Reddit Strike Has Started
reddark.untone.uk
reddark.untone.uk
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.
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.
Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content it actually is.
Of course, given the edit, one must wonder who's data they think it is given who they're collecting it from...
You are free though to access the referenced content on your own if you can find out about it on your own.
Not Reddit. They're just the landlord here.
You’re free to setup your own, or rent somewhere else. Regardless it costs money.
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.
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.
Perhaps if Reddit the company had been more disciplined over the last ten years, it wouldn't have come to that.
API hosting is a drop in the bucket, even if their own accounts are to be believed wholesale.
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
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.
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
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?
Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.
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
^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png
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.
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.
In the case of Reddit and Wikipedia, it's also an important part of how the volunteer moderators/contributors run the site. On Reddit there are a huge selection of community-owned moderation bots that monitor subreddits for posts matching rules.
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.
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.
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.
And we are just talking about links, which in most cases the submitter does not own the referenced content anyways.
Where are they gonna move to?
I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know - where on earth are all these moderators going to start up their new groups on?
If there was a viable alternative they would've found it by now and there wouldn't be a strike, there'd be a desertion. The fact is that even if the moderators want to move, the userbase isn't necessarily going to follow them.
Maybe they will, but there's nothing to move to today.
With nothing to move to, the users aren't going to move. Having a viable place next week might be pointless.
Did you really think there was nothing else? Services like reddit are big because of their network effects, not because they have so special sauce that no one has been able to replicate.
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?
And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without causing a shitstorm.
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.
Wouldn't have got nearly as much backlash.
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?
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.
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.
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/apollo_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.
I don't think the app is making those 600 requests 24/7.
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
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.
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.
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...
There is a notably large group of app developers who all say they have been completely ghosted by Reddit when it comes to any kind of private communication.
Not to mention this comes out of the blue immediately before their IPO after years of status quo, without consulting devs, moderators, or literally anyone outside of reddit HQ. They are also well aware of the cost it would have on 3rd party devs and how unreasonable they are given the extremely-similar level of activity inside the first-party app.
Should a company be allowed to try to make a profit? Of course, no one is arguing against that. The issue is context.
And the way your question is worded implies third party app devs are greedy and unreasonable for wanting to continue to exist while reddit is too mishandled to make a profit. It's a childish "well why can they have anything when I have nothing" take. If the issue is actually profit, why does it only come up without warning just before the IPO? After over 10 years of never coming up before, never even being a discussion point before.
Also, can you name any of the things Reddit has added over the last 5 years that you care about? A single one? They took on both image and video hosting, at I'm sure an insane cost - why? They added NFT avatars - a transparent attempt to cash in on NFTs. A new layout that all the old users hate, removal of the ability to log in on the mobile site. Does anyone remember when they fired Victoria for no god damn reason? Pretty sure that was the last content-related contribution they've made to the platform. Administration is dead set on extracting any kind of profit they can out of something they give no fucks about outside of their ability to profit off of it. They handicap and ruin their own platform for the sake of attempting to make a bit more money.
Context matters. Don't blind yourself by ignoring context.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
Because if it isn't then reddit can simply revoke their access.
How can reddit know if the ads are being stripped out or not? Simple - download the app, run it and see.
The API license can always force things like:
1. Only for apps, whether mobile, desktop or web (i.e. forget about training your LLM on the data) 2. License revoked if content is modified in any way (i.e. no stripping out ads)
It's not that difficult, honestly. I've signed more strict agreements with companies (NDAs, and so forth) to access their system, their data, etc.
And then we are right back at the complaints that reddit is killing 3P clients.
A headless program that does moderation actions (changing flares, approving or deleting posts, updating wiki) uses the same API that a mobile app would use - and ads would only get in the way of those tools.
If the app is poorly behaved or you have a very heavy hitting backend service, then you pay more. If you (the app owner) wants to put advertisements in the user's view - that's up to you. If you want to do offer the app advertisement free out of the generosity of your heart, that's up to you.
The API calls cost the same no matter how they're made - the API doesn't care where it's called from. Be it polling backend service, moderation tool, or mobile app - it's all billed the same with the exception of it being free for certain exceptional cases.
That's much easier to work with for all parties involved.
