to your account.
| It could even be integrated into apple/android keys or user
| subscription models. You pay either directly to reddit or via
| your payments to the 3rd party app service fees
|
| This could work for so many use cases. Why should developers need
| to do think about all this nonsense like key rotation, constantly
| changing pricing models, using round robin API key rotation
| because you're hitting limits with one key, etc. Devs should just
| set up the experience so users can bring their own battery and
| plug in to start playing.
|
| Just provide the backend. Let devs build cool 3rd party apps
| around it. Each user can just get their own API key that's tied
| to them, either simple case like the reddit account, or its part
| of the apple id subscriptions + keychain.
|
| Everyone makes money. Everyone gets to learn programming or
| whatever the fuck makes them make 3rd party experiences. Everyone
| can just be happy.
| corrigible wrote:
| This still needs a network effect to get started
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Yeah true, that's why Reddit doing it would be kinda
| interesting (they won't).
| _dan wrote:
| That doesn't sound very far away from how Apollo/etc work today
| - you authenticate the app with Reddit via oauth and it
| accesses the api as you.
|
| Reddit already implements some features only when you've paid
| (eg you get access to the lounge when you have gold active), so
| I don't imagine it would be a massive stretch to just prevent
| all access to the api to users without gold.
|
| Though it does prompt the question of why they took the path
| they have, instead of trying to charge users. I guess their
| goal is really to get rid of 3rd party clients.
| Nerd_hooligan wrote:
| I thought the start is tomorrow?
| wedn3sday wrote:
| For many people in the world, it's the 12th already.
| redundantly wrote:
| Correct. OP jumped the gun on this post.
| Choco31415 wrote:
| Just the title. The page itself acknowledges that the strike
| is scheduled to start tomorrow:
|
| "These subreddits are going dark or read-only on June 12th
| and after. "
| Timon3 wrote:
| Given that there are currently 655/5279 already private, no,
| they didn't jump the gun.
|
| Edit: 1 minute later already 658.
|
| Edit: 2 minutes later 661.
|
| Edit: 2 3/4 hours later 840.
| Vervious wrote:
| I'm clicking on some of them, and can still view the posts?
| Timon3 wrote:
| Do you have an example? I tried a sampling of private
| subs, none showed posts for me.
| Vervious wrote:
| Oh never mind, I didn't realize that the mechanism was to
| go private. I thought that all the subreddits listed were
| already dark.
| dpistole wrote:
| looks like its a website monitoring the subreddit statuses
| with a handful of them having already gone private
| redundantly wrote:
| Ah, my mistake. I wasn't aware some subreddits had already
| started, thought it was supposed to start tomorrow.
|
| The fun has begun ;)
| stndef wrote:
| It's also tomorrow in some countries already!
| IvyMike wrote:
| I mean, it _has_ begun: https://www.reddit.com/r/diy
| [deleted]
| Buttons840 wrote:
| It's always tomorrow somewhere--or something like that. :)
|
| Remember, when you wake up on June 11th in the USA, June 11th
| is almost over for most of the world.
| selykg wrote:
| A bunch of subs started today
| louistsi wrote:
| The link shows which subreddits have turned private. Many have
| begun already as it is currently the 12th in many timezones.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Define tomorrow? It is past midnight for Beijing and Tokyo for
| example.
|
| UTC would be reasonable standard meaning 6 and half hours still
| to go.
| necovek wrote:
| Even most of Europe would be already in the 12th by that
| metric, not to mention around 70% of the world's population.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Nope, it is not midnight even in Moscow timezone so
| European part of Russia. Which is most Eastern part.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| If the website does not load for you because of HTTP 502 or other
| timeouts, there is a Twitch stream at
| https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247 showing the protest live.
| xwdv wrote:
| What is the point of making a subreddit private for 48 hours?
|
| If approved members of a subreddit can still read and post, why
| not just leave the subreddits private indefinitely? Is public
| access really that important for some reason? This feels
| toothless.
|
| It feels like making your Instagram profile private as a form of
| protest.
| [deleted]
| DantesKite wrote:
| This would work better if there was a viable competitor to
| Reddit.
|
| As it stands, there doesn't seem to be anywhere for these people
| to go, so they'll likely come back after a few days. Habits are
| hard to break.
|
| Habits are a moat too.
| dahwolf wrote:
| This could be Spez's Stalin moment.
|
| Ban these conspiring power mods and take over their subreddits
| with willing volunteers. Let the free-loading Apollo app expire
| and persist with the new API pricing.
|
| I bet this seemingly cruel series of actions would actually
| improve Reddit. Reddit has a whiny upper class of power mods that
| take a little too much joy in watching something burn.
|
| Show them who's boss. Call the bluff.
| sealeck wrote:
| The fact that you think a "Stalin moment" would be a good thing
| says a lot.
| dahwolf wrote:
| The fact that you can't read says even more.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| I feel like one day blackout is going to have an opposite impact
| as it might give Reddit a false idea that no matter what they do
| people will eventually come. Instead of one day, if people were
| doing it for a few months, it will be effective. But we know that
| is not going to happen.
| dubeye wrote:
| I've never used a reddit 3rd party app or mod. Do they make up a
| large percentage of users? What leverage do users have here, any?
| eksapsy wrote:
| Strike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel
| wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing
| me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for
| the rest of my life".
|
| Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do
| you know what message that sends? What would you think if your
| customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm
| coming for the rest of the year" ? Would you give a damn?
|
| Reddit is a commodity. Admittedly a great one. Used to be at
| least. We'll create another one or they'll fix themselves, but
| they won't unless they know you're not going to use them unless
| they fix themselves.
|
| No strike is successful unless you actually make them understand
| that they can't live without you or that **AT LEAST* that you're
| doing your part.
|
| Like, is reddit scared of me deleting my account? I think it
| doesn't give a damn. Is reddit gonna give a damn if another 100k
| accounts start getting deleted along with mine? At least they're
| gonna start noticing. And at least I can say that I've done my
| part.
|
| Ive deleted my reddit account and I'm done with Reddit. Until
| they fix themselves and realize that acting that greedy and
| immaturely with lies about conversations that never happened
| between the Apollo programmer and /u/spez are not gonna pass. At
| least not from me, i'm fairly disgusted by the Reddit leadership.
| thyrox wrote:
| But sometimes sites do die. Digg is a big example of this. It
| started with the top users like MrBabyMan posting against the
| site and then it quickly snowballed taking the whole site with
| it.
|
| Doesn't always happens but it can happen and we can still hope.
| jachee wrote:
| FWIW, Many of the participating subs are going dark
| _indefinitely_. And the real APIcalypse will happen in a couple
| of weeks, when people actually using third party apps literally
| can't anymore.
| arthens wrote:
| Indefinitely until reddit picks new moderators and reopen
| them. No way they'll allow major subs closing down.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yes but there are too many big subs closing. My guess is
| they couldn't support more than a couple dozen on their
| own.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Mods are not fungible. It's tempting to feel that they are,
| but they have an enormous influence on their communities.
| pests wrote:
| Name a single mod.
|
| I can't.
| grogenaut wrote:
| dang
|
| wendifur
|
| Lowtax
|
| drew
| natebc wrote:
| cmndrtaco, he counts right?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Mods are like air traffic controllers. If you know their
| name, they probably fucked up badly. I suspect we'll know
| the names of many more mods if Reddit goes ahead with
| replacing them en-mass.
| grecy wrote:
| I agree with you at heart, but that's like saying the
| head of a hospital or the head union guy dictate what the
| experience of being in a hospital or shop floor are like.
|
| That is absolutely true, but in the interest of making
| money the owners will replace them in a heartbeat. Sure,
| the vibe will change, some existing users will move on,
| but there are _always_ , _always_ new users to hook.
|
| Reddit are not even paying these mods pennies, they
| couldn't care less about them and getting rid of them to
| find ones who are more "compliant".
|
| EDIT: Redditor for 14 years 99,665 post karma 97,633
| comment karma
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| > "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that
| ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the
| rest of my life".
|
| "for the rest of my life" is a big assumption. This strike
| could/should be the first in a series of escalating strikes. If
| parties truly seek change, and not just punishment, it is
| tactically unwise for one's first response to be maximum
| retaliation.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Subreddits have been striking for years. This is not the
| first response.
|
| This is quite an escalation though.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Some subreddits are private for 48hrs, others are indefinitely
| private until the issue is resolved
| cedilla wrote:
| Rossmann seems to have misunderstood what a strike is. A strike
| is always between two parties that depend on each other.
|
| "Leaving forever" is the only thing that won't send a message.
| If you're truly gone forever, Reddit has no shared interest
| with you any longer.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| And powerful strikes go on for weeks if there is no
| acceptable compromise made.
| htag wrote:
| I use to be a reddit power user, but my relationship with the
| platform has been extremely casual (less than 5 hours/yr) for
| the last 10 years. Even after all this time, Reddit could win
| me back as a power user if the platform was better.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The two parties here are the public, and the corporations
| owning social networking sites.
|
| You're not sending a message to Reddit, true enough... but it
| does send a VERY strong message to the rest of the tech bros
| and their investors that Reddit f*cked up, bad, if their
| numbers crash.
| dehrmann wrote:
| One of the magic things about reddit was it was acquired by Conde
| Nast _very_ early in its life. They didn 't know what to do with
| it, so it was a bit neglected. That meant most of the time was
| spent on high-priority scaling issues, and there wasn't time to
| squeeze it for money. This helped with organic growth because the
| users were real and engaged. The downside was they didn't have
| resources to develop good first-party apps, and ended up
| depending on third-party developers for that.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| They bought a good third-party app, turned it first-party, and
| destroyed it. Seems that they had resources enough to do that.
| LanceH wrote:
| The strike is less meaningful when imposed by moderators
| enforcing it. It's not simply a boycott of those using the app,
| which would be proportional. Moderators are dragging a lot of
| other people along with them that may not share the same
| opinions.
|
| I'm scratching my head that the general attitude seems to be that
| Reddit just shouldn't get paid.
| skilled wrote:
| Are you implying the new Reddit design is cheaper to maintain
| than the old one?
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| The subs I follow made a poll, I'm fine with that, even knowing
| not everyone voted.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The website [0] appears to be down right now for me. Overload, or
| legal troubles?
|
| [0]: https://reddark.untone.uk/
| quenix wrote:
| Likely the hug of death
| blackle wrote:
| Classic hug of death, I think. Works on and off for me.
| fho wrote:
| Honestly ... If it would not be for the campaign and media
| coverage ... I would not have noticed that anything has changed.
| _b wrote:
| I think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly
| successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple
| subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is
| fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and
| data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make
| that data junk for awhile to make a statement?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| If everything is downvoted nothing is downvoted
| joeframbach wrote:
| Years ago during the maxwellhill r/technology debacle, many
| users did that, and we're all banned. My first primary account,
| which today would have been 13 years old, was banned.
| ec109685 wrote:
| That anomalous behavior would be easy to filter out, especially
| given they have protections against brigading.
| wvenable wrote:
| If nobody upvotes anything you can't protect against that.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Yeah nothing shows Reddit who's boss like _checks notes_
| aggressively engaging with their product.
| orev wrote:
| I suspect Reddit already has protections in place against this
| type of coordinated attack, as it would look exactly like when
| a whole sub (or 4chan) decides to brigade another sub for some
| other reason. There's probably a hidden limit somewhere that
| when you downvote too many things at once, those vote become
| shadow-votes that don't really count anymore.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I remember reading that downvotes on the posts/comments page
| of a user's profile don't count for a similar reason, but no
| idea if that's actually true.
| _b wrote:
| That is a good point. Are there modifications to the voting
| strike idea that would make it effective?
|
| For instance, what do you think about an "inverted-voting"
| strike instead? Everyone on strike does things roughly as
| normal, but swapping most of their down votes for up votes,
| and visa-versa? That way, people on strike will continue to
| vote about the same amount as before, and in the same
| subeditors as before, so it would be harder to identify them.
| The hope would be that although Reddit could do work to clean
| up the voting data, it would be annoying & take time, and
| presumably still end up as significantly lower quality data
| than they had before.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Knowing the dev behind the site, he got 11k connections, the RAM
| finished and the server went down.
|
| It must be a pretty stressful coding session now.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| I'd consider it a brand damage to Cloudflare too. Their CDN
| clearly couldn't offload the sever traffic. Ideally they should
| just serve stale content while server recovers.
| aendruk wrote:
| s/couldn't/wasn't configured to/. It's not magic.
| jcpsimmons wrote:
| Who cares? Redditors are really too much. Hoping that everything
| has a good resolution only because I don't want Redditors fleeing
| to other sites that are (blissfully) free of their "culture".
| Already have seen an unfortunate influx of them on this site.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Usually I am anti-internet stunts like this. The vast majority of
| boycotts are dumb wastes of time.
|
| That said, Reddit should have built better mod tools before
| making their api change.
|
| I think people complaining about not having 3rd party apps to
| browse reddit is "meh". But moderators need to be able to do
| their jobs.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The first party app is pretty garbage and the mobile experience
| tries to continually redirect you to the garbage app. Honestly
| if that was the only experience available I never would have
| started using reddit.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Official stats showed that only 3% of moderation actions come
| from 3rd party apps, this was just a made up argument all
| along.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
| anonred wrote:
| It's impressive what a determined, vocal minority can achieve
| with just a bit of drama. I hope this ends quickly so
| everyone else can get back to aimlessly doomscrolling on
| Reddit.
| appletrotter wrote:
| It's impressive the power of a misleading statistic more
| like.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Oh, well if spez says it, it must be true!
