1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
Then we can just let all these services die every few years.
99% of users rely on that labor. And it isn't a given some other forums will rise to the same level.
This dumb trope of "economics will ensure an equivalent product will appear" is a laissez faire fantasy.
Lot of people have complained that Google search is worse today without Reddit. If Reddit management kills the communities which produce the text posts it could have a real negative impact on Google.
Meanwhile Google's text and video ad network could probably monetize Reddit way better than Reddit can.
What if that number was 100%? What if all decent GPS programs only worked on iOS? Could we simply stop using iPhones? At that point it might be too late to protest. Imo, the time to protest is before a company has this reach.
Maybe Reddit isn't that big of a deal. They don't own 100% of all Internet discourse. But I think Reddit matters a good deal, since C++ language evolution is influenced significantly by Reddit conversations (yes, actually). But either way, the argument that Reddit should have total leeway doesn't generalize.
Personally I’ve always thought anybody who would do the amount of free labor Reddit mods do is a stone cold fool - precisely because it is so time consuming and the monetary value is all captured by EvilCorp.
I’m sure it will be similar for Reddit - no clear “winner” at first, but the start of a gradual and irreversible decline for the incumbent.
If Spez doesn't blink, the investors will make him.
I don't think he's' going to win this one without making concession.
When those users voice opinions on other things, it's called content. When those users voice their opinions against reddit, it's noise.
Hoffman continues to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit is.
The very people that give your platform its value are revolting against you, and you think it's noise.
What's your product? What do you create? In what way will Reddit thrive only with what you put into it? Where do you think the content you lace your ads between comes from?
But there was reddit.com for people to migrate to.
Let's see the 99% figure out the fediverse.
There's no reason something like Reddit needs to be privately owned, or commercial at all.
Will a chunk of users stay off the site permanently? Maybe. Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.
Sooooo why would I care that a small number of Reddit users are complaining?
But even so, if they had just said that, the outcome would be so much different. Because as of now it seems like they're fucking people over for the sake of fucking them over.
Overreaction much ? Are we really become that desensitized as a society? I find that hard to believe.
Providing an API for free for 15 years. Yeah, total bait and switch.
The fundamental problem is that reddit's primary strength, it's biggest point of value, is antithetical to the type of monetization that Google would implement.
That is actually really true.
Also reddit is a great (if not the actual best existing right now?) source for training AI models.
I find a CEO referring to their employees as 'Snoos' to be offputting personally.
I'm sure it's meant to be a fun and inclusive term but the guy is sending out a pretty serious email that ends in, "I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations."
The tone strikes me as weird for this message and I feel like the term 'Snoo' is infantizing at best?
Maybe I'm alone, it just feels super weird to hear that coming from someone with the title of CEO at a company of more than 100 people
I think the Fediverse will slowly pick up steam, and perhaps rival reddit in 5 or 10 years. Which is fine. One long-term advantage of the Fediverse is that it's more immune to corporate shenanigans. And ultimately, for all of us, this is a long game.
Casual participation doesn't get the job done.
The idea that reddit would benefit without these users is just a complete misunderstanding of what reddit is and what creates reddit's value.
To me Reddit is a website, people keep referring to it as an app, but I have never used an app for it. It works best in the browser.
It's like if McDonalds instead of just opening more stores decided that it can make even more money if it turned into a bar and grill because steaks have higher margins.
Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.
They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.
To my understanding, it would be distributed and virtually independnet from central provider. It would be nice to have something like that for "communities" (slightly different from microblogging or chat/discord)... lemmy seems nice but it's somewhat akin to mastodon where each server is kinda isolated and while you can now federate, searching for communities across the fediverse is not the best experience yet...
In my own personal opinionated mental wargaming, with which you are all welcome to disagree, Reddit is literally just a few dozen hours from making that outcome very likely, and the clock is steadily ticking. Wargame out their options if their communities don't budge and the stalemate extends past this week. If Reddit will not back down, they have basically only one other option, which is to lever away the moderator positions for all the private reddits and replace them. If they do, that may superficially work for a while (though IMHO even that is not guaranteed) but the end result would still be the fastest and hardest case of social media evaporative cooling history has ever seen: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...
Moreover, while the technical task of levering away the subreddit moderators is a single SQL query away (more or less), the job of resuscitating those communities is not. Even if we assume that all the non-moderators on reddit just shrug and get back to redditing, Reddit can't possibly find enough moderators of any kind to moderate that amount of content. At this point the wargame branches out into several options Reddit can take to try to solve this with their current personpower, but none of the ones I can come up with will actually, you know, work. (Closest is to try to query the DB for most active users and make them the new moderators, but merely "most active" is actually not a great criterion, and it will correlate closely with "people who got angry and left" so there is a LOOOOOOOT of manual labor in that process. You can just run the SQL query and surprise announce the new moderators but that really won't work either.) As many have pointed out, moderators are providing an awful lot of free labor. Reddit can easily throw that free labor away but they can not just trivially reconstruct it if they do.
As a moderator myself, I have my reasons for doing what I do, in the amount that I do, for free, and I am satisfied with the arrangement. However, if they do lever me off, I will not be lifting a finger for them. I actually won't be all that perturbed about it either... "oh, no, I can't provide free services to your company anymore gosh geewillikers whatever will I do", I know exactly what I will do, which is move on. I've been on the internet for over 25 years. Moving on is part of the deal. Someday I'm sure I'll move on from HN.
I guess it remains to be seen if that is true, but unlike Twitter and Mastodon, where I didn't think Mastodon was a good alternative, I actually could see https://kbin.social being a good alternative for reddit.
The longer this protest goes on the more the alternatives will grow and be viable. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Happened with the feed of Facebook. originally was a true social network where you scrolled through what your family and friends posted. Now it is a algorithm designed to maximize attention and sell influence,
Happened with YouTube. Used to be really pro independent user … now the search functionality is barebones giving you maybe one or two results… the rest promoted content.