For Reddit Inc, it's bad because they'll under-charge for things where they could capture more money, and over-charge for things that are helpful to their platform but not directly profitable, like moderator tools.
It's bad for developers because it forces them to deal with having a revenue model well before they're ready to. A lot of people just like building things, and only worry about revenue once it's successful enough to matter.
It's bad for users because all sorts of tools that would be free now have to charge them. Instead of somebody just hacking together a moderation tool suddenly has to find a way to pay for it.
The headless case is easy enough; in each content blob you include an "is_ad" field. Tools that are user agents display that content. Tools that aren't are free to ignore it under the TOS.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial
> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.
Otherwise your app (for all users) would fall under:
> Your use of the Imgur API is also limited by the number of POST requests your IP can make across all endpoints. This limit is 1,250 POST requests per hour. Commercial Usage is not impacted by this limit. Each POST request will contain the following headers.
The pricing is https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing (note that this is quite different than the pricing that Apollo claims to have)
$500/month for 7.5M calls/month and $10k for 150M calls/month
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/reddits-new-api-pric...
> Selig says Reddit wants $12,000 for 50 million API requests, while Imgur, a similar social media photo site, charges $166 for 50 million API calls. Selig says even if users were willing to pay out of pocket for the API costs, Reddit announced the new billing plan one month before it would take effect, and Selig says that's just not feasible for developers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
> Our pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls
That puts it at about 3x more than Imgur's published rates.
For someone hacking together a moderation tool, I have done this (wiki updates) It means that my run to get data on a few hundred subs would cost me about a quarter. When I was in testing, I was only doing about 5-10 calls though on a sub that I managed so that it wouldn't go haywire somewhere else.
---
Consider the outrage where an API key is yanked (for whatever reason) with Twitter. Yanking an API key gets even more problematic if there is an existing business relationship.
You're also proposing that someone periodically audits the different reddit clients to see if they are displaying enough / all the ads and that there aren't any uber style shenanigans where if it is found to be coming from the IP block that Reddit owns it shows ads while certain users (who subscribed with a private non-apple subscription) aren't getting ads.
It is just easier to charge for an API.
And for an app that already has a monthly subscription ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 shows $5.99) available to it, to increase that rate to match the number of calls. If the average user is making 350 requests per day that's $10/month for the user, so update the subscription to $15/month ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252 ). If the push notification server ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... ) is making an additional 600 requests per hour per user... that might need some scaling back or adding another tier (that's $15/day/user of API calls by itself).
No, just the big ones. Which they will know, because they'll know the API usage. Below some level, it doesn't matter if somebody's doing it wrong.
> It is just easier to charge for an API.
Easier in the sense of less labor for a few people at Reddit? Sure. But who cares? The goal isn't making it easier for a few low-level employees. The first goal is to create maximum value. The second goal is to extract enough cash to cover the costs of the value generation, plus a bit extra. If something is not easy but is profitable, that's a-ok in business-land.
That makes sure that applications are incentivized to write code well that doesn't take advantage of a free resource.
The Apollo push notification part of the server is hitting 600 requests per hour per user - 10 requests per minute per user. That has a cost to it for Reddit even if not a single page is rendered for a mobile app.
It doesn't matter if it's a headless moderation tool or the push notification server or an exceptionally poorly behaving front end. API requests have a cost that up until now have been free.
If Apollo turned off the notification server, he'd be down to pennies per user per day for the app. If it was scaled back to a request every minute it would be $1/day/user. Scale it back to a check every 10 minutes and you're back to pennies per day per user.
As it is, it was designed with a free and nearly unlimited rate limit available.
Trying to do an audit of advertisements being displayed (again, easy to defeat so that the auditor sees the ads while others don't) this doesn't fix the problem that apps are taking advantage of free resources that aren't free to the host.
If the cost of the API is too high for the load that it (and any backend) puts on the host, then it should be up to the app designer to find a way to monetize it - it is their responsibility to write the code within the limits that it can afford.
The marginal cost of a single API call is approximately zero. Reddit, like most SaaS businesses, is much more about fixed costs than variable costs. I think they are much better off following the standard freemium approach, where they give away what's basically free, and then use value-based pricing to get a fair share of the possible revenues. The sort of cost-based pricing you suggest a) doesn't match their cost model, b) overcharges for valuable things that may not produce direct revenue, and c) undercharges for things that are especially valuable to users.