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I know he is a paragon of virtue who would never use access
| to production to edit people's comments!
| appletrotter wrote:
| That's for all actions, including auto moderator actions. I
| understand that the % of _manual_ mod actions is closer to
| 30% on 3PA.
| anonred wrote:
| Do you have a source for the 30% manual mod actions claim?
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| This leaves out a significant share of how moderators use the
| API, which is for bots and external services that augment
| moderation without actually doing the moderating.
|
| Example, a mod at /r/music remarked last week that they've
| been paying a few bucks a month to host a server for some
| additional features for years. It's common to use some
| automation to summon mods in a discord so someone near a
| computer can execute the moderating, since the mobile tools
| are so limited.
|
| And ofc as other uses pointed out, that's 3% of a sum
| including the vast number of auto moderator mod actions taken
| on the site, which are not really human originated at all.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| And if you read the source you will see that all those
| tools will retain free access to the API...
| breadsniffer01 wrote:
| Afaik, mods get free Reddit API usage for any tools. There's
| been some misinformation being thrown around that claims they
| also are subject to the API price changes.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Source? My concern is that the 3rd party tools will shutdown
| or stagnate if usage drops to basically just mods. Reddit
| doesn't support mods, so it's looking grim.
| rany_ wrote:
| Besides this boycott is at best useless, most are only going
| offline for 48 hours; it should be permanent until they reverse
| the decision if they were being sincere.
| BrotherBisquick wrote:
| Reddit mods are addicted to power. If they don't ban anyone
| for 48 hours, they get the shakes.
| joobus wrote:
| The third-party apps shutting down on July 1st will be the
| real test. If Reddit notices a significant drop in traffic on
| that day, they will probably start walking back the change. I
| agree that this boycott, while the intention is good, won't
| do much.
| nomorewords wrote:
| I don't think Reddit is doing anything based on that day's
| data. I suspect that they will wait for a month before
| starting to rely on the data for any long-term prospects.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Unless a large number of people who don't use 3rd party
| apps also leave in solidarity, it won't be a "significant
| drop". 3rd party apps make up quite a small amount of total
| traffic. And that's also assuming that TPA users _leave_
| and don't just switch.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If you have 10,000 users you have 1000 commenters, 100
| people posting, and 10 moderators. If you keep 97% of
| your users but you lost half your mods, 25% of your
| posters and 7% of your commenters its going to lead to an
| eventual decline bigger than 3% and it can create a self
| re-enforcing trend because the people contributing to
| other networks can drag their connections along with
| them.
| philistine wrote:
| The true number to look at is not traffic, it's moderation
| actions. The real problem is the site will get harder to
| moderate without the API.
|
| And it's why you have the strike; Reddit is not at risk of
| dying, it's at risk of becoming even worse that it already
| is.
| john-radio wrote:
| To self-reinforce my participation in the strike, I logged out of
| reddit and disabled Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Old.reddit
| Redirect add-ons, and looking at the front page without those
| improvements (which I'm sure a minority of users use) it's
| shocking how terrible the site's UI is for the uninitiated. For
| the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter
| clone.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I don't get it. If I log out and go to reddit.com I see it he
| "Popular" view with a pretty good looking UI, 4.5 "cards" per
| screen height, I don't think that's what someone could mean by
|
| > it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is
|
| On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early
| 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use.
|
| Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI?
| Am I looking at the wrong thing?
| dv_dt wrote:
| On Apollo, I have the UI configured to omit previews of
| images and videos, it's also high density. It basically looks
| like HN.
| wasyl wrote:
| This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/ueQfJsc.png. Huge
| cookies popup, I don't even see one full post immediately.
| When scrolling the feed I mostly see 2 posts, sometimes a bit
| of a third one. With old.reddit.com it's a compact list where
| you see a lot more content at once.
|
| Also I found reading comments in new UI to be terrible, they
| load maybe one comment from 2-3 levels down, and everything
| else requires you to click to load more:
| https://i.imgur.com/C6DXttC.png.
|
| And what are those posts on the right? I _just_ opened a post
| that I'm interested in, do I have to be shoved samples from
| completely irrelevant communities.
|
| Also, try opening a post on new Reddit and then go back (in
| history) -- for me the previous page loads from scratch, all
| the way on the top. Old reddit behaves as expected.
|
| The list probably goes on, but I never spent more than 5
| minutes I did now to find out all the issues. I'm pretty sure
| one of the issues Reddit has with 3rd party apps is that they
| let you browse Reddit with old.reddit philosophy -- see lots
| of content, choose what you find interesting, and make it
| easy to dig into the discussion. As opposed to shoving the
| content in my face and pushing me to only read one top-
| upvoted comment on each level
| TX81Z wrote:
| The thing I think this conversation should be about is how
| horrible their site is.
|
| I don't think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if
| anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with
| disabilities and allow people who wouldn't deal with their
| trash UX to still generate content for those who do.
|
| The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.
| matteoraso wrote:
| >For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad
| Twitter clone.
|
| The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used
| Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit
| would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to
| wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how
| profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money
| ruining their UI.
| [deleted]
| elsewhere7868 wrote:
| [dead]
| jimmytucson wrote:
| For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to
| browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF
| would be just $0.73/month[1].
|
| For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2].
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/premium
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I don't see why the fuck anyone would buy reddit Premium.
| Enough with these subscriptions;
| dybber wrote:
| If it gave you the possibility to use other apps than the
| official? I think people would want to do that.
| justinhj wrote:
| The business model being, we make a client so bad that you
| will willingly give us money to not use it.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Maybe if I could then bypass the ridiculous rules some mods
| put on their subreddits I would.
|
| Imagine paying for Spotify, and then some ego tripping power
| nanny decides you aren't allowed to listen to some of the
| music. It's absurd.
|
| The lex Friedman subreddit especially is like this. The
| number of people banned from that sub for simply
| _disagreeing_ with Lex is ridiculous. Why on earth would I
| pay for something like that?
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Great. I'd happily pay $2.52 per month. Now Apollo should
| release a version of the app with bring-your-own-API-keys, I'll
| sign up for developer access, and pay for my own API usage. Has
| no one thought of this?
| davidktr wrote:
| You are missing the point that the developer needs a good
| working relationship with Reddit. He said very clearly that
| for him this is not about the money but about a passion
| project of his.
| danieldk wrote:
| Yeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit
| clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API
| requests their users are going to make and if they
| underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also,
| it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly,
| especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app
| purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX.
|
| If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of
| Reddit Premium? Reddit gets more premium subscribers and
| clients don't have to deal with all the complexities of how to
| handle API request prices.
|
| It reeks of just wanting to destroy third-party clients in
| favor of their own (terrible) client.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Pretty easy to handle if you don't buy a monthly subscription
| but instead buy X API calls and can reload when you run out.
| kevincox wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a great experience for users.
|
| 1. They don't directly know what actions are causing how
| many API calls, so it is unclear what they are buying.
|
| 2. It creates the incentive to use the service less to save
| money.
|
| 3. They aren't directly in control of what API calls the
| app makes, so there is some disconnect. (What if the
| developer decides to preload some info because it creates a
| better experience?)
|
| Generally the user should be purchasing based on the value
| it offers them, not the cost to provide the service.
| jimmytucson wrote:
| > If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it
| part of Reddit Premium?
|
| Wouldn't this be the worst of both worlds for the 3rd party
| app developers? In the current model, the developer of Apollo
| could charge $2.99/month and pay themselves $0.47/month/user.
| If we assume 80k paid users, that's $450k/year - not bad for
| a passion project!
|
| If Reddit instead took it out of developers hands and made
| users of Apollo pay Reddit for access, that would seem mighty
| unfair to the developer of Apollo, wouldn't it?
| opello wrote:
| It seems ideal to me where Reddit loses the ability to
| complain about usage by being able to control pricing for
| access and app developers get to recoup whatever they feel
| is necessary to maintain the app.
|
| This may be myopic though.
| dybber wrote:
| Would people maybe have been more okay with this, if the change
| was that you needed to pay for Reddit premium to be able to use
| API/other apps with your user? Then it was not be a bill
| forwarded to other apps, but a bill to each individual user
| using these apps?
|
| They would probably have been able to reduce the price of
| Reddit premium at the same time.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other
| services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a
| premium subscription comes to mind.
|
| That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit
| wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically)
| have more opportunities to monetize both users (including
| premium users) and their data, which probably looks better
| for a prospective IPO.
| antonjs wrote:
| I wonder if this could also actually work against reddit's
| interests. I'm guessing that a lot of the power users /
| mods have the highest API load, by doing things like taking
| large mod actions. You'd effectively be charging them more
| for the privilege of working.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I'd say it's better than shutting mods and power users
| out of better apps entirely. They could also do things
| like give mods of subreddits past a certain
| subscriber/activity threshold free premium to help them
| mod better.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Large mod actions? Like nuking a thread? I sincerely hope
| the API includes bulk actions so it only takes one call
| to delete a list of comment ids
| jimmytucson wrote:
| do you think 3rd party developers would be okay with this? in
| this scenario, the Reddit premium subscription fee would be a
| price floor and developers would have to charge a separate
| fee to use their app.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| Per the Apollo developer's post, a huge amount of the problem
| is existing subscriptions already sold for $10/year, which are
| now massive _costs_ - and negative on net if there 's even four
| months left on them. Not that having the price of your app
| suddenly _quadruple_ from $10 /year to $40/year because of API
| fees would be a small problem on its own!
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
| ("Why not just increase the price of Apollo" section)
| drexlspivey wrote:
| I don't get why you can't just bring your own API key with
| Apollo. It seems pretty simple to have the user go through
| Oauth to set up an app and have his own quota.
| Monotoko wrote:
| You can, I've already made a modified version of Apollo and
| sideloaded it onto my phone with a tweak to set my own key
| instead of Apollo's
|
| However there is a line on the developers page now that says
| all apps need to accept terms and sign up for a developers
| program, so I have my doubts it will continue to work either
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| How?
|
| Apollo's dev never released the source code to the app,
| only the server which sends out push notifications.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Probably jailbroken phone, but honestly I am equally
| clueless.
| hartator wrote:
| > How?
|
| And why? Before a few days ago, it wasn't an issue at
| all.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I mean the reason should be plainly obvious if you've
| been following the last few days.
| Monotoko wrote:
| Sideloadly and a lot of messing about, it doesn't need to
| be jailbroken though.
|
| While it's still here: https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak
| /comments/145y787/tutorial...
| ihuman wrote:
| That sub is private now
| charrondev wrote:
| Presumsbly you could disassemble the app, replace the
| relevant keys, then sign it with your own developer app.
| antonjs wrote:
| Probably possible to edit the API key resource without
| actually needing to see the source code.
| anonred wrote:
| Please don't do this, it'll just make it even harder for
| actual developers and moderators to use Reddit's API if
| people start abusing it.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Of course it would be doable but Reddit doesn't want this. They
| rather have complete control over the platform. They can't sell
| ads or metrics with third party apps.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.
|
| But why not? It's reddit's choice to not push ads into the
| API, they could certainly change that. They could also
| provide a telemetry sdk and mandate that all 3p apps use it.
|
| There's a way to make this all work but given reddit is
| completely uninterested in maintaining the status quo they
| must have other directions they want to take the platform.
| Apofis wrote:
| Usurious!