TikTok just straight up controls what you consume from the get go
Reddit wants to join in the same model. Heavily corporate moderated content masquerading as “use content.
Sadly I am not too hopeful for a new platform. Any true open forum upvote downvote platform will be torpedoed before it can get going …
To be completely honest, if a two-day blackout is proven to be the most serious "protest" the community can do, I'll buy Reddit stock when it IPO.
Apollo was by far the best reddit browsing experience on mobile and it seems like the API price was a direct action to shut these third party experiences down knowing their experience was sub par.
Are you using old.reddit.com by chance? If so I have a sneaking suspicious that's going to go away in due time.
Since "redditor" is a community name, it makes sense there would be a different internal/employee demonym and Snoo fits the site as good as any other name might.
But not only mods are going to be affected. If you are going to build a bot on Reddit you have now to think twice with the increase pricing cost
I bet most views at this point are just the generic popular view, not driven by a subscription to a sub.
I thought, ah, surely this error will be cleared up upon appeal. I submitted my appeal, and nope, ban remains. It was actually kind of upsetting (I guess due to the seeming arbitrariness? certainly no content of any value was lost), but it was good to have that nice, clean break.
Anyway, I mention any of this not because I care about getting that account back, but because it occurred to me that I’d really like to get back on that account and delete all my messages, but with the way their ban seems to work, I don’t think I can do that.
And while I’m sure their 2023 TOS makes it purely my problem if I got myself banned and thus lost any ability to control the content I contributed, I do wonder if their TOS was as robust (it was a pretty, pretty informal place when I started posting, and rights to contributed content can be pretty nuanced based on how the license/TOS is worded), or how their stance interacts with any of the privacy laws passed in the last 10-12 years.
Oh well. This is why my default rule is “never post” (as I elect to override that default at this very moment).
The work those few do help people like you in ways you might not completely fathom. Reddit doesn't auto-regulate itself as much as we think. It's hard work but a small percentage of people who are paid nothing, and use 3rd-party tools to work best.
Just went in the UBlock Origin settings... and yep, there are 14 potential "annoyance" filters. Just turned them on an applied them. Lets see how it goes...
but that's the issue - Reddit's been focusing on other forms of content only in the native Reddit app, like TikTok-esque live streams and promoted posts from subs you aren't subscribed to.
The protest could end today, the 3rd party apps go...and if the volunteer mods go with it, then the site as a whole tumbles onto a decline that eventually kills it.
Even on desktop, a lot users and mods use Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) [0] because the "default" Reddit is crap too, lol. I'm sure other HN users would also be using the "old" version of reddit, old.reddit.com [1] since it still performs better somehow. RES has also mentioned that it should continue working fine, but they're not entirely sure about it either. [2]
[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/141hyv3/a...
I think the biggest impact, though, is some moderators rely on tools/clients to make their (voluntary) jobs easier. If those tools disappear, then a lot of these subreddits will probably shut down for lack of moderators. And I heard that /r/blind mods literally cannot use the existing Reddit site/apps.
For sure.
Knowing there’s a backlash against the backlash, I wonder if Reddit triples down and forcibly flips back to public all the top subreddits that went private.
There’s the problem of real quick finding new mods for like 8,000 subreddits. I’m sure the tail is long, but they’d probably start with the biggest and work their way down.
Ultimately all the data and code lives on Reddit servers. They can do whatever they want. The way they’ve acted so far I don’t see them backing down.
I've gone back to reddit during the dark period and there is still plenty of new tidbits to read. I barely noticed anything unless I specifically went to a community that went dark.
All in all I'd say it was very ineffectual on the face of it. But these things tend to snowball so I'll keep watching this space.
Reddit made themselves a real mess here and it's all SO stupid.
It's best at a desktop with old.reddit and res, but the better apps are a close second.
Well, maybe not so surprising with their product team.
If it's just the nerd audience I'll bet Reddit win without thinking. But it's more than that: they're ditching some mods who rely on 3rd party apps, and some users who stay on Reddit for NSFW content.
So yeah, I still think Reddit will be fine, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
I used it last month when Reddit randomly ruined my 13-year-old account and everything I ever posted, so this recent set of blackouts just feels like icing on the cake. (In short: Some Kafkaesque process flagged my account as spam, I appealed, got an automated "it was a mistake, fixed" message, but it wasn't fixed at all, and now I can't contact anyone because the system falsely thinks my account is in already back to working-order.)
It does mean you need to cut-n-paste the Reddit url there, but it's been working for the content I needed to look into yesterday.
Works just fine for who, though? Not for non-technical people.
The FOSS community, especially the Fediverse community continually disappoint me by being so dismissive of, or even hostile to design critique. Nearly universally, trying to engage a project community in rethinking an interface is received like unsolicited criticism of someone's physique. Even as a software developer who's put many thousands of hours into FOSS development, AND a professional designer, And making it clear I'd be willing to research, design, test, and implement myself, the results are usually just as discouraging. I've stopped trying.
Without significant designer input, FOSS social media initiatives will always be two steps ahead technically but 10 steps behind in UX. After the November bump, Mastodon had lost the majority of the active users it had gained by February. I think that if something even comes close to a commercial social media UX, they stand a chance at being a real turning point the world's conception of how social media 'works.'
It's win-win for everyone for the most part.
The other bans were my fault (as in, I knew it was likely at that point) but I was apathetic at that point. Still, I appealed because they were silly bans, and my account was reinstated each time.
You’d be surprised how big players work around those.
I asked GitHub to remove an issue from a repo whose owner blocked me. Being both I and the owner EU users, I sent a GDPR removal request. They just said they’re a “controller” and that the request would be forwarded to the owner.
Nothing came of it.
GitHub even has customer support, Reddit does not, so you can imagine how little chances you have in doing so unless you fire up your lawyers.