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.
It's actually hard to believe people are throwing this big a fit over something they don't deem worthy of $5 a month.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
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.
What does Reddit's core functionality cost? They have annual revenue of half a billion dollars. Tell me that you can't use that money to run a text distribution infrastructure.
I doubt Slashdot in its day cost half a million dollars to run.
I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.
The fact that I subscribe to r/woodworking, r/diy, etc, is really useful for targeting but I never see relevant ads.
I’ve literally given Reddit a big list of my interests and the asked to be served content, and the ads are almost completely unrelated.
Good thing nobody is asking for that.
However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any changes.
Such a freq complaint it's a cliché.
Certainly been true for every software product and service I've worked.
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.
Back in the day (2006-2010ish, I think) I was a pretty active member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians. I was kind of on a crusade against people who would put up their own pages to try to promote themselves, in violation of the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy. Mainly, I was worried that it would be untenable to keep WP accurate if we had too many pages. I also went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of. There was a well-established consensus at the time that most individual pokemon did not meet the notability threshold (I don't remember the exact criteria, but it had to do with multiple sources of the information being available) and therefore their pages should be deleted. Looking back, that was kinda silly... The Wikipedia is not Paper policy probably outweighs the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy when it comes to Pokemon.
Anyway, I don't doubt that there is a political element in the case of this Kyle guy, but it's probable that I would have voted to have him deleted on completely apolitical grounds. (I haven't heard of him and haven't read enough to form a political or notability opinion on him at this point)
I find it amusing that pokemons get pages, but real people don't.
Yeah, notability, I get it. Still.
This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by "intangible as well as tangible things" which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which at the same time are recognized as the tangible par excellence.
"""
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
And of course, giving back to Debord, we can say that the society of the spectacle is one of infinite supply of manufactured social objects.
"sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".
Anyway, the problem is there's a lot of valuable content on wikipedia that is essentially borderline according to the rules, but also delivers a lot of value, and this content exists at the suffrage of whether or not they have some greasy nerd as patron or whether another one gets a bee up their ass about it.
"Lists" policy is a great example, and I've seen quite a few important lists go through cycles where despite being a de-facto resource for 10 or 15 years, all of a sudden some editor will get a bee up their ass and just delete it all, because WP:Lists. But of course having been the resource for 15 years, nobody external has bothered to collate a list that already exists on wikipedia, but if you point that out then you get the WP:OriginalResearch response. If you revert the changes, they'll lock it for "vandalism", etc. So we just lose that resource that's existed for 10-15 years, unless some other sufficiently greasy nerd pushes back on it.
The wikipedia editor cadre sucks, it's the definitive answer to the question of "what's the absolute least power that can go to someone's head". It's a real problem with the public trying to interact with wikipedia, much like stackoverflow answers everyone just knows it's not worth the time and does their damndest not to interact with it if they have any other alternatives.
And yes, "anyone can do it" in principle but it's not the public's job to push uphill to try and chase out bad actors in the organization. People won't do it and they'll just go do better things and you'll be left with only the toxic people - it's the "dead sea effect" in action. A sufficient concentration of poison will kill any life that might have any chance of remediating the poison.
https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9
Much like stackoverflow and the "come to jesus" moment a couple years ago when they tried to get SO members to stop being so fucking toxic to newcomers and people trying to ask the questions that let SO create content (to which the community basically shrugged and said they wouldn't "compromise community standards" by not shitting on people/pressing their mod buttons to suppress stuff for arbitrary reasons/etc), the cancer is so ingrown at this point that you can't save the organization without putting policies in that those greasies are going to hate, and that will kill the host organism. So it's terminal. Wikipedia editing is the same as StackOverflow commenting and has been for years. It's not that they're going to go under, but they're not everything they could be either, and there are often distinct points where the quality of the product has gone down over the years rather than up due to these problem children.
(I found a comment from myself 5 years ago saying this exact same thing in fact, lol)
Powermods on reddit are sort of another case of this too... it's not a great system to have some random greasy nerd from 2008 squatting on some common keyword/brand name while moderating poorly. But now it's entrenched and if you change the policy they're all going to shut down their subs in solidarity, so you have to essentially be willing to hammer down on the whole mod class and come in and replace all of them. It's the old "10% of the employees are real shitasses but they're protected by the union so we can't really do anything about it" problem.