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| For me, removing NSFW (what will that even be defined as?)
| means 3rd party clients will have an incomplete experience.
| memalign wrote:
| I think that subreddits and posts already have NSFW tags.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless
| and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I
| want to explain why I believe they are wrong.
|
| Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small
| subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and
| especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or
| something like RES, you are more than likely a power user. If you
| moderate a subreddit, you're probably a power user. If those
| power users go away then you lose a large swath of content and
| moderation which negatively affects the regular users at other
| parts of the curve. It is not going to be immediate but this is
| reddit slowly bleeding itself to death.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially
| pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or
| something like RES, you are more than likely a power user._
|
| I've seen this repeated elsewhere but I've seen zero actual
| evidence of it.
|
| And the counterpoint is quite easy: that people use these
| apps/extensions for a better _viewing_ experience. Because on
| the creation side, typing into a text box or pasting a link is
| just typing into a text box. The apps /extensions are great for
| _consuming_.
|
| Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between
| 0.5 and 1.5 _billion_ monthly users, while the Apollo app has
| 1.5 _million_ monthly users. That 's nothing.
|
| The bigger question seems to be around moderators who use power
| moderation tools. Will Reddit keep allowing moderation tools?
| If not, will they improve their own? If they lose moderators,
| are there other moderators willing to take their place, or will
| they start investing in more ML-based moderation, etc.?
| Sholmesy wrote:
| > Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something
| between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users
|
| Not disagree-ing with your points, but do you have a source
| for this? It doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
|
| 1.5B people is ~ 20% of the world population, and probably
| closer to 50% of those with computers & internet capable of
| downloading reddit.com, an image heavy forum.
|
| I'm in the demographic for Reddit (30s, male, western
| country), and I think maybe 10% of my friends, family &
| coworkers even know what Reddit is, let along are an MAU.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Everybody's reporting "Reddit had 430 million monthly
| active users in 2020", so that's the half-billion that
| seems to be fact-based.
|
| Then the current 1.5B number seems to be based on
| extrapolation (1.66B in [1] for one estimate) based on
| previous growth rates.
|
| I shared your initial skepticism, but Reddit is the 20th
| most popular site in the world [2]. I know I have
| definitely been surprised and even shocked that certain
| extended family members and coworkers of mine have turned
| out to be heavy Reddit users. It's turned into this
| incredibly widespread site that almost nobody talks about
| "in real life".
|
| Of course, monthly active users presumably includes people
| who click on a Reddit search result once in the month. It
| doesn't mean they're using it daily and upvoting.
|
| [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-reddit-
| users/#sect...
|
| [2] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
| mrtksn wrote:
| So, what happens if reddit just kicks out the mods
| participating? It's not like the owners of the subs actually
| own anything, they just happen to do work in exchange of clout
| or money(from 3rd parties). There will be unlimited supply of
| volunteers waiting in line to acquire this privilege. If anyone
| actually manages to do some damage, they can just roll back the
| database or something.
|
| I've seen so many boycotts on the internet and the only one
| that worked was DIGG->Reddit and it worked only because Reddit
| was ready to take over.
|
| It would be poetic if Reddit goes away the way it come but I
| wouldn't bet on it. The relationship is symbiotic but the
| parties are not equal, it's the platform that holds the power.
| Unlike the real world where atoms behaviour is absolute, in
| this virtual environment the platform decides about how the
| nature works and the only real power is in the hands of those
| who control the servers.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| What happens if reddit crosses that line is completely up to
| community response. People could go on as usual and nothing
| happens or there could be an even more visceral backlash.
| History says business as usual but no one really knows what
| would happen.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There's no real community though.
|
| I have 12 y/o account with over 15K post karma and 35K
| comment karma and I don't care the slightest. The place has
| grown too big to feel like a community, if anything, I'm
| worried that r/StableDiffusion might go away because there
| are is so much chronological high quality content of the
| development of stable diffusion.
|
| I tracked down my first comment about how "reddit is dead",
| it's from 11 years ago. Apart from some smaller subs, for
| me reddit has become a content stream not that different
| from Twitter or TikTok.
|
| I will be sad to see some niche subs go but maybe that's
| the plan, after all, they are going after the mainstream.
| There's probably not much money in monetising some nerds.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| reddit is not a community. The subreddits are the
| community. I don't care about reddit as a whole but there
| are individual subreddits that if they change or go away
| then I no longer have a reason to use reddit.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Are these subs small or large?
| OldManRyan wrote:
| Both. A few are in the 500k+ sub range and some are way
| under that and more niche.
| busyant wrote:
| > I've seen so many boycotts on the internet and the only one
| that worked was DIGG->Reddit and it worked only because
| Reddit was ready to take over.
|
| Agree. Reddit had the critical mass and content to absorb
| Digg.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't see anything out there that is in a
| similar situation. I looked at kbin / lemmy yesterday and
| today and it feels like starting over again (content-wise).
| yanderekko wrote:
| >Engagement is a power curve
|
| Sure, but the degradation of the UX based on these changes
| seems to be pretty exaggerated in my view. How many of these
| powerusers are only using Reddit through a 3rd party client and
| would quit the site over having it closed? My guess is that the
| answer is "not many", and Reddit is clearly banking on this...
| and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own
| internal analysis?
|
| More concretely, my impression is that these changes will not
| hit RES meaningfully. If they did, I would be unhappy but it
| would not break the site for me.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| The developer of RES said they do not know if the changes
| will hit them and it is up in the air.
|
| > Reddit's public statements have been limited on this
| method, however we have been told we should see minimal
| impact via this route. However we are still not 100% sure on
| potential impact and are being cautious going forwards.[0]
|
| Developers behind third-party clients were also told they
| should be fine with the new changes so reddit's word isn't
| worth anything. This is not just about clients but tools and
| bots as well.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/141hzqj/ann
| oun...
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Would removing old.reddit.com break the site for you?
|
| It would for me, and thats the trajectory. The new UI is an
| absolute pig.
| themagician wrote:
| Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods--
| literally dozens. You've got _maybe_ a hundred mods who are
| "power mods" that control the vast majority of large
| subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own
| the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to
| pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways,
| become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it
| because--surprise--they ban those people.
|
| Honestly, the mod structure on reddit needs to change. This
| protest will almost 100% backfire. If it actually impacts
| revenue the admins will just ban a few dozen mods and the
| protest will, effectively, be over. Users will probably be
| better off for it too.
|
| The oppressive moderation that happens on reddit is not
| necessary. The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let
| people post what they want and vote on it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Disagree with this for lots of reasons:
|
| 1. First, look at the incentive structure for being a mod of
| a large subreddit: it's a _ton_ of work, with people
| constantly bitching at you, for no compensation. The vast
| majority of people with a life are not going to want to do
| this. So of course it appeals to people who can power trip
| off it, and I can 't see those dynamics really changing. I do
| think that reddit should change the rules to make it easier
| for particularly egregious mods to be voted out by the
| subscribers of a sub, but that's a relatively small change.
| For example, some of the r/lgbt mods were notorious assholes,
| which is why some people split off to make r/ainbow. Should
| be easier for subscribers to essentially "impeach" shitty
| mods.
|
| 2. "If it actually impacts revenue the admins will just ban a
| few dozen mods and the protest will, effectively, be over"
| People keep saying this, but I doubt it. The vast majority of
| reddit users, at least in the subs I've seen, support this -
| a bunch of the subs even had polls to ask what they should
| do. It's one thing for the admins to remove mods who are
| acting against the wishes of most is a subs' subscribers, but
| I think it would be total chaos if they tried to replace mods
| specifically to get their way WRT to the API changes.
|
| At the end of the day, reddit is nothing without it's
| community. Company management can only go so far before it
| kills the goose that laid the golden egg.
| themagician wrote:
| The power trip is enough for most people. And for the right
| subs, brands approach you with outrageous offers. It can
| EASILY make you six figures *a month. When I read, it was
| much smaller. Years ago when reddit it was much smaller and
| I was working for an agency. We paid $60,000 just for 2-3
| months of "posting support". It amounted to something like
| 12 posts. I know first hand how much some mods get
| compensated. And this wasn't even a major subreddit.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >First, look at the incentive structure for being a mod of
| a large subreddit: it's a ton of work, with people
| constantly bitching at you, for no compensation.
|
| And they'll find new people to do it for no compensation,
| just as they did before the mod tools in question existed.
|
| >The vast majority of reddit users, at least in the subs
| I've seen, support this - a bunch of the subs even had
| polls to ask what they should do.
|
| The support is vast but shallow, and this will become clear
| quickly when extended blackouts cause admin interventions
| and no one cares except for a vocal minority that will then
| attack the site in other ways (spam.)
| zouhair wrote:
| > And they'll find new people to do it for no
| compensation, just as they did before the mod tools in
| question existed.
|
| For free? I doubt they could find any for free.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people
| post what they want and vote on it.
|
| This only works (mostly) for legal content. Unfortunately a
| lot of illegal content would be highly popular and upvoted if
| not moderated. It also doesn't really work when a subset of
| users engage with the system in bad faith or leverage bots.
|
| Paid moderation is expensive - even if offshored - and I'm
| surprised that Reddit is willing to risk having to take on
| increased moderation costs. There's no way the lost potential
| revenue from 3rd party app users is enough to make up for
| that.
| altonas wrote:
| I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm
| active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video
| game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple
| occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big
| multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod
| (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my
| subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll
| have you blacklisted from modding other subs". That same
| exact mod on multiple occasions has deleted my posts from
| subs he mods, just to reupload them for karma himself. I
| don't even care about the karma, I just wish mods wouldn't
| delete my posts that don't break any rules in any way, shape,
| or form, especially when it's for blatant karma farming.
|
| If you look around Google you can even find several posts of
| subreddits getting "liberated" of this particular multi sub
| mod... Something needs to change so this stops happening
| OldManRyan wrote:
| I do agree this is an issue that needs to be addressed but
| you are also posting this on a website that is heavily
| moderated and runs as smoothly as it does because of the
| efforts of dang and the other moderators so I can't agree
| that reddit should just be the wild west.
| seydor wrote:
| reddit should auto-retire mods after X months. We can do that
| in mainstream politics - not on reddit politics
| mynameishere wrote:
| Agree completely. Get rid of all the large-sub mods, replace
| them with paid moderators who are instructed to only remove
| spam and illegal content. Giant, giant improvement. The mods
| as they are just power trip on their own politics. Why else
| would they do it for no money?
| Shaanie wrote:
| Self-moderation doesn't work for any reasonably large
| community, if you don't want your community to be generic
| Facebook/Instagram quality posts. Community-based moderation
| inevitably makes any subreddit into "fun phots/videos"
| because people who browse largely don't care about _where_
| the post is, they might not even realize what subreddit it is
| in when up-voting.
|
| Subreddits like askscience or askhistorians would be
| impossible without extremely strict moderation, for obvious
| reasons.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a
| small subset of users.
|
| This is it, and it's the same with Twitter. At some number of
| connection in the social graph, or some amount of content
| produced, a user becomes more valuable than the ad money they
| could bring in. i.e. the opportunity cost flips, and it's worth
| giving up the ad revenue or API usage in order to keep them. To
| use an extreme, if a Kardashian said they were leaving Twitter,
| it would obviously be worth a lot of money to keep them on the
| platform. But my guess is that the percentage of users bringing
| more value than their ad revenue is closer to 1 in a 100 than 1
| in a million.
|
| As you said this then plays into the third party client issue
| directly, because those users are almost by definition power
| users, and power users get so much value out of third party
| clients with micro optimisations for their use-cases.
|
| The problem is that this feels so obvious that I can't believe
| Reddit (or Twitter) don't have a measure of this internally,
| and I don't know why they wouldn't be optimising for it. My
| only conclusion is that it's too much nuance for a Musk-driven
| product team to handle, and that Reddit are shit-scared that
| they're going to collapse before IPO'ing and can't make
| rational decisions.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| For power users, advertisers flip from paying for their eyes
| to paying for their thumbs.