The whole letter seems incredibly tone-deaf. calling the protests "noise" is incredibly dismissive of their user base and their concerns. The whole section about not wearing reddit gear outside is an obviously farcical attempt to paint people who oppose this change as violent when they are more likely to be people who never go outside, let alone people who are prowling around with weapons looking for vengeance for API changes.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
I would not be surprised if there are people on reddit who are thinking of closing down the garden and removing reddit from the open web.
Just cap all existing API keys to roughly the number of users they currently have.
Everyone who is currently using RIF or Apollo or $whatever can continue to use it. They can't add any new users.
Super simple, nobody is losing anything, nobody is having anything taken away. All new users would be fed into the app. Eventually the 3rd party apps would have died off. It would have been a slow, painful and QUIET death.
Either way: yes, annoyances++. It helps a lot.
Who knows. I still kinda think it must have just been a mistake, or maybe something I said was taken extremely, extremely out of context (and if I lack the imagination to see how, well, shame on me). I mostly just find it humorous because this is the only ban I can remember getting in almost three decades online.
Reddit itself isn't a terribly complex site to implement as is shown with the relatively small staff they have for a very large user base. Until relatively recently you could download the source code from Github and spin up an instance yourself. The actual "work" is being done by the unpaid moderators and contributors.
I am genuinely curious how this is going to work going forward.
there clearly is a gulf between people who actively wish to make it so and those who consume the byproduct of their effort.
For me the blackout was effective. I'm done with reddit. Fuck em
I feel Reddit could have easily come up with a model where the API usage gets tied to premium account and that decouples apps from API charges.
Reddit has now created a new problem for itself which is that a huge user base that previously didn't bother to look at third-party apps has suddenly become aware of third-party apps. So now, they will start bypassing Reddit's official apps that generate revenue for Reddit in favor of third-party apps that seemingly have a better UX and are ad-free.
The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.
But that's probably fine with them. Reddit seems to have taken that the position that users are fungible, which (particularly when they depend on volunteer moderators) seems somewhat dubious to me.
... what? Reddit is absolutely not the only place to discuss an NBA game.
Because much as some folks here seem to believe, there IS actually more to reddit, reddit as it exists today, than just ad impression counts. I'm not some social media genius but the way that this being talked about by some people, who I guess haven't been a part of reddit over 17+ years, I am flabbergasted at how y'all think these things grow and thrive.
What's the market value of 9gag? iFunny?
Digg?
I say this in jest, but only partially... lots of subreddits have noticed influexes of AI bots recently. Maybe spammers testing the water, or maybe you were just the product that was just helping train its replacement.
This line of reasoning goes nowhere.
> then its niche and generalist subreddits alike will lose their culture and quality faster than one can blink an eye
reddit chaotically overriding subreddit moderation decisions has had that effect for a while.
Also, let's not keep conveniently leaving out that a growing number of subs are pledging to continue the protest.
Your post cites no specific reasons why Kbin is worse than Reddit from a UX perspective. Have you even tried it?
Unfortunately dead on...
It would take a lot more than 2 days to see a response, and even then there was enough subreddits still active that /r/all honestly looked about the same.
But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on, and a sufficiently expensive API at least forces them to do engineering work to get all the data. So at the time I believed Reddit's reasoning.
They are great fun with cat pictures and other stupid content. And you'll have the occasional laser-focused sub-reddit (that will be a loss).
But the vast vast vast majority? Utter stupidity.
Split old.reddit off into an "old school" version that has 3rd party apps, but needs a subscription to access. Then keep new reddit as their tiktok Instagram clone.
Because they want the freedom to add more of the features you suggested. To join the existing classics like Chat, For You Feed and the Redesign all of which are insipid and poorly implemented.
Even the new Discover tab isn't even personalised despite recommendation algorithms being so basic to implement these days.
It does look like more of a hybrid between Twitter and Reddit with the threaded conversations and nerd-friendly API layer i.e. ActivityPub.
I, for one, am shocked and surprised.
I'm not a big fan of boycotts generally. Most of the time they're performative. But this one seems to have teeth. I hope this goes on indefinitely rather than than having an end date that the owners can simply wait out.
Reddit should not be an expensive site to maintain. It's text and some CDN media, basically. There's no reason it can't run profitably but the owners simply want to extract as much value in the short term to increase the IPO price. Short-term profits.
The race will be between Reddit admins recognizing the degradation of the user experience and the outflow of users who don't want to visit their favorite subreddit because they keep seeing decapitated heads and underage pornography and every conversation is off topic.
> the number of Reddits that have gone dark expanded from around 7,000 to more than 8,400
Annoyingly, there's no context for these numbers. Is this 10% of all subreddits? 90%? Does it cover half of all users? They're meaningless numbers that "sound big."
/r/nbacirclejerk, /r/basketball, /r/cfb, /r/heat and /r/denvernuggets hosted the game threads for last night game.
Honestly really digged the experience on the /r/nbacirclejerk game thread.
No, you and others' wishful thinking lead you to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit and Hoffman are. This is just the standard "how to run a business" MBA crap at play. The website you think Reddit is doesn't exist; and that doesn't even matter, as for them it's just another black box that makes money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758616/reddit-app-survi...
Why open again on Wednesday?
Is there a market out there where I can bet all my money against this claim? The idea that this will lead to a spam wave destroying Reddit is wishful thinking on the part of aggrieved moderators who see themselves as forming a Thin Blue Line against a tide of chaos.
8k is very significant
How much are you willing to pay?
Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?
The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech.
* Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm sure people recognize that pattern.