Just in case anyone here is taking paulmd too literally, it's not possible for "some editor" or any one person to cause an article or list on WP to be deleted. If I remember correctly (and if it hasn't changed) speedy deletion requires at least 3 people, and if it's contested then there's a whole voting procedure. Speaking as a (former?) greasy nerd, I've actually always been impressed with the democracy and consensus systems on Wikipedia; it strikes me as pretty effective, especially compared to most governments.
You're probably right that self-aggrandizement and gatekeeping is a problem among wikipedians.
I'm sorry to hear the diagnosis is terminal... but since you say you've been complaining for at least 5 years, maybe WP has a few more years to live?
(anybody curious about how deletion works, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction_to_dele... )
Well, that's the point of the stackoverflow comparison. Nobody actually goes to stackoverflow to ask questions anymore. The culture is rotten and there are better places to ask. It's become "read-only" for most of its potential userbase, people actively avoid using it. But is there still a site called stackoverflow? Yes. It's just lingering in agony, like many cancer patients. Doesn't mean without some turn in fortunes (or leadership) that it's ever going to come back though.
> Did you try proposing a policy change
That's the thing I said though... why would I voluntarily choose to spend more time working with a toxic organization in a fruitless attempt to solve its organizational culture for them? Not only is that not actually going to change anything but it's a huge drain on me personally for little direct benefit. Why is it my responsibility to tilt at windmills to try and fix your organizational culture?
That's the whole point about StackOverflow and Wikipedia's culture problems in a nutshell: at a certain point you are just so toxic that nobody who's not interested in the game-playing itself is going to tolerate the game-playing. And at that point you have the "dead-sea effect" going, because the game-players will always stay around.
Is this a little unreasonable in the abstract? Sure, I am not engaging with the organization and then complaining when it doesn't work the way I want it to. But this is the practical reality - the public isn't going to build a better Wikipedia organization just for the sake of it. If you have a viable organization then some of them will contribute content, maybe. And if your editors piss it all away because it didn't meet X rule or Y rule then you will simply have a worse product, and in the long term people will stop contributing content because they see it doesn't matter (which is where we are with wikipedia right now in general).
I am not being prescriptive here - merely remarking on a phenomenon that is observable. Nobody likes interacting with career StackOverflowers or Wikipedians. They're, on the whole, kinda tedious and unpleasant people, and the product is worse as a result of this public disengagement. And this is not an uncommon opinion, you will not find a single person on Reddit who speaks positively of StackOverflow or Wikipedia's organizational culture, everyone (including their CEOs) knows they suck to interact with. The culture is toxic and rotten and the organizations cannot change it because a subset of the members relish in it being toxic and rotten, and over time the projects lose steam and falter due to public disengagement. You'll always have the greasies but the public is not beating down SO's door in 2023 to enlarge the community or to edit wikipedia and create content they know will be reverted by some basement-dweller.
Anything beyond fixing a minor typo or awkward sentence is kind of a waste of time on wikipedia, and that's really more than most people will even do to begin with. Just not interested in the social-game-playing aspects of it, and the content you create will be reverted and removed without you there being an advocate for it. The gameplaying matters more than the content, and that's what's killing SO too.
https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9
The problem for SO and Wikipedia is - those tedious, unpleasant people still generate a lot of short-term value even if they're a long-term problem. And just like the powermods of reddit, they wield a lot of internal power and can cause a lot of problems if you overtly (or even subtly) show them the door or put "please be nice" policies into place and anger them.
If it were just me, I'd keep my mouth shut (ok maybe not). Everyone knows SO and Wikipedia have culture problems, almost nobody has good experiences with their interactions on those sites, when that's the uniform experience you have an org problem.
But yeah, it's the paradox of intolerance in action. Being tolerant of shitty people leads to a shitty org culture or a shitty society/world. If they get too entrenched, you end up being unable to pry them off the levers of power and the dead-sea effect begins.
There's just also not really a way for them to move past them because the people causing those problems are powerful internal stakeholders. There's no easy solution to a rotten organizational culture and it leads to bad outcomes. It's a shame to see it happen but again, there's no magic wands to fix any of it. Whatcha gonna do.