| pests wrote:
| > because those users are almost by definition power users
|
| Why is this the case and being repeated everywhere by
| everyone?
|
| Reddit originally didn't have a mobile app and only third
| party clients existed. Everyone who wanted a mobile
| experience was using a third party app. Many of those
| original users never switched to the official app. How are
| they power users by definition?
| danpalmer wrote:
| That's a fair point, but I still think there's a strong
| correlation. To address that point specifically, users who
| started using Reddit early enough that the official one
| didn't exist, and have stuck around and are still active
| now, are more likely to be power users just based on
| account age. Additionally, many years ago those seeking out
| mobile apps may have been power users as well. Mobile apps
| are the default now, but unofficial apps have only recently
| been more mainstream.
| spokeonawheel wrote:
| they are wrong because 3rd party apps are the only way the site
| is actually usable on a mobile device.
| [deleted]
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| And now I want to explain why you're wrong.
|
| The vast majority of people who are visiting subreddits are
| doing so because they're actively seeking out the material
| being presented to them. These people are subscribers to the
| subreddits. Subreddits that "go dark" are not blocked for
| everyone. Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have
| not yet subscribed to the subreddit.
|
| So this giant display of enlightened asshattery affects almost
| nobody. And even if it did, it's a 2 day ordeal.
|
| Which means jack fucking squat. It's the equivalent of wearing
| an MLK bandana on Juneteenth day and spending the rest of the
| year voting and campaigning for politicians trying to abolish
| what's left of the Voting Rights Act.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| > The vast majority of people who are visiting subreddits are
| doing so because they're actively seeking out the material
| being presented to them. These people are subscribers to the
| subreddits. Subreddits that "go dark" are not blocked for
| everyone. Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have
| not yet subscribed to the subreddit.
|
| I don't believe this is true but I'm willing to test it out.
| I'll subscribe to a bunch of subreddits that intend to go
| dark and see what happens.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| natebc wrote:
| I've dropped (\\.|^)reddit\\.com$ into my pihole block list to
| avoid any accidental visits during the strike.
|
| I'll really miss a couple of the good communities I've found
| there if this adventure ends up being fatal.
| nabakin wrote:
| If anyone is interested in how many of the top 250 subreddits are
| participating, I created a website for it here
| https://save3rdpartyapps.com/
| rany_ wrote:
| Oh no, gone for 48-hours... That will show 'em! (meanwhile the
| Reddit IPO is in a few months..)
|
| It should be permanent if these boycotters want an effective
| outcome, but a 48-hours boycott sends the wrong message and just
| communicates that it is OK to do these sorts of shenanigans and
| all they will get a slap on the wrist.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Great! For any other compulsive Reddit addicts out there with
| uBlock Origin installed, you can block Reddit as follows:
|
| Click uBlock Origin extension -> click gears -> click "My
| Filters" tab -> paste this line
|
| ||reddit.com^$all
| Marcan wrote:
| Thanks for the filter, very useful! I'm keeping this on until
| Reddit backtracks.
| bardfinn wrote:
| I also keep coming back to the metaphor that Reddit is a great
| deal like Gormenghast: an ancient, stony fortification of
| cobbled-together structures, housing a gaggle of idiosyncratic
| personas whose lives are filled with the performances of abstruse
| rituals and obligations, the mandatory detritus of a former glory
| -- insular and in a state of glacial decadence, and which
| nevertheless has a secondary community plastered on its boundary,
| with which it perfunctorily yet regularly interacts AND YET all
| of which exists within a much wider world that has largely
| diverged from it.
|
| I think about the Tower of Flints.
| Quequau wrote:
| lol, you're right but also with a good deal of 'minimum viable
| product' in the mix. I'm going to steal this to share with my
| friends (who mostly hate Reddit).
|
| Also, have a nice day.
| technothrasher wrote:
| That series literally depressed the heck out of me... as does
| Reddit at times.
| king_magic wrote:
| My prediction is that the "strike" will be utterly useless. It
| will usher in the era of full-spectrum AI moderation faster. The
| world will keep turning, and most Reddit users simply won't care
| that much.
|
| Cynical take? Certainly. I think this was always doomed to
| failure through eventual apathy.
|
| Do I want it to fail? Of course not, but it feels as poorly
| thought out as Occupy Wall Street did.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Thinking on how to forward from here.
|
| Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem?
|
| Instead of raising API price, what if Reddit injects ADs as real
| content for non premium API calls, so those API free
| riders/crawlers would get ADs indistinguishable from content.
| Well intended apps like Apollo could allow users to provide their
| premium identity and get AD free content. If this works, Reddit
| could even lower the price of premium account thanks to increase
| in AD revenue.
|
| Also, I believe Reddit should share ADs revenue with subreddits
| moderators. This would truly align the incentive of all parties.
| TX81Z wrote:
| The age of adtech as the dominant technology revenue model is
| drawing to a close and Reddit missed out on the golden age.
| Trying to make ads work now, when it's clear the future is
| subscriptions and the like, is just dumb.
| rchaud wrote:
| Only Google and FB figured out ads, and they were planet-
| scale companies. Twitter pulled in ad revenue but couldn't
| make a profit. Reddit's audience is extremely hostile to ads,
| and they've never managed to attract big advertisers anyway.
| belinder wrote:
| Amazon?
| TX81Z wrote:
| And they haven't figured out a way to do it *legally*. Both
| are getting fined more by the day in the EU and fending off
| more class lawsuits than you can believe in the USA.
|
| Once you take away the "grossly illegal activity" dividend
| neither is nearly as rosy as it seems.
| jachee wrote:
| Aside for my own curiosity: Why do you capitalize the word `ad`
| like that? It's not an acronym, it's an abbreviation; short for
| `advertisement`.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem?
|
| No, it is the whole shebang which is why Reddit is forcing this
| extinction event for 3rd party apps.
|
| I use the Now for Reddit Android app and Reddit Enhancement
| Suite extension on desktop. With this combination, Reddit has
| stayed visually identical for the past decade. I never saw
| things like NFT avatars, RPAN livestreaming or any of the
| things Reddit has added to make it something other than an old
| school messageboard.
|
| Users like me are a disaster for Reddit because I treat it like
| a PHPbb forum from 2010. There is no hope of upselling me into
| something I would pay for. Reddit's owners however believe that
| they should be multiplying their wealth many times over for
| running a bigger Phpbb instance. _That_ is the crux of the
| problem.
| calessian wrote:
| They could very well convince me to pay a subscription fee if
| they promised to not change the site anymore. Sure, that's
| not exactly a great business model, but I do wonder if
| they'll eventually pull the plug on old.reddit
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| [shrugs] the mods will be deleted and replaced with a Mechanical
| Turk style outsourcing system.
| quenix wrote:
| I suggest the title be updated to reflect the live tracking
| nature of this site
|
| "Watch the Reddit strike unfold live"?
| seydor wrote:
| My subs are up though
| wpietri wrote:
| Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for
| those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit.
|
| The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these
| (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the
| millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go
| there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not
| going back.
| istillwritecode wrote:
| I will continue to use reddit.
| latortuga wrote:
| Same. Regardless of how they've bumpy the pay increase and
| related comms have been, it's their platform. Nobody uses
| third party apps to access Pinterest, tiktok, Facebook, ig,
| or any other major internet property and I don't see a
| problem with reddit running their company to make money. Yeah
| it sucks that Apollo, rif, etc all are getting shut down.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Reddit and Twitter embraced third party clients because it
| saved them the early cost of doing it themselves and
| provided extra avenues and incentives for power users to
| create content and moderators to cultivate communities.
| Both benefit the platform and in the end revenues.
|
| Social media platforms are almost always generous in
| allowing for tools and third party clients that result in
| new content being created. What they restrict is the same
| sort of thing for the passive viewing side.
|
| Reddit and Twitter were always unusual in that there's such
| a 50/50 split between posting and consuming, and power
| users valued being able to curate their reading experience
| as well as the tools they had to post with. Most of
| Twitter's core feature set came from power user features
| invented in third party apps, including retweeting. But as
| the apps became more popular they also took away a larger
| proportion of passive eyeballs for advertisers. A balance
| of some sort was needed, and I think both Twitter and
| Reddit have gone the wrong way.
|
| Facebook is different to those two in that it always had
| the benefit of exploiting your existing in person social
| graph and growing outward from there, meaning it had
| different drivers and incentives for frequent posting.
| wpietri wrote:
| It is really theirs? They have legal ownership, sure, so
| they can do this without forcible intervention by the
| state. But laws are things we make up to memorialize our
| agreements on what we think should happen, so focusing on
| legal ownership doesn't really answer the question of who
| Reddit really belongs to.
| GenerWork wrote:
| Same. One thing that I've noticed is that this seems to be a
| rebellion of power users and not the average Joe, which is
| why this has gotten so much traction on HN. To the Average
| Joe, if Apollo shuts down, they'll just download the Reddit
| app. However, HN users look at the Apollo dev and see
| themselves, so they're jumping on this out of solidarity.
|
| I personally think this will last a few days and then all the
| default subs will either open by mod decisions or be forced
| open by Reddit admins. If it's the latter, I expect all
| existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who
| are friendlier with Reddit admins. I also expect that usage
| of the official app will jump and there won't be any major
| disruptions to Reddit usage.
| xenophonf wrote:
| > _If it 's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get
| the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with
| Reddit admins._
|
| I'm not crossing the picket line, but I think that's a
| likely outcome, too. That's why I'm preparing to archive
| what little content I'm personally interested in and am
| leaving the platform permanently.
| JaumeGreen wrote:
| The decisions that reddit has taken were not affecting me
| for now. The new ui was horrible for my use case (text
| subreddits and focusing on the debate) so I was a
| old.reddit user.
|
| But the way the direction is going, and some experiences in
| some subs have made me take a decision, and my 12+ year
| account is no more.
|
| It won't matter, and probably reddit will survive, be it as
| strong as it is now or in a diminished state. But I'm tired
| of this kind of directives in these kinds of companies.
|
| I hope that leaving that, and not having Instagram or
| Facebook on the phone, might give me a little push on being
| more productive. Wish me luck.
| Lapsa wrote:
| it will. saying that from experience. makes you bit of an
| outcast though - be ready
| dmix wrote:
| At most this comes down to Reddit's inability to provide a
| quality mobile app that satisfies the 3rd party app users.
| The niche ones like disability friendly UIs is likely a
| different issue that may simply require a different app
| entirely given the typical product dev demands of most big
| companies.
|
| The real problem is Reddit mostly sucks at design and UX.
| https://new.Reddit.com shows it's not getting better
| besides search.
|
| The users don't really give a shit about API pricing or
| understand/care about Reddits steep financial demands. IRL
| Reddit probably have bankers down their throats for the IPO
| and Sam Altman/PG/Steve's VC friends are pushing the AI
| data goldmine angle. Only the execs know what is really
| happening behind the scenes but there's some very clear
| motivations here they aren't doing a good job of
| communicating (possibly out of fear of the super niche
| r/antiwork type audiences who in reality will whine
| regardless).
|
| Reddit could do plenty to fix the mobile (and web) issues
| and buy good will by openly confronting them. Plenty of
| product and transparency failures here well beyond spez's
| Apollo dev conflict taking up the bulk of discourse that
| mostly only powerusers care about.
|
| Otherwise Reddit is known for having powerusers, mods, and
| a general anti-authority "we're making a difference by
| shitposting on the internet" culture. Especially after
| their net neutrality protests. It's only natural for such a
| thing to turn into a big deal when the poweruser minority
| gets upset and for the rest there's a prime opportunity for
| outrage against [faceless big corporation]. Reddit's
| favourite target.
|
| Reddit could much, much more easily placate the regular
| non-hardcore users by simply being transparent about their
| very real business demands to make money (esp with LLM) and
| by very publicly doubling down on making a better mobile
| app - since clearly they view 3rd party apps as not
| feasible for their current business plans. So why not fix
| why people love the 3rd party ones?
|
| But as always big business PR is awful, transparency is
| downplayed and intentions are obscure as if users are
| idiots. Etc. Typical big co mediocrity.
| a2tech wrote:
| I don't think I agree with you. Every sub I'm on that has
| asked people if they should go dark (either temporarily or
| permanently) have seen overwhelming support for the
| protest. This includes subreddits such as woodworking, our
| local city sub, and arduino. These subs are NOT made out of
| power users and they all supported it.