* Applied to CEO roles, it means publicly demonstrating contempt toward groups of people who are (individually) weaker than you, including employees, customers, protestors, etc. And it means disregard for consequences, such as Musk's actions when bidding $40 billion for Twitter, and afterward; or much of what has happened in crypto. It demonstrates your power, demonstrates their powerlessness (if they capitulate), and makes you look like you have extreme confidence and little empathy - which is very trendy now, of course. Disregard for consequences works until they occur. It's basic con-person tactics, the most obvious bad sales techniques.
* When challenged, act more aggressively or with more contempt. Double down.
* Play the victim and characterize those who oppose you as violent threats - which again shows disinterest and contempt for them and their arguments. One remarkable place you can see it is some US Supreme Court justices - it's such a powerful trend in 'leadership' that these people with untouchable lifetime positions even do it. (In case you missed it, Reddit's CEO used this technique.)
These 'leaders' protray themselves as brilliant, innovative, and highly capable, and people assume they must be - after all, they run these big companies. They are just corrupt and swept up in the latest fashion. Power corrupts, no surprise.
The sad part is that I see many on the other side of these issues actually believe this crap - they believe they are powerless and unilaterally disarm, as if the leaders are using the Force when they say, 'you have no power' - 'Oh, I guess I have no power' and they despair. (And then they tell everyone else the same.)
At the cost of a little faith in demoracy (write large - the power of individuals working together), they hold all the power. Our ancestors who in the same way built much of the freedom and society we have now, must be amazed. We just give it all away. The worst of our society haven't given it away - look at Bud Light. Reddit should be toast, or at least the CEO. People just wake up and act.
Reddit has grown and has thrived, now the company is prioritising turning on the money tap. They’re prepared to lose X users if it means they can monetise the remaining users by Y amount.
I’m not saying this as a defence, I’ve also been using Reddit for 15+ years and I’m disappointed by what I see. I’m just clear eyed about the game plan.
Fun stuff I had to deal with include: The admin's "Anti-Evil Operations" frequently deleting user comments with no explanation. A persistent pedophile who just wouldn't go away. Getting guilt tripped by a severely mentally ill guy whenever we had to ban him (and his many alts) for breaking the rules. Doxx. Gore. Brigading. White supremacists. Racists with their "racial crime statistics". An impossible to moderate Reddit Chat (there were no chat moderation logs at all). And much more.
I completely checked out of moderation when I remembered that I wasn't getting paid to deal with any of the above. And since then, I've had much more appreciation for all the moderators who were willing to put in time and effort into maintaining a community for free.
they're already struggling with worse service on the way.
at least Google and meta have world-class programmers. what's reddit's moat?
> [The judge overseeing the case has permitted the plaintiffs to remain anonymous in court filings because of credible threats of violence [PDF] directed at their attorney. The Register understands that the plaintiffs are known to the defendants.]
> https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
As for why he couldn't simply shift those users to monthly, it's due to the notice being a month. If Reddit had given a 6-month warning, that would've given everyone time to content with the issue and update their own apps (billing system changes are hard).
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
"Why not just increase the price of Apollo?" on https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
Having given up moderation ages ago, I have no dog in this fight. I'm sitting on the sidelines watching the drama with a bowl of popcorn, just like everyone else.
Maybe it can happen now among the apps that have put their foot down about a complete end, but certainly loses a lot of momentum from those who might have already uninstalled them.
Reddit has always tried to thread the needle of having 4chan-like freedom without 4chan-like anarchy. That’s the secret to its success.
The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page.
Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.
Apollo also does polling of the message box for each user for push notifications ( https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/main/i... ) which currently has a rate of 1/minute/user. This is another 1.4k calls per day and changes the price that would be paid.
Current rate: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
March 16th rate update (6 r/m to 1r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/74a8...
Nov 22nd rate update (12 r/m to 6 r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/7582...
I was trying to find video essays on Cyberpunk, the worthless search kept giving videos of the stupid Cyberpunk 2077 video game. I had to use Google search to find what I needed.
Also YouTube search likes recommend me unrelated stuff too nowadays. For heaven sakes, can we have a search that just do its damn job.
There is a sentiment of, 'Whelp, was fun while it lasted. Remember, digg, haha. See on the next go around.'
I have no idea what subreddits are using these days, but I'm familiar with spambot, that compared any submitted image against blacklists. For anyone managing a NSFW subreddit, such a tool is an absolute necessity to avoid getting sent to the penalty box by Reddit admins.
https://github.com/4pr0n/spambot
I don't know what's being used now, but when I was familiar with it, spambot was monitoring dozens of NSFW subreddits that had tens of thousands of subscribers. This is only one of thousands of such customized moderation bots that use the free API.
It's a slow process, but an inevitable one. Twitter has demonstrated this, where it isn't this instant switch, but a slow burn. We're only now getting Meta's take on such a replacement for example. Same will happen with Reddit now people are aware how fragile it really is. I just don't see direct replacements happening this year.
Anecdotally I do see far more aggressive displacement on Reddit than I did with Twitter however, perhaps due to how impersonal Reddit is where most feel they can abandon it much easier than a Twitter account with many professional colleagues attached.
Digg decided that taking user submissions didn't make them enough money so they changed the model to letting sites pay to submit links. Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section.
This and other issues pissed off a lot of users. Then there was a massive protest where all the submissions and comments said go over to Reddit. Reddit's user base ballooned with former Digg users. Digg went forward with its stupid submission changes and a significant percentage of users stayed on Reddit and Digg became a ghost town of PR submissions and astroturf comments.
Like Reddit the value of Digg existed almost entirely in its user base. Once the users left there was no utility left in the site. It was a darling of "crowd sourced" content so without the crowd there was no content.
If you think the solution to blocking a sub (or all of Reddit) is "a hundred million people can just all decide to go somewhere else the next day", you fundamentally misunderstand how the community and network effect works.
A while ago, I was moderator for a small community of subreddits and decided that the leadership shenanigans had gotten to me, so I left all those subs behind and just became a lurker. Nothing reddit leadership has done has made me regret that choice.