I've had projects fail because of org culture problems (may have taken down the whole company at this point). But when the boss and the boss's boss are part of the problem, what can you realistically do? Not interact with that org anymore, that's about it.
Was it probably? I took a quick look at the deletions, the deletion reviews, and some of the older versions of the article. The article seemed to be very thin on actual citations, with way more text for a living-persons biography than I'd think reasonable for that level of sourcing. The deletion discussions were a hot mess, but my main takeway is what somebody else wrote there: "There's still not a single keep !voter here who has discussed which sources actually show notability."
Looking at the current article, my take is similar. I only skimmed, but I'm not seeing a lot of WP:RS compliant sources listed that would persuade me of notability even now; it's an awful lot of citation to his own works.
No need for such verbal contortion.
You're describing the far-right (Republican Party) and center-right (Democratic Party).
Left parties in the USA include Green Party, DSA, CPUSA, etc. They are largely irrelevant.
However, it doesn't have to be limited to legislations passed, but rather what is widely being discussed and pushed forward by the Democratic factions, the biggest example is the "Green New Deal"; more government intervention, increased spendings, massive expansion of state power.
US Senate and the solid blue core? Still firmly center-right.
For instance, Republicans are very unlikely to be elected in my city. So competitive candidates call themselves Democrats. And to establish their bonafidas, they might even hold a few select leftish positions to brag about. But when it comes to legislating and appropriations, the boring stuff that no one pays attention to, they're just as nimby, reactionary, regressive as any generic Republican.
Who are the likes? How many of them are there? AOC is a house representative; is there a progressive senator?
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.
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.
No, they can ignore the venture capitalists' shares. Reddit's Series F was led by a mutual fund. Most of Reddit's shares are non-voting common stock, under a voting-rights agreement or held by non-VC investors.
The difference is meaningful when tracing incentives. Venture capital, almost by definition, involves a high-loss high-reward portfolio. Most bets are expected to bust. That makes a middling bet that doesn't return the fund essentially worthless, which in turn encourages shooting for the moon. Late-stage private portfolios cannot sustain heavy losses. They are looking at preservation of capital in addition to returns, which makes them fundamentally different from VCs.
Shorthanding all investors in tech companies to VCs denies you visibility into a rich spectrum of actors, incentives and alignments.
Most of Reddit's shares were issued in the era of founder-friendly voting rights agreements. The fact that those investors don't have anyone on the Board means they don't have the right to elect one to it. Private-company Board rules are Byzantine. But they're not thoughtless.
No. It's a term specific for those investors working with: I don't expect you to survive, but if you don't get at least 10000% of return, you could as well be dead.
Almost all of capitalism works differently.
Well, not anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
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!"
You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot.
Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same.
You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.
Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine?
As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million.
I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear.
The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.
If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.
Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
Heck, if you hire people because you might need them, give them nothing to do (as many people claimed happened to them) and then fire them it is the easiest of all.
If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.
You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact.
People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize.
It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact.
Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".
So they got investment and scaled up to everyday users. Terrible redesign but at least the site doesn't look nerdy anymore, right? There are now actual advertisers on board. People are paying for badges and hats. They are tracking the shit out of people and pushing the app. They're on the way to profitability, and the next step is to cut out the old guard - who they couldn't monetize anyway - by removing third party apps.
Their costs are almost certainly ridiculous but their plan is either to become the next TikTok or crash and burn.
Cynically, nobody is going to donate to a full or nearly full "donations requested" bar, so nobody is going to specify a bar that gets full.
I'd rather contribute to something that is actually going to be successful.
If you say you need £1000000 to go to space, and ask for £10 sponsorship, if you tell me you've so far raised nothing, what chance is there of my money going to use as intended? If on the other hand you've raised £999000 I can be more confident you are actually going to reach your goal.
Also personally, it seems to me that if you have a goal, then that's a minimum. If you don't reach it, the thing doesn't happen. A website never reaching its funding goals is one that seems more likely to shut down, and what's the point of supporting something that could shut down tomorrow because it can't pay it's way. I know that's self reinforcing but there it is.
Income is the same as profit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260066/reddit-advertisi...
Shareholders care not for employee happiness, in so far as said employee is working and producing. Ditto with user happiness - if they're not happy they can leave. By not leaving, they must be happy to stay.