| goostavos wrote:
| The site linked in this very post sorta disagrees with
| you, though. The subs not taking part in the strike
| vastly outnumber those who are.
|
| Outside of a few (relatively speaking) small circles, the
| Reddit strike boils down to "Reddit is striking?" The
| revolt goes unnoticed. Lurkers are happily scrolling the
| front page right now.
| stryan wrote:
| To be clear, the strike isn't supposed to start until
| June 12th, which hasn't happened in North America yet.
| This headline seems to be jumping the gun a little as
| only a few subreddits went dark immediately.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| A lot of subreddits have begun in the past hour because
| it's already the 12th in Europe. Formula1 and FormulaE
| just went dark in the past hour for example.
| themagician wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
|
| Reddit becomes harder and harder to actually post on. Subs
| are now ruled by mods and strict automods with ridiculous
| rules and posting requirements. You post something and it
| gets automatically removed and then you have to post a
| dozen more times changing this word or that word to try and
| figure out how to actually get something through.
|
| In reality there are a few DOZEN mods that basically
| control all of reddit. Yes, dozens. It's the same mods over
| and over again.
| ifiht wrote:
| Have created two accounts in the past year and
| successfully posted once, despite trying dozens of times
| (ironically the one that made it was a rant about how
| impossible it is for new users)
| drumhead wrote:
| Its community knowledge, just like wikipedia right now. Infact
| someone mentioned in another thread that maybe thats the
| ownership structure Reddit should have had.
| bardfinn wrote:
| The blackouts will not change the way Reddit, Inc. is behaving.
|
| Why?
|
| Many reasons:
|
| Reddit was a party, now it is a business. As Spez said in the
| AMA, it is not (yet) profitable, and as is apparent, there are
| no more rounds of capital raising happening. They filed for an
| IPO two years ago. Will they have that IPO? I say, at this
| point, No. The mere fact that Spez said that it's not
| profitable tells me that they're no longer going for an IPO.
| Now, they're just aiming at making Reddit into a real business,
| for the long term.
|
| Third Party Apps using the API to serve Reddit content with
| subscription models or by running their own adverts alongside
| the content, and raking in cash -- bottom line, they were
| stealing revenues from Reddit. Even though Reddit didn't
| enforce any API TOS or AUP or user agreement, etc -- the terms
| were still there in the main user agreement that use of the
| site and use of the API was personal, and not "scrape the
| contents of the site, slap your own brand on it, and pull in
| profit from that". Not even if it had a better UI and better
| mod tools. It's still theft, even if the aesthetics were clean.
| Even if it was "anti censorship", even if it was
| "accountability and transparency", even if it was for research
| and even if it supported, tangentially, moderator efforts. Even
| if Reddit mismanaged their API for a decade.
|
| Reddit admins already prepared for this eventuality. They
| started preparing for it in 2015 when a bunch of "free speech"
| bigotry-oriented ecosystem subreddits blacked out "in protest"
| of Reddit shutting down a half dozen subreddits -- subreddits
| dedicated to white supremacist hatred and violent misogyny, and
| which, we would later find out were run by a now-convicted
| White Identity Terrorist, European88.
|
| They later prepared for it in 2018 and then when the founder of
| KotakuInAction figured out that the people who had been running
| KiA were the same people who helped u/European88 run thousands
| of White Identity Extremism terrorist subreddits and misogynist
| subreddits, and were in a conspiracy to burn the site down by
| drowning it in terrorist hate speech and making it into 4chan's
| /pol/. He closed KiA. The Reddit admins reopened it and gave it
| back to the people who had been running it to drive misogynist
| hatred and recruit for White Identity Extremism groups.
|
| Moderator is a Verb, not a Noun. The new moderator code of
| conduct and modsupportbot "moderator candidate" function makes
| it clear that moderators are supposed to be the people who
| actually take actions to steward a community, not people who
| claim a title and never take action, not people who abuse the
| privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that
| aren't in the interest of the communities they serve. Not
| absentee founders.
|
| Moderator teams tend to be cliques of 80% people with strong
| opinions about how the subreddit should be run but who take
| very few actions and 20% people who take a lot of actions to
| enforce clear violations of the Sitewide rules and subreddit
| rules. The 80% don't recruit new moderators. The 20% can't
| recruit new moderators. The 20% get burned out, they leave, the
| 80% still don't recruit new moderators, and eventually can't
| recruit moderators at all, moderation doesn't happen, the
| community fails.
|
| That shouldn't happen. But it does.
|
| Reddit is a forest; Subreddits are plants in that forest. Some
| are huge trees, and some are tiny shrubs. Anyone can plant one
| and grow it. But guess what happens when a huge tree is cut
| down? Suddenly, fifteen trees spring up to fill the air and
| sunlight and soil and ecosystem niche the fallen tree once had.
|
| You cut down your own tree, Reddit doesn't care. You clearcut a
| field, Reddit doesn't care. You take down one of the core and
| oldest trees ... ok Reddit might care, but they will deal with
| it.
|
| You and a bunch of Reddit moderators who don't want to recruit
| and manage and train and mentor dozens and hundreds of new
| moderators to replace the mod teams you're burning out, to
| replace you, eventually -- because, hey, we're all mortal --
| are choosing to leave the site? Close your subreddits? OK,
| Buddy. A dozen of you, and the toxic, static, insular mindset
| and cliqueishness you brought to running communities, you're
| gone -- and in your place, 500 fresh faces. People with a
| passion for community, who don't know you, don't want to know
| you, and who will build communities in the forest.
|
| Sometimes, forest fires happen, and can be good for the
| ecosystem.
|
| Two day protests don't change corporate behaviour. There has
| been one protest that successfully coincided with Reddit
| changing its behaviour, and that protest built over nine months
| in the contemporaneous instance, and began 5 years earlier. It
| succeeded largely because it was protesting terrorist hatred
| and violence, and Reddit could either come to terms with it, or
| lose advertisers & audience.
|
| There's no such thing as bad publicity, only bad managers.
| Reddit's in the headlines! People will come check it out. Free
| publicity.
|
| In summary:
|
| The two-day and/or "indefinite" blackouts are a good holiday,
| and a solidarity speech act with our co-moderators &
| communities.
|
| I doubt they're going to change the behaviour of Reddit, Inc.
|
| Because at this point, it's profits or bankruptcy.
| davemp wrote:
| > Not even if it had a better UI and better mod tools. It's
| still theft, even if the aesthetics were clean.
|
| Except reddit is mostly just a link aggregator and host of
| other stolen content.
| hanspeter wrote:
| Well, this may be true for many of the big subreddits, but
| the vast majority of subreddits and their communities are
| about conversation and original content more than link
| aggregation.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Nonsense. The API had clear terms of service that allowed for
| third party clients, and Reddit explicitly promoted and
| supported them in the past. The current Reddit app was even
| built on one such app (Alien Blue) that Reddit acquired.
|
| For a platform hosting user generated content and with
| volunteer moderation having third party clients is usually a
| net positive despite the small loss in advertising revenue,
| purely because they have a very positive impact on content
| creation and curation. That keeps passive users coming to the
| site so they can be advertised to.
|
| At some point after a platform matures there needs to be some
| additional monetisation of third party clients, especially as
| they begin to capture a larger share of users. It doesn't
| have to result in the clients being killed off entirely.
|
| Reddit is nothing without people voluntarily adding content
| to the site and good moderators voluntarily running
| subreddits. That's especially true for special interest and
| high quality subs like AskHistorians.
| choudharism wrote:
| This is so many layers of unhinged rhetoric, picking out
| individual points to break them down and debate them will be
| fruitless. One thing though...
|
| Moderator is most certainly a noun, and can be an adjective
| when placed in front of a "candidate". What are you even on,
| man.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/moderator
| rjh29 wrote:
| > moderators are supposed to be the people who actually
| take actions to steward a community, not people who claim a
| title and never take action, not people who abuse the
| privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that
| aren't in the interest of the communities they serve. Not
| absentee founders.
|
| I'm not the OP but that context makes it pretty obvious the
| OP is being figurative.
| seaners wrote:
| [flagged]
| moneyaside wrote:
| [dead]
| vjk800 wrote:
| It's the classic network effect. People use it because other
| people use it.
| TX81Z wrote:
| ...until people stop using it because other people stopped
| using it. They are playing with fire.
| dryanau wrote:
| Reddit of all platforms should know this, having risen to
| prominence on the heels of Digg v4
| rafark wrote:
| Kind of like the kardashians?
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU, Facebook
| is $200 ARPU in the US.
|
| The app they're burning down Reddit over is already charging
| $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10
| million.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but we usually don't give out API keys
| to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our
| data for free.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _Reddit wanted 2.50 /month/app_
|
| I think the pricing model is per API call, and Reddit was
| claiming that a typical user, with the app using the data the
| way Reddit envisions, would use that quantity of API calls.
|
| This, of course, assumes that every app is designed similar
| to the way Reddit expects, i.e., Reddit is assuming that
| nobody will do anything to add any value on top of Reddit's
| own design. But isn't that value-add part of the reason these
| apps exist in the first place?
| faangsticle wrote:
| Reddit has for years and years, and built their shoddy little
| website on that fact.
| TX81Z wrote:
| "Our data".
| wilg wrote:
| > Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU
|
| And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without
| causing a shitstorm.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'd also point out it's not Reddit who wanted a $30 ARPU.
| It's a small number of Reddit execs and venture
| capitalists.
|
| Reddit, by which I mean its vast user community, does not
| give a shit about ARPU as long as the site stays up and
| things get modestly better over time. And I've seen no
| evidence that Reddit needs a massive bump in revenue to
| meet those goals.
| numpad0 wrote:
| If they can't make $30 ARPU stick, what could ever be
| profitable on Web, other than by deceptively recovering
| damages through ads? Is the only value prop of Web that
| it's free-beer?(my mental answer is nothing and yes)
| not_a_shill wrote:
| If it's that low they could have just locked 3rd party apps
| behind a reddit premium account with some reasonable rate
| limits for non commercial use. So similar to what Spotify
| does.
|
| Wouldn't have got nearly as much backlash.
| eshack94 wrote:
| The entire goal of these API changes is to intentionally
| price third-party app developers out of the market without
| imposing a strict blanket-policy ban.
|
| And the goal of this is to attempt to further monetize the
| platform on the backs of other people's content by forcing
| them to see as many ads and upsell opportunities as possible.
|
| And the goal of this is to appear more appealing to current
| and future investors in order to drive up the IPO price and
| build demand.
|
| And the goal of this is to make those with significant equity
| stake filthy rich.
|
| The issue is that the changes they're trying to make are
| inherently hostile to the community whose free content and
| moderation has made the platform what it is today. And if the
| community decides to leave the platform and not come back,
| then regardless of potential for extra ad revenue, the
| inherent value of the platform will disappear because ads
| will be shown to less and less users. This is assuming people
| leave and actually don't come back, which remains to be seen.
|
| The whole "front page of the internet" idea was pretty neat,
| and is a stark contrast to the days where each internet
| community had their own niche forum somewhere. Maybe we'll
| see some other platform overtake Reddit as the new front page
| of the internet, or maybe an old platform like Digg will make
| a resurgence. But that's a tall ask when Reddit is now so
| entrenched in that space.
|
| Edit: technology -> platform, in the last paragraph above.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| This is kind of like the Twitter fiasco where in the eye of
| the storm a lot of loud people are pressuring more people
| to make this seem a lot bigger than it is.
|
| Unless you have some alternative that has Reddit
| functionality, but can somehow operate without revenue, I'm
| just going to assume there isn't and Reddit will continue
| operating as normal.
|
| Just doing the math $2.50 seems reasonable if you're going
| to redistribute the data to users while bypassing the ads.
| wpietri wrote:
| If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could
| have a free version of the API that includes the inline
| ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads
| for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a
| share of that revenue to client makers.
|
| As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it
| looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated
| content in an attempt to extract maximum dollars from it
| while intentionally excluding third parties.
| shagie wrote:
| What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be
| rendered by the 3rd party client?
|
| What incentive is there for the API users to add in ads
| that reddit serves for the 3rd party client users? Can
| reddit be guaranteed get a share of the revenue for the
| IAP of "block all ads?" Is it worth it for reddit to do
| it when they can't control the price of said IAP ($0.49
| for "block all of Reddit's ads")
| pawptart wrote:
| Right? That's what I've never understood. Putting ads in
| the API is irrelevant, since the 3rd party clients will
| just ignore them.