But it's sad, anybody remember Team Periwinkle? Cake day? Getting trophies? Reddit used to distribute their source code, and have real hackers running it. Now it's just another shitty business model looking to be exploited. I get it, Reddit isn't a charity and isn't free to run, it is a business, but now it's just going to be a shit one.
You know what would have still sucked but still ended up working?
"Hey 3rd party app makers, you're part of the Reddit community. Running this site and service is expensive, so here's what's going to happen. In 12 months we're going to be reworking our revenue model and it will impact how you connect to us. Let's start to chat about it now and decide what's best for this part of our community.
Be prepared, we're going to have to figure out how to make money but we want you to be part of the solution. Anything is on the table but here's what we're thinking today:
1. Limit free API access to a cap per day - easier to implement, but will not create revenue for anybody and will cause us to have to build anti-abuse systems.
2. Run more ads. We think we'd probably have to figure out a way for your apps to be part of our ad network. So possible terms of service (TOS) for you might be that you'll have to pass ads through according to some yet to be decided display standard. You won't get any money from it, and it might make your user experience worse. We might consider extending our TOS to also let you run ads in your own apps and mix them in with ours. It's your app, and it would be your decision.
3. Charge for API access. We want to target making $x/million API calls. You would have to figure out how to pay for this. One options is to charge your users a monthly fee and pass it through. Our experience say that while this would reduce your user count, it would also reduce your support load. We'd be open to letting you charge $x+y/million and you keep the $y or perhaps we charge some fee like $x+y and you keep z% percent. On our free site we'd probably still run ads, which would encourage users to your apps for a "premium" experience. There's several models here and we haven't decided yet -- but it could be win-win for everybody who acts as a "portal" into our service. As a show of good faith, we'd probably kill our own organic mobile app to further let you differentiate yours.
4. Some mix of the above, maybe with tiers.
Contact us, we're going to start setting up discussions for the next 2-3 months, make a decision within 6, and then give you 6 months to modify your apps and work out payment methods and so on."
Reddit wants to wrap all their content in a mobile app. There they can force ads without the option to blocking, they can force (paid for) "suggestions", and they can vacuum up all that sweet personalized data from every user.
There are only so many people who would be willing to pay $x for a Reddit subscription. Would the quality of content and discussion go up? Absolutely, but that's not what Huffman and his VC backers care about. They care about _scale_, and if you can collect the information of every person who goes so far as to even click on a Reddit post that's a result in a Google search, you can have near-infinite scale. At that point, the question isn't "how do I get Joe Schmoe to pay for a Reddit subscription?", it's "How many ads can I cram into every GET request made to Reddit and maximize the price advertisers are willing to pay to be in that GET request?"
If the number isn't very large, I'll concede that I either over-reacted or the total number of bots is way larger than I imagined. If the number of bots is large, this affects their valuation.
If the number is large, it shows that the primary asset, the user base, has reduced and this also affects their valuation.
I can't see how they can come out of this looking as valuable as before.
I wouldn't like to be an investor.
Plus compared to Reddit, any kind of real discussion was a pain in the ass. (As opposed to a bunch of people sequentially shouting into the void in an un-threaded manner.)
I guess I just find it baffling that people think that the site will have the same value it had today (to users and advertisers) if it is loses its soul. I don't even think I'm being idealistic. I've been through this before. Reddit is more than a view count, or else people wouldn't care they way we do. Did? Something.
They said, on a website that is essentially a single subreddit.
Unless you mean financially.
I hate to admit, but this comment pretty much sums it up: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/209870 (first part talks about communities in general, the rest is about r/Dota2 in particular - but can mostly be applied to most other subreddits)
I really don't want it to be like this, but it sums up perfectly how I feel about it. I'm not on Reddit to make posts - about 99.999% of time I don't have anything to post, and those five minutes a year when I possibly do aren't today. I'm lurking around, then maybe participating in comments, chatting with people or just expressing My Importantly Worthless Opinions(tm).
I've checked out Fediverse and it's essentially empty. Those who make all the posts I was commenting on haven't moved there. If they will, I will visit, for sure. But if they won't (and seems that they won't) - I won't stick around simply because there's nothing to do there for me, personally (I'm no content producer).
Blackout doesn't address this. Neither are all those "check out Lemmy/Kbin/... posts" I've seen.
Reddit knows this and that's why they call users like me "noise". I guess, moderators included (as I get it, most mods don't post - they have a different role)?
Numbers are probably closer to 20% care than 50%, but the effect would be visible regardless.
People are tying themselves into knots turning Reddit into either near-bankrupt or evil. Or hyper-focusing on particular elements that are just disputable human interactions, like most (i.e. suggesting he could optimize API calls isn't some slap in the face & shitting on his app. really immature!)
I have absolutely 0 dog in this fight, no huge reddit fan, I just don't like how many people I see bamboozled by him. Extremely manipulative behavior.
If Huffman had called up guys like Christian Selig a while back and been like "Listen, it's been great, I love the apps you guys make, but business is business and I want to see more revenue, and to do that I'm going to charge more for the API and probably eventually shut it down, let's work on a timetable to sunset things.", he's not nearly the jerk he is today. No one's under the illusion that Reddit or Conde Nast are charities; they have revenue targets to make.
What makes this fucking people over is the negotiating over API price and implementation timetable that was clearly in bad faith and meant to shut down these applications within the timespan of a quarter. Imagine being told that your way of making a living (which these apps are for their developers) is going away in a month. Sure, these devs are the cream of the crop, but that's still a major life disruption, and you don't do that to the people who helped make your website what it is today.
But I think there’s a huge difference between that charge being 20 cents and $2 (or 50 cents and $5).
That is a pretty low reduction and imo shows how those of us who care are not a majority, and the whole thing might end up being nothing more than a gamer-protest.
edit: back up, peak comments from below 7k to below 6k; peak posts from about 1.2k to 1.1k
Some of that hundred million would disappear, sure, but hey - what percentage of subscribers are relatively inactive anyway?