I think these proposals to "change" the metrics is as flawed as the current system.
The only way to avoid that I know is to address a specific target audience and scale up to dominate that. Tumblr has achieved this. A rival then can't dislodge you because you already own the relevant network. It's still risky though, because if a rival builds a product that covers the general audience and also servers that subset well, then the subset might decamp. Hence Tumblr trying to break out of it's niche. G+ addressed a lot of niches very well, but Google just wasn't interested in that kind of network.
Facebook is astoundingly profitable, and is the canonical example of network effects. Almost everyone I've ever known is or was on Facebook.
So I don't consider Network Effect Businesses to be terrible as for-profits in and of themselves.
The issue perhaps is that there is an expectation that they can become Google or Facebook.
Now we have a generation raised on social media that doesn't require your real name, maybe we will see a new platform reach Facebook levels.
TikTok and YouTube are obviously huge, but slightly different again to Facebook.
As an aside, people talk about how amazing Tik Tok is, but in the end, it's really just the creators uploading content that make it work.
Facebook captured Advertising dollars, in part, by investing in Ad infrastructure and building tools that companies could use to create targeted Ads. Every other platform, apart from AdWords, felt unfinished, especially Twitter!
Unfortunately any platform that draws >10 million daily users will reliably have people calling and offering billions of dollars to adopt that strategy and chase after revenue growth. Eventually the owner breaks down and agrees to take a huge personal payoff in order for the company to adopt a "Double or nothing" policy. Over, and over again.
There's too many enormous piles of money out there seeking a return for this to be a sensible self-regulating system with stable provision of goods & services.
Holdouts are few and far between, like Craigslist.
All of the BigTech companies are built on network effects and two sided markets
I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.
On the other hand there are sites like Danbooru which seem to thrive without advertising probably because the nature of their content drives advertising away.
I know that is a minefield of issues regarding access and moderation and it would make it a frequent election day financial harassment target but it would be nice to have something that is publicly funded, ad free, and not vulnerable to deep pockets stealing the entire system from the people.
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.
Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
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).
It's not illegal either.
And then someone gave a valid response.
And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."
This response is a non sequitur.
Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.
And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.
The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.
As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.
The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.
So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.
It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.
> When you call the police
In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.
People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.
To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.
It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.
There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.
Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.
After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.
Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.
Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.
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.
But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.
I don't recall it being truly necessary before, though there were annoying banners sometimes.
But right now "age restricted" tweets require a login, and the thing that makes tweets age restricted is the presence of images plus a very buggy per-account setting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...
Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.
There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.
> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.
I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.
She can search YouTube for cats and not get that stuff.
But I frequently think of my kids even for situations they don't directly risk. Call it an empathy gauge.
We also didn't have the massive amount of statistical evidence in mental health that came to light just recently about teenage social media use, especially in girls. Several times these studies have made it to the top of HN.
https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...
Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?
Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.
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...
As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.
Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)
Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.
Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.
Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution to that isn't to remove the feature. There are many other ways to deal with that, including banning the people who enjoy fomenting mob abuse campaigns.
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.
Good for you and Musk! So proud of people who can put money into something and lord over it because of capitalism.
TBC: you thought the throughline was money when it was nothing. You were talking about investing money that can be used to exploit workers and turn a higher profit by paying workers less than they benefit the stakeholders. Exploiting people is an obvious immoral action.
One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
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.
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.
For nearly 20 years I helped run Bandwagon, a co-op of nerds who toward the end of the dot-com bubble needed a place to put their personal web projects. We clubbed together to rent a full colo rack and we each put our servers in.
There were many opportunities to try to turn this into a business. It might have been lucrative, might have been a failure. We kept it as a small co-op, and it was fine.
And right now I'm looking at starting something that I might eventually get a salary from, but if it has surplus revenues beyond that, I'd rather use it to improve the thing and its impact in the world.
I understand that a lot of people want a zillion dollars so they can live a life of luxury. To each their own, but I feel kinda bad for people who organize their lives around that. They rarely succeed, are usually quite unhappy, and frequently create a trail of pain and misery behind them.
Trying to make a massive profit is another activity altogether, and the quest to do so can easily destroy a sustainable business. As Reddit may learn.
> Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability.
The head count increased ten fold since Spez took over. This is because VCs want billion dollar companies, not some moderately profitable ones. They want to deliver more (so more employees) and increase monetization, including by charging for the API.
