1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758616/reddit-app-survi...
> [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...
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 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.
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)?
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
TheDonald.win went down because the admin saw the light after Jan 6 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/05/why-the...)
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.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vYx9yPEIpJaoh2I4keEjA?si=a...
(Of course, it's also possible that the whole interview was just an act.)
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
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...
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.