|
| The Reddit that the loud minority wants is never, ever
| coming back. These protests are just a blip -- if you
| don't like what Reddit has become, your only recourse is
| to leave.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Reddit announced this price 30-days before they planned to
| enforce/charge it. If there was any doubt at all that Reddit
| wasn't trying to ban third-party apps with deniability, then
| that should settle it. That isn't reasonable.
|
| Plus $2.5 to Reddit, means that apps need to charge $3.60
| before 30% App-Store fees. But the app developer also needs
| new infrastructure to handle the billing, payment, and
| tracking, between end-users & Reddit along with their
| existing overhead. So the current $1/month aka $0.70/month
| after fees they're operating on likely isn't sustainable.
|
| So now we're looking at $3.60 to Reddit + the existing
| $1/month = $4.6, but also all this new payment/billing
| infrastructure. Could easily exceed $5/month which frankly
| nobody is going to pay, and then get all this done in just
| 30-days even though that date is completely arbitrary from
| Reddit's end.
| not_a_shill wrote:
| People would pay $5 a month. They do on discord
| for...animated emoticons.
|
| It's actually hard to believe people are throwing this big
| a fit over something they don't deem worthy of $5 a month.
| opello wrote:
| I think it's because Reddit came to a solution that put a
| rather large and sudden burden on the app developers.
|
| Had it been something like "starting next year only
| Premium users will get to auth to the API" (which is
| analogous to the $5/mo. of Discord Nitro) the lead time
| would have been greater and the users would have been
| able to solve the problem of access on their own.
|
| I imagine this being less desirable when individuals have
| multiple accounts.
| kemotep wrote:
| The trick is the end user of the third party app doesn't
| have to pay. The app developer is the one being charged
| by Reddit.
|
| If you have 10,000 users that Reddit in 30 days is going
| to charge you $250,000 per month to continue allowing
| your third party app to operate and you only had 5-10% of
| your users paying for a premium version you could see how
| that becomes somewhat unreasonable.
|
| A bit more of a heads up is all the Apollo developer
| wanted. He understood that the API no longer being free
| is reasonable. The timing is what he objects. No
| assistance in allowing premium Reddit accounts that use
| Third Party Apps to cover API costs, etc.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| > our content
|
| Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content
| it actually is.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| A curated set of links, rated, sorted, filtered, and
| discussion. That's the content you want and are having a
| tantrum about not having free access to.
|
| You are free though to access the referenced content on
| your own if you can find out about it on your own.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Who curated them, rated them, sorted them, filtered them,
| and discussed them?
|
| Not Reddit. They're just the landlord here.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And the landlords still have costs. It is not free to run
| a platform. They have to pay for it in one way or an
| other. Time of free beer have come to end.
|
| People here should understand this more than anyone else.
| It is one thing to have site as hobby, but something with
| number of users is expensive to run.
| wpietri wrote:
| It's not free to run a platform. But this is not about
| platform costs. This is about the standard pre-IPO
| juicing of the stats to maximize IPO pop, allowing
| insiders and VCs to sell shares and make bank. People
| here should understand this more than anyone else.
| monetus wrote:
| It takes a lot of optimism about lack of human greed to
| think that this is not the case, IMO.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think it's not so much optimism as getting so blinded
| by the nominal, theoretical purpose that they don't pay
| attention to what people are actually doing. As they say,
| "follow the money". That'll tell you the difference
| between stated purpose and revealed purpose. "The purpose
| of the system is what it does."
| Blackthorn wrote:
| It appears there's quite a severe disagreement over what
| those costs ought to be.
|
| Perhaps if Reddit the company had been more disciplined
| over the last ten years, it wouldn't have come to that.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| If you think this isn't pre-IPO bullshit and is just "hey
| we have costs too!" I have multiple bridges to sell you
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Their hosting costs are not going to majorly change due
| to API access. By their own accounts, less than 5% of
| users access the site via the API and if anything, those
| would impose less costs than someone needing to load the
| entire UI alongside the API calls (albeit using a new
| GraphQL API that I'm sure is more efficient but not
| available to 3rd party apps).
|
| API hosting is a drop in the bucket, even if their own
| accounts are to be believed wholesale.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Yes and you rent the infrastructure needed to facilitate
| all those processes for millions of users.
|
| You're free to setup your own, or rent somewhere else.
| Regardless it costs money.
| ziftface wrote:
| The infrastructure costs next to nothing compared to what
| they're charging. There is a natural equilibrium point
| between communities, the landlord, the moderators, etc,
| and this clearly isn't it. Someone else will find it
| though.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The equilibrium is between what the market will pay and
| supply.
| whyenot wrote:
| I didn't rent anything. Over 14 years, I provided Reddit
| with content and worked for free as a moderator. In more
| recent times, I even paid $5.99/mo for a premium
| membership. Users like me and the communities that we
| helped build, are what Reddit is throwing away. It's sad.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You built your dream castle in someone else's yard. You
| managed to get a bunch of visitors to come make the
| castle even better. The owner makes money on ads on the
| property so the more visitors the more income.
|
| Now they want to charge for some aspect that was free and
| you decide not hang around anymore.
|
| You say reddit is throwing it away when you are the one
| who is throwing it away because you have to pay if you
| want api access.
| whyenot wrote:
| I already was paying. As mentioned in my comment, $5.99 a
| month.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I like that they went back and edited their comment to
| change that wording.
|
| Of course, given the edit, one must wonder who's data they
| think it is given who they're collecting it from...
| bredren wrote:
| If it is the company's content, it's the company's
| moderation and I know a lot of folks ready for due and past
| due compensation.
| alangibson wrote:
| These subreddits disagree that this is Reddit's data
| raincole wrote:
| > The app they're burning down Reddit over is
|
| Lmao. Do you even realize what all these are about...?
| Reddit's pricing API policy is making ALL the apps
| unsustaniable. It's not "the app".
|
| > Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US.
|
| Yeah so? Only users and mods in the US matter and fuck the
| rest of the world?
|
| Plus Reddit is, surprisingly, not Facebook. I don't even
| understand why you're comparing them. Actually I believe many
| people use Reddit because it's not like Facebook.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| If you ran a website, would you allow 3rd parties to
| reproduce and sell your data for free?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Yes. I love CC0 and hate IP. I find other ways to make
| the money than licensing access to data (or
| aspiring/building toward in some parts).
|
| For my apps that rely on UGC, I take it a step further
| and remove myself from UGC liabilities somewhat by having
| users self host in various ways, appified for simplicity.
| I definitely don't paywall license access to UGC - this
| allows me to operate much more leanly by not having full
| custody of UGC. Win-win
|
| Obviously UGC hazards are still important to build
| against but these models offer interesting ways to do
| that as well
| dragontamer wrote:
| Reddit didn't make any of that data. It was community
| members.
|
| If you're a community leader in charge of some
| subreddit... would you continue to let Reddit host the
| data if they continuously make it more expensive to
| access the data?
| Blackthorn wrote:
| I ran a popular wiki for a decade and did exactly that,
| complete with API.
|
| Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior
| because all the content on it was created by its users.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| How do we educate the masses on avoiding insane digital
| landlords?
|
| Which is all the big players btw. And most small players
| too. It's not just a big n corrupt edge case.
|
| I struggle with pitching the value of it in my products
| and would like to help peers
| rtsil wrote:
| You can't because the digital landlords make everything
| free or almost free in the beginning, before raising it
| to stratospheric levels once the market is captive.
| Google did that with Maps. OpenAI is doing it with its
| API. And people like free or almost free things rather
| than reasonably-priced things.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's not always so capital intensive anymore to make
| things free, there are technical advancements that make
| that easier these days so I believe there is edge to be
| found. In particular I'm exploring offline-first apps in
| addition to decentralization/self hosting, because
| offline-oriented apps help avoid expensive servers. Users
| like the privacy benefits and I enjoy the benefits of
| minimizing UGC custody.
| raincole wrote:
| > 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free
|
| You mean... like Reddit, which's reproducing and selling
| users' data...? (play canned laughter)
|
| To answer your question, I'd charge them to cover the
| bandwidth cost.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Yea that's how business works - you take parts, add
| value, and produce new parts. In this case a curated set
| of links with discussion. The costs for you the user are
| so low (ad supported) because users do most of the work.
| You'd have to pay a monthly fee if Reddit had to employee
| thousands of people to curate the links for you. And
| given you don't like paying money in the first place,
| there would be no Reddit.
|
| The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth
| and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of
| users who are not paying their fair share which in turn
| means more ads for everyone else to make up for free
| loaders.
| whyenot wrote:
| It's not your data. It's your user's data.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| If all the content on my website was literally donated by
| 3rd parties for the explicit and practically only purpose
| of online dissemination, I'd definitely think twice
| before paywalling it.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, I do. I give users access to the API for free and
| then I do not monitor their use of it. So it is almost
| certsin that some of our competitors scrape our site and
| use our data for free.
| kbenson wrote:
| This isn't over one app. Many (most?) the app makers have
| noted the change is unsustainable for them.
|
| One way to look at it is that Apollo, the app you're
| referencing that was able to charge $10 a year, would have to
| charge 2.5 times as much just to cover the access fees, and
| not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit.
|
| The issue here is that the ARPU calculation and assumptions
| are wrong. Is reddit losing out on that _entirely_ if someone
| comes to them from a separate interface but still is served
| through them? Also, it 's just too optimistic. Reddit has
| revenue of less than a dollar per site user (or maybe
| slightly more than a dollar now?). Most references I'm seeing
| showed reddit with an ARPU of well under $1 in 2021, closer
| to half a dollar. Are we expected to believe there's been a
| 40x increase in a year, or that after all the years reddit
| has functioned they'll be able to achieve that in the near
| future?
| pests wrote:
| > and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for
| profit.
|
| Is it fair for a third party app to be profitable before
| the service itself is?
|
| Reddit has to cover the access fees, its own overhead, and
| try to make a profit itself too.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Yes, it is. Why wouldn't it be?
|
| Third party apps benefit the platform, especially in the
| early days. They result in more content from power users
| and easier moderation, so they contribute to revenue and
| aren't only a cost.
|
| They generally have extremely low overheads though, with
| nearly all being the work of just one or two developers.
| The profit they bring in is minuscule compared to what
| Reddit is looking to achieve. Apollo's profit from annual
| subscribers, once accounting for taxes and the App Store
| fee, appears to be just a couple hundred thousand dollars
| based on the numbers Selig has provided.
| shagie wrote:
| At "just a couple hundred thousand per year" and a
| $5/month subscription for "Apollo Ultra Monthly"... (
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-
| reddit/id979274575 ). Apple's cut of that is 30% for the
| first year and 15% for all following years.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a
| _ca...
|
| > Even if I only kept subscription users, the average
| Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost
| $2.50 per month, which is over double what the
| subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every
| month.
|
| That's half of what the subscription costs... though he
| could update the subscription.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252
|
| > Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the
| price of a subscription without interrupting service only
| under certain specific conditions. If the increase does
| not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the
| subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual
| subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may
| change the price without interrupting service. Developers
| may do this no more than once per year.
|
| > If the subscription price increase is above the
| thresholds, exceeds the annual limit, or occurs within
| territories where the law requires it, you must opt in
| before the price increase is applied. If you don't opt in
| to the new price, the subscription will not renew at the
| next billing period. You can subscribe again within the
| app or on the Manage Subscriptions page.
|
| He could have limited free use and turned off push
| notifications or drastically cut down on the polling rate
| ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apol
| lo_13... "The server polls Reddit approximately every 6
| seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or
| 600 requests per hour per user") and increased the price.
|
| The full passage is:
|
| > For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active
| users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6
| seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or
| 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have
| one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in
| the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server
| would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results,
| coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for
| nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with
| a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server
| costs.
|
| Note that the claim of the average user 344 requests per
| day and the polling rate of 600 requests per hour per
| user do not seem to be in agreement and may significantly
| contribute to the API pricing quote.
| jonchurch_ wrote:
| The price of Apollo according to their website [1] is
| $1.50/month subscription for their highest tier (Ultra),
| or a $5 one time payment for their secondary tier (Pro).