You're welcome to take the cynical approach to that, sure, but I've never felt it to be a particularly harmful thing. It's good to have some semblance of a friendly culture, if only to break up the day.
Some people will like it and I'm sure some people hate it. I've never given it a second thought though.
Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.
Thinking back to around 1995-2005, I really regret how so many "search" tools (both online and in certain OSes) have become opaque and unreliable "let me guess it for you" engines. Features to correct them when they are wrong--like negation of terms--are sometimes unreliably badly/non-documents, or nonexistent.
It's not a lack of knowledge or skill--FFS Youtube owner Google has its own history as a search engine there--but all the commercial incentives aligned for Enshittificiation, and I wish I knew how to fix it.
Some communities have talked about going to Discord, but that's of course more of a closed platform in most ways.
In some sense, as a non-share holder who wants to see people build these communities in the open, I appreciate this approach.
TheDonald.win went down because the admin saw the light after Jan 6 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/05/why-the...)
If Reddit is saying "it's $2 for the 300 calls per day" that is claimed for the mobile app usage they're correct looking at what they charge for API calls based on the developer saying that the average user does 345 calls/day from the mobile app.
From the app develop perspective who also has a polling back end and an apple subscription cut and maintaining the same profit as before on top of it all, they're likely looking at closer to $20/month for that same user (noting that previously they were charing $4.99 and it was almost all profit for that user).
There's a lot of people who prefer, or at least respect, an openly arrogant or dishonest leader. At least you know where you stand then, and are visible. The alternative, a lot of the time, is a leader who pays lipservice to equality, but has the same underlying disrespect.
The dream is being treated as a capable individual, but if a leader isn't willing to see you like that, it's pick your poison.
If there's a detailed argument saying that basic moderation (eg. obvious spam removal and not "I want to ban everyone who's ever said anything nice about Trump") will take say an order of magnitude more human effort without 3rd party tools I'd be curious to see it. If there's a persuasive claim along these lines I'd shift my beliefs, but I haven't seen it so far.
It's a massive circle jerk and echo chamber of regurgitated opinions. So in other words: exactly like the rest of Reddit.
And in theory not even that. As long as the traffic can be redirected to a different server it should still work. In practice, however, at least Apollo has some server-side components so it wouldn't be totally plug-and-play without developer support.
Sadly, I'm not sure how to get in touch with the developers/users who may be interested.
(I've also heard that someone's working on a Reddit/Lemmy gateway, but I don't know who they are or how far they've gotten.)
First, no it is not 3$. Apple takes a 30% cut, and requires a yearly fee to keep the app on the store. There is also a separate server cost, and a cost associated with paying an engineer. The actual cost is 5 dollars.
Second, there is only one single month to make all changes. Pricing was announced only 30 days prior.
That means payment setup, subscription changes, app update and payment approval requests, etc all need to happen within 30days. This is literally impossible.
Third, there are people who have paid a for a yearly subscription. (10$ total) Those funds either need to be refunded in it's entirety, or be allowed to run out first. Both will not occur within 30 days. That is literally impossible for apollo dev to do. That's just an issue of how refunding works and timelines.
If it is the latter, the dev will be incurring ~50,000 usd in costs every month. This is impossible to sustain.
Either way, there are app store rules that must be followed first. Reddit's timeline is incompatible with them.
And finally, regardless of API costs! reddit has on multiple occasions, defamed Apollo dev. Why would he continue working with a company that makes false blackmail accusations, then doubles down after evidence is provided?
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
https://github.com/toolbox-team/reddit-moderator-toolbox
I don't know if the proposed API changes will affect this specific tool, but I doubt moderators would be nearly as up in arms if their tools were going to keep working the way they had in the past.
Exactly. Reddit holds all the cards. Time after time, no great migration after a "revolt".
> Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season.
The NBA championship just ended and the season is over. It's the least important time of the NBA season.
This is nothing but an annoyance at best for reddit. If things got serious, they'll just take ban the revolt leaders and take over the subs. Frankly, I despise the "power" mods as much as the reddit admins. Hope there is a mass culling of the mods on reddit as these privileged mods are who made reddit unbearable and turned it into a propaganda cesspool.
People are addicted, especially the mods and power users. They won't go, because they've infested too much in building up their "clout."
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
Maybe in another 15 years, whichever successor to Reddit is found unsustainable/unreliable (decentralized or not), everyone left with a dire need of niche online subcommunities shrugs their shoulders and moves on once again. I don't see them having another choice. The need for online communities will always be there in my mind, especially since the existence of Reddit has proven that it can be done, and someone will build something else that everyone conditioned on these forums will use eventually.
I hold out hope, but an unlikely outcome is the mainstream somehow attaches itself to a service with a different funding model like Wikipedia or AO3, or these kinds of message boards are treated like public utilities. It will still be a massive burden to administer, but the outcomes could be different. I remember reading how "critical" subreddits were given a pass from the blackouts like /r/Ukraine because the value of their information trumps anything related to Reddit operations. A part of me thinks that Reddit's current playbook takes into account that some parts of its existence have become too important for mods/users to shut down, and that seems different to Digg's situation in 2010. They simply weren't as big as Reddit today. This is uncharted territory.
Regardless, in my mind, a lot of things in life don't last forever, not just Digg or (soon possibly) Reddit. But lots of people rode the wave regardless for 15+ years, and have gained a lot of useful knowledge from Reddit in the meantime.
So people will inevitably flock to other closed platforms like Discord because those platforms are the objectively superior choices, and they're not ideal for various reasons, but in my mind you just have to meet people where they are. And I think a service like Discord could absolutely implode with a few misplaced administrative changes. But at this point I tend to see these things as part of a greater circle of life, and it's (probably) not like they're going to implode almost immediately in quick succession. Just that your time spent there is a part of a particular nexus in a particular point of human history, and it's going to be limited. So, enjoy it while it lasts.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vYx9yPEIpJaoh2I4keEjA?si=a...