|
| [1] https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/
| shagie wrote:
| On https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-
| reddit/id979274575 In-App Purchases
| Apollo Ultra Monthly $ 4.99 Amazing Tip
| $10.00 Generous Tip $ 5.00 Nice
| Tip $ 0.99 Kind Tip $
| 3.00 Godzilla Tip $19.99
|
| They may have a separate subscription service that isn't
| using Apple's. Or it is possible that the page wasn't
| updated at some point. Those prices, however, are the
| prices and match the app.
| pests wrote:
| > average user 344 requests per day and the polling rate
| of 600 requests per hour do not seem to be in agreement
|
| I don't think the app is making those 600 requests 24/7.
| shagie wrote:
| The app isn't. The server doing push notifications on
| behalf of a user is.
| pests wrote:
| Eh, even if we can agree on it being fair I still don't
| see anything wrong with what Reddit is trying to do.
| While the profit might be minuscule compared to what
| Reddit is looking for, its still currently more than
| reddit is making.
|
| I don't think a person using a third party app
| necessarily implies they are a power user or better at
| moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even
| have a mobile app and the only options were third party
| apps.
|
| > They generally have extremely low overheads though,
| with nearly all being the work of just one or two
| developers
|
| Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low
| developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is
| subsidizing the majority of the value the third party
| apps are capturing.
|
| Its entirely within reason for Reddit to want to capture
| that value instead of giving it away to free to third
| party apps.
| stickfigure wrote:
| If reddit needs to capture every hundred-thousand dollar
| niche, there is no room for any ecosystem whatsoever.
| That's a choice they can make, but it might not go the
| way they want in the long run.
| _djo_ wrote:
| > Eh, even if we can agree on it being fair I still don't
| see anything wrong with what Reddit is trying to do.
| While the profit might be minuscule compared to what
| Reddit is looking for, its still currently more than
| reddit is making.
|
| Reddit has also expanded its staff count (and therefore
| costs) dramatically to chase new product areas and has
| seen big jumps in revenue. They've clearly been chasing
| growth in revenue and user numbers over profit. It
| doesn't meant they couldn't be profitable based on what
| they have.
|
| > I don't think a person using a third party app
| necessarily implies they are a power user or better at
| moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even
| have a mobile app and the only options were third party
| apps.
|
| Not every user of a third party app is a power user, but
| power users and mods are almost certainly using third
| party apps & tools. The shutdown statements made by so
| many sub moderators back that up.
|
| > Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low
| developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is
| subsidizing the majority of the value the third party
| apps are capturing.
|
| That doesn't make any sense. They're not replacing the
| platform, they're just an interface to it. The better
| point of comparison is to the official Reddit apps, which
| are much worse in almost every way than the third party
| equivalents despite being built by teams of engineers.
| They don't even have proper accessibility.
|
| > It's entirely within reason for Reddit to want to
| capture that value instead of giving it away to free to
| third party apps.
|
| Not if it results in a drop in engagement from power
| users and moderators, which would in turn result in less
| content, a worse experience for users, fewer users
| returning or joining up because of that, and thus less
| revenue over time.
| kbenson wrote:
| They're offering paid API access. Do you think they're
| only expecting non-profits to use it?
|
| If nobody can make your pricing work and offer a product,
| then you're losing out on that revenue. I'm not saying
| they should be allowing API access at a loss, but if
| they've priced every API user out of the market and they
| aren't pricing at cost or at their actual expected
| revenue per user internally then that means they're
| taking actions that are net negative with regard to
| profit.
|
| I, like many others, think that their pricing is nowhere
| near the actual per user expected revenue, so either
| they're doing something incredibly stupid and shutting
| out a source of profit, or the goal of this was never
| really to monetize the API, and instead to kill third
| party apps while attempting to give themselves some cover
| from the negative publicity of those actions by reframing
| it as asking for the third party apps pay for the cost of
| their previously free access.
|
| I think the latter is more likely, but you know what they
| say about attributing malice...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| >ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million.
|
| He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million.
| What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with
| the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year
| in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to
| offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with
| much less friction.
|
| The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipulative
| (unrealistically short period for apps to adapt, API prices
| far above what other services charge) indicates that the $20
| million number is a lie made to make themselves seem less
| scummy.
|
| As it stands, Reddit hasn't even tried even simpler solutions
| like returning ads in the API requests and requiring that the
| 3rd parties include those for free usage.
| antonjs wrote:
| I don't think he was even saying they were paying $20M in
| server costs. He was saying that if their claim that
| they're missing out on $20M in potential revenue from those
| users is correct, they should buy the app for $10M and make
| a 2x return on investment in one year.
| jupp0r wrote:
| It's not Reddit's content, it's the community's. It's
| literally users wanting to access their own stuff in a
| different way.
|
| If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that
| nothing is left of their business when those communities have
| moved elsewhere. To even create this war against your own
| users is complete folly.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| No it's their content. You gave it to them in exchange for
| a platform on which people can find out about it.
|
| You also get from it the good feeling when people 'upvote'
| your content. It's a pretty good deal in that you only pay
| for it by seeing some ads.
|
| You're free to setup your own blog and send emails to your
| friends about the links you like.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Their TOS literally says otherwise
| [deleted]
| saxonww wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. Reddit is not entitled
| to a user base. They have to provide a product users are
| interested in using. Right now, a lot of users are upset
| with Reddit and have decided to stop using it. It doesn't
| matter whether you agree with them or think they are
| being reasonable.
|
| We'll see who ultimately comes out ahead. I figure it
| will be Reddit, but that doesn't mean anything about this
| is difficult to understand. This is how being a consumer
| works when you're upset with a provider and can't vote
| with your wallet.
| 8note wrote:
| I granted a license to the content; I retain ownership
| jcims wrote:
| Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
| wpietri wrote:
| Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to
| the head of product as the defense against the dark arts
| teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear
| mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's
| successes came from watching what users were actually doing
| and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote
| tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on
| something irrelevant or actively contradictory to user needs.
| Or just flat out ignoring things users liked, as with them
| closing down Vine and letting TikTok come in to win as the
| short, fun video platform.
|
| But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure,
| Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly
| decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a
| McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of
| chaos. It would have been out of business long before,
| instead of merely shrinking significantly.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these
| network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit
| businesses. They're of great value to those who use them,
| and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good
| way to monetize them (nor does there need to be
| monetization), and trying to do so damages the
| functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would
| likely be better off (from the POV of the users and the
| network as a whole) as something more along the lines of
| non-profit foundations.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Meh, Twitter and Reddit monetize just fine with ads. The
| problem comes in with VC expectations where everything
| must 1000x or die. These are not bad businesses, they're
| just small compared to Facebook or Google. What's needed
| is mature leadership that recognizes the value comes from
| the community, and following the private equity playbook
| of strip-mining the value is short-sighted.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _problem comes in with VC expectations where everything
| must 1000x or die_
|
| Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism? Reddit is pining
| to go public and Twitter just LBO'd. Neither is having
| its chain yanked by venture capital.
| djbusby wrote:
| The chain is yanked whem you raise your first round. The
| yanking stops at Exit/IPO
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The yanking doesn't even stop then; it just changes who
| is pulling. Various institutional investors are all over
| Google to do better than it is. Google makes billions of
| dollars a year. More. More. More.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know how it is for everybody, but I'm
| reminded of the line, "A good horse runs even at the
| shadow of the whip." When I've been at places that have
| taken VC money, there's always a deep, pervasive
| awareness that the deal is "exit or bust", and that every
| investor call should include good news in up-and-to-the-
| right form. At least with us, they didn't have to do much
| explicit yanking of the chain. Probably for the same
| reason that Fat Tony doesn't often have to remind people
| that he expects to be paid on time.
| nathants wrote:
| the generation of companies that defeat these vc
| companies will bootstrap, and use things like remote and
| chatgpt to make it work.
| wpietri wrote:
| Reddit took $1.3 billion in investor money. What makes
| you say they're not having their chain yanked? Going
| public solves an investor problem, but I don't see it
| solving anything for Reddit's community.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Reddit took $1.3 billion in investor money. What makes
| you say they 're not having their chain yanked?_
|
| Took. Past tense. Limited need to take more. Look at
| Reddit's Board: it's ten people, only one of whom (Mike
| Seibel) is a VC.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Twitter's problems started with VC investment where they
| were always compared against Facebook. I don't think Wall
| Street is much better, but by the time they went public,
| valuation and growth trajectories were already
| established by the VC narrative.
| rjh29 wrote:
| According to the spez AMA, Reddit is not profitable.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Meh, Twitter [...] monetize[s] just fine with ads.
|
| Well, not anymore.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-
| sal...
| Prickle wrote:
| https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-
| earnings-q4/...
|
| Thing is, Twitter was profitable in 2019. Then the
| venture capitalists decided "Now is the time to increase
| your workforce by a factor of two. You need to start
| losing money again or you aren't trying hard enough!"
| chimeracoder wrote:
| You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. Twitter was
| profitable in 2018 and 2019. It then took a bath in 2020
| (like almost all advertising-based businesses), and then
| was projected to recover to profitability in 2022 before
| Musk announced the takeover, which threw everything into
| a tailspin.
| civilitty wrote:
| Is Facebook not a network effect business? It's not only
| wildly profitable but bigger than those two combined.
|
| Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can't
| figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Twitter and Reddit are messageboards. Like Hacker News.
| Every time they do something controversial, someone
| thinks Usenet needs to be reincarnated.
|
| Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.
|
| Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram.
| Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family.
| They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is
| personal to many people.
|
| I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Exactly. I'm headed back to wikipedia, where I found
| community as a teenager. I think you can draw a direct
| line from wikimedia's nonprofit status to 22 years of
| greatness and steady improvement.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| There is definitely interests that have captured
| Wikipedia. It takes the form of editors that have slowly
| built up a lot of credibility and power that then use it
| years later in some manner that does not agree with the
| neutral nature of the site.
|
| The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned
| into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the
| craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left
| also got attacked and censored.
|
| In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle
| Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent
| attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic
| party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia
| calling for the deletion of his page.
|
| After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor,
| it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.
|
| [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_
| deletio...
|
| Watching this whole experience play out in real time was
| utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since
| become captured.
|
| Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing
| in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia
| whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership
| did not clamp down on this behavior when it was
| happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks
| from the far right and eventually people with a lot of
| exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he
| hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half
| the country not trusting the site at all and their minds
| being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.
|
| Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later
| after the election was over but the lasting damage has
| been done. I presume that in the next election it will be
| targeted again.
|
| We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit
| during election season and you can be sure that Musk is
| whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are
| probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I
| thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place
| of refuge. I guess not.
| TylerE wrote:
| Eh, the Foundation has a lot of bloat and solicits
| donations far above actual operating costs.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Sure, they're far from perfect. I don't mind if build a
| nice big contingency fund or even become personally
| wealthy -- but I think it makes a difference that greed
| isn't the central organizing principle.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Its closer to its a scam than its far from perfect
| pneumonic wrote:
| True, but luckily they don't intrude on the community or
| impact the Wikipedia site too much beyond their ever more
| frequent "We desperately need donations" campaigns. As
| the Foundation has gotten richer, its desire for more
| milk from its Wikipedia cash cow has only grown.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Which makes sense in case of a nonprofit that relies on
| donations and can't predict whether the next year will be
| a hard one for people, making their sole income drop.
| TX81Z wrote:
| A friend there once told me the exec-level staff
| basically just does what the users want and they lack any
| real "authority" over the site.
|
| However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas
| for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any
| changes.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I think the pace of change has been just right, though.
| They added a graphical editor and modernifed the
| interface styling. Both of those changes happened about 5
| years later than I would have expected, but you can tell
| they were carried out with extreme care not to piss off
| any users. We end up with an experience that pleases
| everyone.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, the way I think of it, the modern dogmas of
| Increase Shareholder Value and The CEO is Always Right
| might work for some businesses, but fall down badly when
| applied to user-generated content. They treat broader
| stakeholders as both morally and economically irrelevant.
| We can argue about the "moral" part, but with Reddit it's
| especially obvious that the users are the heart of the
| operation, making them economically crucial.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Non-profits still need enough revenue to meet expenses.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| myspace managed to be killed
| ericd wrote:
| Seems like most companies could use a Defense Against the
| Dark Patterns teacher :-)
| midasuni wrote:
| The ones that are always evil or at best doomed to fail
| tomcam wrote:
| How is Twitter rapidly decaying? I am a daily, but very
| light user so I may not be observing the trends as well as
| you.