(Of course, it's also possible that the whole interview was just an act.)
If I want to learn something technical (for example, music production) I'll search in google the thing I want to understand, then add the keyword `reddit`.
What the past few days has demonstrated to me, is how much of this information is on Reddit and how helpless I am without it, with all the main subreddits closed.
Furthermore, if I want to ask something technical I'll ask it on Reddit, and will almost always get an appropriate response. So it's been reliable for me as well.
Also, the fact that I don't need to create another account for a separate platform, just so I can ask a question about a new hobby I've just discovered. It's the fact that it's so centralised that makes it so valuable.
If a Reddit IPO is coming, then this could simply be a form of de-risking. It's a double edged blade, because higher quality 3rd party apps may increase the platform's value while you're on their good side, but rub 3rd party app developers the wrong way and they might start getting clever ideas. A short notification period may reduce the chance of clever ideas reaching manifestation.
I'll go out on a limb and say that most Apollo/3P users would've done the same thing.
Really sucks that they chose death instead.
The more recent GDPR on the other hand should allow me to ask the "owner" (I forgot the exact name) to delete all the data related to me. He however declined to follow my request. An option at that point was to pay something like €50 to file a complaint to the governing body (some EU entity), so I gave up.
The examples you cite could not be more different if you tried.
a) One is working towards their IPO. b) One was taken private, and doing nothing would have resulted in Chapter 11 c) The 3rd is a public company, trying to unwind a moonshot project with a budget that dwarfed the cost of the NASA Apollo space program itself.
The common themes in these disparate scenarios is that all 3 leadership "styles" have a strong sense of self-interest (and short term self-preservation), period.
But that's just business.
Its nothing new.
What percentage of users actually voted in the polls? If its not a significant portion of the sub-reddit population, was the poll even valid? But a sub-reddit may have still taken action: "90% voted yes... but less than 5% voted" hmm?
I personally dont like the official apps or new.reddit, but I think Im part of the minority. It wouldnt surprise me to find out that most users dont actually care about the API price increase, because they use the default homepage and mobile apps. In that case, this boycott would actually be creating a degraded experience for them and negatively impacting their opinions of the moderators that are complaining and making polls to shut it down.
Note that HN also deprecates stale stories, where "stale" includes "ongoing discussion of some present drama", e.g., bitcoin and NFCs last year, or GPT currently.
dang's discussed this occasionally, see: <>>35463948 >
HN specifically doesn't moderate posts critical of YC company down, though Reddit's so long out of the gate I'm not sure that still applies. See: <>>35463948 >
There've been 116 stories mentioning "Reddit" with > 20 votes between 2023-5-13 and 2023-6-14.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1686720501&dateRange=custom&...>
I'm doing analysis based on HN front page listings and could update that to see what the actual surviving front-page story count is. It's been ... fairly substantial.
Fewer than 3% of submissions make the front page, and that's exclusive of spammed or moderated content.
Update / Edit:
There've been 16 front-page stories on Reddit since 31 May beginning with "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" (<>>36141083 >).
As compared with prior years, the 2023 mention rate is well above both the 5- and 10-year history (showing year and HN front-page mentions of "Reddit"):
2007 41
2008 31
2009 15
2010 44
2011 41
2012 46
2013 28
2014 27
2015 27
2016 19
2017 15
2018 15
2019 12
2020 24
2021 12
2022 13
2023 21
With a leader like Steve Jobs you got a lot of rumors about callous behavior in private but got a polished exterior. Trump upended that when he became popular by being publicly crass.
Looking back, that was kind of some heavy body horror for a kids movie.
But yeah, “Snoo” is easily the worst tech company name for their employees I’ve heard. I had no idea Reddit had an internal name for their employees. This is way worse than “meta mates” or whatever Zuckerberg ended up coming up with.
I hope Reddit did their due diligence in this. My feeling is that the people who found a 3rd party client and even paid for it are the ones in the 0.001% who produced the content for the rest of the people.
But we'll see in a few weeks if /u/spez starts forcing subreddits to open.
Random data point: I paid for Apollo Pro (not Ultra - it didn't have any features that I wanted), and turns out I've lied about 99.999%, it was more like eight nines as I have a Reddit account since 2011 and my only post ever was on r/KeybaseProofs. I thought I had some questions that I've wanted to post, but it seems that I've always solved them without ever posting, just searching for answers harder - so my memory had failed me.
Apollo is convenient and features were totally worth the money. Even for someone who only browses and posts only comments. The official app is no good.
So... I don't know. I share your hopes that everyone else is not like me (but then why no one is posting on Fediverse?)
That, of course, goes out the window when the person you're arguing with legitimately identifies as a Nazi.
hoffman founded reddit ... together with btw aaron swartz.
I think it has stopped being that a long, long time ago, and Steve kept track better than us what the new demographics of reddit are. I am sad that the reddit I enjoyed is no more, but I am looking forwards to the new crop of discussion platforms (or whatever else) that will crop up.
I never access /r/popular or /r/all or any of the default subreddits, all my usage on reddit is from niche communities about my hobbies, and through the past 15 years each new hobby I started there was a subreddit to kickstart it full of information and a community. That's going to be the biggest loss.
Most of reddit the past 10 years has been shifting towards new users just lazily scrolling /r/popular but those users are not profitable, they don't generate value, the ads will be poorly targeted. The laser-focused subreddits is where the value of reddit as a platform comes from, I don't like advertising but I could tolerate targeting on those subreddits as it'd be relevant without invading users' privacy (like the old days of AdSense using the context of the page for ads, not profiling the user).
The vast majority is utter stupidity, I agree, but that is a part of reddit that you can completely avoid if you are a bit more of a power user... It will suck when it dies.
It can be also a massive circle jerk but if that's the only thing you can see from niche subreddits you are coming into this with a massive bias and ignoring the good parts, and these good parts are missing from most of the rest of the web.
I feel that your opinion is the same, just an attempt at a massive circle jerk about how terrible reddit is. It is, but it's also not and if you sincerely can't see how useful reddit is for a wide range of hobbies it's probably because you're a little myopic.
- $3/user is the Apollo author’s projected costs. Dunno what the rest of that means. “The App Store charges 30%!!!” simply isn’t relevant other than for devs projecting anything that’s hurt them over the last decade into this story
- What are “all the changes”? My understanding is he’d release an update with a new API key with a CC attached.
- If it’s gravely important that the yearly subscriptions who have paid already get free Reddit, why is he shutting down?
- Why is it impossible to give a finite list of customers a refund in 30 days? Again, isn’t he doing it anyway?
- I’ve developed on the App Store since day 30 and don’t know what App Store rule you’re referring to.
- I think your claim is Apple might not let him get an update out? That’s fine. Do what everyone else does and _don’t add the credit card to the old API key_.
- He can’t afford $60K/month? Why not? Charge more than costs. That’s how business works, you don’t have an inalienable right to free APIs.
- he can’t afford $60K/month, redux: he bring in millions a year, right?
- His two claims are:
1. he was offended because Reddit said the app is inefficient - he won’t put it into quotes so I’m guessing it was just generic “you could optimize your api calls” advice
2. He made a very bad joke that he frames as “mostly joking” and frankly, was blackmail. We’re seeing the other side of it now.
Anything else?
Those rates are BEST CASE. I linked the code directly to you that actually does it in your previous comment.
They queue 100[0] users every 5[1] seconds to pull their status, they then update the next check timestamp in the db to be at now + the constant you quote[2] which they use for rate limiting, so at most once per minute.
So unless they have under 1,000 users, then it won't ever be "every single minute."
[0]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
[1]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
[2]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
There are inevitable more than one Spez at Reddit, but I doubt all 2000+ employees are like that.
for $10/month I'd expect more quality control in communities, and my experience from years of browsing doesn't make me optimistic that my money would improve that.
if that's all you got out of the comment, you clearly aren't trying to see the POV of the app developer. He's under no obligation to keep working for a company that has at this point slandered him behind his back and he can shut down his app whenever he wants.
You are free to judge him but I don't think he's losing sleep over internet comments trying to claim he is disingenuous. Personally, I see no fault on his end, especially when Reddit is dealing the cards to begin with.
This isn't just about an API becoming paid. It's clear they want to phase out 3rd party apps without saying it out loud.
Google and many other companies for almost 2 decades have spent their time scraping petabytes of data from the web. A lot of that with no expectation of payment. Some companies became billionaires off of that ability to freely access mass bulks of data.
Data scraping has always been a grey area, but I find it strange how it's suddenly taken a turn for some people whenever modern AI comes up. We can't really be drawing lines based on what we feel is good/evil, because we will never agree as a whole on what is good/evil.
And as we see yet again in internet history, we see the cost of that comfortability when you put all your eggs in one centralized basket. This isn't the 90's dial-up days; I'd rather create a burner account in 5 minutes and keep my trail scattered across the net than fall into that trap where everything is in one place.
If others bond together from that, I get it now.
There might genuinely not be a single price that pays for itself, and usage-based pricing might be required.
People are unintentionally grading him on a _huge_ curve, essentially "what if...all I had to do was code and App Store?" That would be nice, I get the impression he's had a fun ride so far where that was pretty much it. Now that the thing he's selling isn't free, he can pound the table and quit, or run the business.
You can try to do a bottom-up estimate, but how much do you think it costs to moderate the (8th?) largest domain on earth? More or less than that? More or less than what Reddit's current operating income is?
Do you understand your comments are focused on making judgements about _personalities_, not business decisions? Do you see how they assume others are too?
Since you've indulged, please, allow me:
Your comments are aggro and focused on personalities and people. I don't find them useful or interesting.
Yes, I know my stance on this isn't the common one. I have been taking it for a few days on several forums.
I've obviously seen a bunch of people who were happy to dismiss everything I said. Your replies stand out as the only ones that were wildly off-topic and myopic. You are strangely focused on social dynamics and stack-ranking strangers that will never meet, and assume the strangers are doing the same.
You chose to comment on a personality and not a business decision. So I responded in kind. To remind you of your comment:
>I just don't like how many people I see bamboozled by him. Extremely manipulative behavior.
This is not a comment about a business decision. This isn't even a comment about Apollo nor Christian. So yea, I reply simply to voice my disagreement with this assertion as you have indeed brought me into your odd argument.Tit for tat.
And since you asked for my useless and non-interesting opinion by proxy: As a fellow dev (not reddit app dev, just general person who has worked on tech only for it to fail due to powers outside my control), I do empathize with here. Trying to and spin my own emotions as being bamboozled is dishonest, inflammatory, and in my singular case, wrong.
Other than the needless personal attack, that's exactly what he did.
a) 30% on mobile app (made up) would be less than 70% web, but still sizable!
a) Scraping by generative AI companies, etc.?
A conversation is always at some level about voicing your opinion or showing something you've done or bought and basically ask for feedback/reactions.
I've read about some people calling for a return to forums. That lacks the one-stop-shop-for-all-interests feel, though - besides, subreddits are quick to tell you about other online communities you should hit up. For some of the older folks on here, how were the old newsgroups compared to reddit? From the little I know - and I mean "I learned about newsgroups from a joke on the Simpsons" little - it kind of sounds like Reddit...
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
I honestly can't be bothered to answer any of your claims. You obviously don't read links attached to comments. So read this, or just ignore it. Your choice.