| asveikau wrote:
| I don't know if this is true, but I heard that recently,
| searching Twitter for "cats" led you to videos of cats
| being mutilated. The story continued that Elon had fired
| the entire team devoted to preventing such outcomes.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-
| autocomplete...
|
| Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter,
| 10, searching for cat videos.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Yes, it's accurate. I tested it and was shown that video.
|
| There have been other examples beyond that cat video too,
| that just got a lot of attention.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter,
| 10, searching for cat videos
|
| I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Or for cat mutilation. Until now.
|
| I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat
| videos.
| machdiamonds wrote:
| As a user, I think Twitter is better now, notably with
| the Community Notes feature that even Zuckerberg
| commended on Lex's podcast - I hope he introduces a
| similar concept. The option to post extended threads is
| appreciated. I hardly come across political content as I
| avoid engagement with it, and I find it beneficial that
| creating an account is no longer necessary for viewing
| Tweets and responses.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| If I understand correctly this was a feature already
| nearly completed as Twitter was being acquired and Elon
| just rolled it out and took credit.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| The company lost half of its value in six months,
| according to Elon Musk himself [1].
|
| Anecdotally, due to Musk's support of extreme-right views
| (for example re-inviting Trump [2], supporting DeSantis
| [3], or protecting bullying [4]), many people have left
| in protest and so these views are over-represented on the
| site.
|
| The word "decay" seems appropriate.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-
| musk-twit... [2]
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-
| trump-r... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-
| musk-ron-desantis-... [4]
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-
| twitte...
| wpietri wrote:
| Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically,
| outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have
| departed, and the value of the company has fallen by
| something between half and two thirds. One of its core
| assets, the blue checkmark for verified notable accounts,
| has been permanently destroyed. I no longer use it, but
| word from my friends who still do is that is has become
| grimmer, less fun. Musk has stopped releasing statistics,
| but I expect that new users signups and net promoter
| scores are well down as well.
|
| Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud
| with Google means they may soon lose significant trust
| and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella
| Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running
| skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the
| current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by
| visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more
| messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.
|
| And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to
| read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it;
| he's been covering it pretty well.
| nomdep wrote:
| > I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it
|
| That explains why the rest of your comment doesn't make
| sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist.
| He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor
| problem he can find in tech companies.
| kaba0 wrote:
| So what isn't true of the listed problems? One might
| argue that some of those are not big problems, but
| advertisers pulling out is an absolutely major problem.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I don't notice any of the things you mentioned. As a
| user, I haven't felt much difference before and after
| Musk's takeover. If anything, I think Twitter is a little
| bit better and more vibrant now, because the censorship
| is not like before.
|
| Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative,
| but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >If anything, I think Twitter is a little bit better and
| more vibrant now, because the censorship is not like
| before.
|
| Sure, if you like cat mutilation and transphobia and
| white supremacist propoganda. But you be you.
| larksimian wrote:
| You follow some weird accounts if that's what you see in
| your feed.
| tomrod wrote:
| Your comments reminds me of the metaphor of boiling a
| frog.
|
| Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the
| revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs,
| are still around (despite being compositionally a
| different population, mostly).
| Lapsa wrote:
| [flagged]
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users
| were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions,
| retweets, _quote tweets_ ).
|
| Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each
| other you shouldn't support that.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Wait a second, I could be totally wrong on this but I
| thought Twitter nearing bankruptcy was the real reason they
| sunset Vine?
| nyreed wrote:
| In Vine we trust.
| [deleted]
| TX81Z wrote:
| Vine shutting down may be one of the top ten stupid
| decisions in business history.
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| >But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's
| franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos.
|
| I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind
| of resembles--Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter
| itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.
|
| The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey
| company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every
| last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a
| long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is
| a solid case study from recent times.
|
| https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-
| business-f...
|
| Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the
| deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun
| lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's
| obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.
| smeagull wrote:
| They lasted long enough for there to be no real competitors.
| jachee wrote:
| It's popular despite itself... but It's _not_ successful.
|
| One of the things Spez is whining about is that they're not
| profitable.
| dijit wrote:
| Spez also presided over the headcount ballooning ten-fold.
|
| He's chasing new markets, not doubling down on current
| ones. to the detriment of everyone including his companies
| profitability.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it.
|
| And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I
| care about it being sustainable.
|
| A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking
| even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very
| large return on their very large investment. And they are
| perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that
| means they are getting a chance at something larger and
| much more profitable.
|
| Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth
| of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of
| Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-
| community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction
| of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Making a profit is how it becomes sustainable.
| rafark wrote:
| Of course you as a user don't care that is profitable. I
| mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not picking sides, but if
| you were the ceo/owner, you'd probably care about its
| profitability. If you were the owner of such a big site,
| wouldn't you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very
| comfortable- early retirement?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn't you
| be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable-
| early retirement?
|
| As a small business owner myself, I can very much assure
| you that we're not thinking of that at all; we're
| thinking of ways to _get back into the black!_
|
| Once we're in the black, we'll start thinking of ways to
| get an early retirement.
| giantrobot wrote:
| They decided to chase TikTok and host a shitload of video
| content. Video storage and delivery is _way_ more expensive
| than text-only or even text and images.
|
| Congratulations Reddit! You pulled in users with no good
| way to cover the costs of those users.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Wikipedia manages to be extremely profitable, maybe reddit
| execs just suck at their job and should be fired...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg described Twitter as "A clown car that fell
| into a gold mine."
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| Now let us remember how Zuckerberg descibed his first batch
| of users...
| accoil wrote:
| Right on both accounts?
| HKH2 wrote:
| Reddit is not going to change. It seems quite a few people
| don't mind being abused a bit to get the convenience they
| want. Nothing's going to happen.
| uw_rob wrote:
| I am not so sure that I agree here. What's interesting
| about reddit is that it is one site with very different
| UIs. The official reddit app has a focus on video/images
| and looks to be in competition with TikTok. old.reddit.com
| and Apollo are very much text centric apps. From my
| understand, reddit has a traffic breakdown of 50/50 on the
| text centric vs. visual centric UIs. With the UIs like
| Apollo being killed, and old.reddit.com eventually going
| away as well[0], I think users will genuinely leave as they
| have killed the text based UIs.
|
| [0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I have a theory, after working for one of the UK's largest
| social networks, that no-one who runs a social network
| understands what made it work or why it continues to work.
|
| Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in
| case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don't
| understand it, any large changes they do make are generally
| negative (new twitter, Reddit).
|
| Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any
| changes at all because the site doesn't belong to management,
| it belongs to them. It's their space. Changing anything is
| like someone's snuck into their house at night and remodelled
| their lounge.
|
| It'll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit's Digg
| moment or it's more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone
| kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
| AmericanOP wrote:
| They wasted half a decade not building promised moderation
| tools for the people who create value on Reddit.
|
| Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how
| aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned
| mobile app should be.
| wpietri wrote:
| I still feel bad for whatever web developer had to check
| in the "this page looks better in the app" banner.
| Lapsa wrote:
| great levels of empathy. and I'm not sarcastic
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Pull request description: "Does it really, though?"
| guyomes wrote:
| > It's their space. Changing anything is like someone's
| snuck into their house at night and remodelled their
| lounge.
|
| This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary
| of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who
| view themselves as painter artists. He explained the
| fundamental difference between his work and the work of a
| painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for
| people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for
| people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art
| from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive
| landscape.
|
| A stable environment can also allow people to build other
| art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a
| sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It'll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit's Digg
| moment or it's more like the Facebook newsfeed where
| everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as
| before.
|
| In order for this to be Reddit's "Digg moment", there needs
| to be a viable candidate to switch _to_.
|
| There isn't, as far as I can tell.
| nologic01 wrote:
| What are the alternatives exactly?
|
| Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily
| migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are
| stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network
| lock-in.
|
| The social media as a prison operating model.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I'm apparently in limbo waiting for beehaw to figure out
| I'm not Hitler.
| [deleted]
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Reddit is proof of Internet Rule No.51 "the better the
| content, the worse the User Interface"
| memefrog wrote:
| It's the other way round from a cause & effect perspective:
| the worse the user interface, the more off-putting it is to
| the casual users that create and promote low-quality
| content.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating
| and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those
| people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
|
| You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say
| mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit
| _but not the admins or platform itself_ seems untenable.
|
| Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a
| substantial decline in community quality via its impact on
| moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that
| there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and
| community quality, similar to how most people would be
| skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic
| relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For
| example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the
| past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed
| back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for
| the site as a whole.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head,
| bub.
|
| The average bit of user-generated content is of very low
| quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform,
| this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the
| good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to
| vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful
| and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of
| that is labor I value.
|
| The platform deserves _some_ credit. But as all the
| developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the
| strength of its software. Reddit doesn 't have a technology
| moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent
| it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be
| replicated, it has been many times.
|
| So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-
| corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills
| and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is
| trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having
| it.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head,
| bub.
|
| I mean, if you're going to Reddit to marvel at the sidebar
| rules or CSS stylings, then I guess you're going there for
| the mods qua mods. But I would assume that this represents
| a relatively rare user psychographic. Beyond this, my point
| is that it's unfair to give the mods credit for indirectly
| cultivating communities but refuse to extend this same
| consideration to the admins or platform.
|
| >The average bit of user-generated content is of very low
| quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform,
| this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter
| the good stuff to the top.
|
| Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation
| tools that are being impacted by the API changes were
| created. Treating this protest as being about the basic
| question of whether Reddit should have moderation or not is
| disingenuous.
|
| >But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and
| Reddit-the-community is not having it.
|
| Well, the powermods aren't having it. We'll see what
| "Reddit-the-community" thinks when the dust settles. A
| bunch of activists can't claim to speak for it, though
| obviously they'd like to pretend that they can.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Mods don't just edit the css, they moderate. You can
| clearly see the difference a good mod team does. After
| the reddit blackout is over, check out the difference
| between /gaming and /AskHistorians. AskHistorian threads
| are often 90% deleted comments because people try
| commenting without posting any sources.
|
| For smaller communities mods keep away trolls and
| spambots. They enforce custom rules that sub will have.
|
| > Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the
| moderation tools that are being impacted by the API
| changes were created
|
| Are you forgetting about Reddit Enhancement Suite? There
| is no mod that just uses the built-in reddit moderation.
| There hasn't been since the days when Reddit was a
| website only known to tech related college students.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| If you're claiming that the main things Reddit mods do is
| a bit of rule text and some CSS, then I don't think you
| know enough about the topic to be worth further
| discussion.
| mbrameld wrote:
| Tell me you've never moderated a sizeable online community
| without telling me you've never moderated a sizeable online
| community.
| yanderekko wrote:
| I haven't. So what? Is there anything I'm wrong about in a
| way that you could provide meaningful evidence on? Surely
| you aren't arguing that only moderators are qualified to
| weigh in on the social value of moderators - this sort of
| logic wouldn't pass the laugh test if we were talking about
| police, or soliders, or middle managers, or low-level
| government bureaucrats. This whole "thin blue line"-style
| thinking that moderators are flirting with here is...
| cringey.
| [deleted]
| arnorhs wrote:
| Fair enough. Usually this is the stance I would take in these
| sorts of discussions, since usually power users misunderstand
| how much they represent the majority of users.
|
| But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of
| active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined
| to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the
| passive way it is used.
|
| I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go
| back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit
| will have shrunk by that time
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| [flagged]
| rc_mob wrote:
| why are you namecalling?
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| I usually prefer to be polite but I just had a moment of
| remembering all of the times that I got censored on Reddit
| even when I was polite, but had an unpopular opinion.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The joke definition of Web 2.0: You make the content, we make
| the money.
|
| Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content
| consumers.
| WellThenGood wrote:
| Uh doesn't Reddit owe its community 10% per sama's Series B
| article https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit ? "So, the Series B
| Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the
| people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase
| community ownership over time." Whatever happened to this?
| Will we end up getting it before or after sama gives us UBI,
| open AI, and fusion completely altruistically?
| samtho wrote:
| Why haven't we heard about this more widely?
| MrPatan wrote:
| [flagged]
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