If they stayed smaller it would have been more sustainable and wouldn't have to charge for the API.
He’s chasing new markets, not doubling down on current ones. to the detriment of everyone including his companies profitability.
Congratulations Reddit! You pulled in users with no good way to cover the costs of those users.
[0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC
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.
Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.
If they tell you to implement a banner or dark pattern you do it.
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.
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.
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.
That's probably NSFW.
HN and RSS remain in the mix. Also using my mobile browser's option to create a shortcut/browserApp for a few news sites. There really is an awful lot out there - I'm just beginning to look (again).
Interestingly... last year - with no effort on my part - reddit became an also-ran when I dived into TikTok. When I left TikTok, reddit re-entered the picture.
Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market.
Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views.
Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age.
Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.
But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.
What gets me, though, is some of the factually false claims you make here, and it would seem fair to dispute them. For example:
> puberty blockers which are not permanent
That's not true. Such chemicals have lasting effects on the body, and are the same chemicals used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
> I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done.
Such stories are readily available. And if you, for example, watch the documentary, "What is a woman?", which was recently seen by millions of people on Twitter, you'll find interviews with doctors who have conducted voluntary mastectomies and phalloplasties on children younger than 17.
> Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.
In the same documentary, a man from Canada is interviewed. His daughter went to a hospital and the hospital informed him that his daughter would be given testosterone injections against his wishes. When he filed a lawsuit, a judge jailed him for referring to his daughter as "she." He is now out on bail, unable to legally leave the province he resides in, and his daughter is receiving the injections anyway.
So, given how much effort you put into your comment, I hope you will be fair-minded enough to do some more research, find out what you're factually wrong about, and then reconsider your positions. Otherwise, it's just more ideological warfare, unconcerned with the truth.
Some of us have work related to politics and don’t need an ignorant explanation of the propaganda video called what is a woman (a title and question that is silly in and of itself…people know what a woman is).
—-
You don’t understand right or wrong. The person being incorrect about minor un important stuff bout some kids sometimes rarely getting more serious stuff happen doesn’t mean anything. We are still talking super rare stuff.
At no point do you, someone who is pretending watching a propaganda video gives them evidence for their side. A video can say anything haha. The amt of shady shit the porpoganda was doing was unhinged.
Stop repeating what your ilk does. Again the person being technically wrong does not matter. Any one who reconsiders positions based on only technically being wrong is by definition not fair minded enough. They are reactionaries without enough theory or knowledge to back up any convictions they have that are focused on unhinged things like focusing on oppressed people.
At no point do you understand what ideology means. To act like people who don’t want to see fascism as ideologues is unhinged.
Also. Did you know leftists get banned all the time. Leftist subreddits get banned In whole (Chapo Trap House).
Stop living in a fantasy world where you’re the moral victim.
See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.
There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence.
Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle)
If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.
There's only a few niche subs that will be hard to replace for me, but they're talking about moving.
That’s the entire problem and why Reddit is so successful. People don’t like jumping around between topic specific websites. Discoverability is too hard.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's a weird comparison to make, too. You're comparing a default subreddit that is mostly for memes with one of the subreddits held in highest regard. Lots of highly-moderated subreddits are just awful. Why not compare /r/AskHistorians with the large number of highly- but poorly-moderated subreddits? There are many (I won't name names) that you would expect to be reasonably neutral places but because of who picked the name originally have become politically extreme over time. Or just as a result of the effect of the upvote/downvote mechanism. The high influence that early votes have on submissions means that if a small group of people make it their life's work to watch /new (and they do exist!) they can control the narrative very successfully.
The idea that reddit mods are some great asset to the site is just strange, IMO. To me, they're one of the worst things about the website. Most of the big subreddits are dominated by the same group of power moderators who have some questionable conflicts of interests with outside forces. Smaller subreddits tend to be dominated by high-school-style cliques.
Truer words have never been written about reddit. It is a cesspit of censorship with tiny islands of insights.
The funny part is occasionally I've come across subs without mods (someone started the sub, then stopped using Reddit), and they've mostly been great. But Reddit tries to crack down on them, and they also have ways to push power mods into any sub that gets too big.
If you were the CEO of reddit what would you change? Replace the volunteer mods with paid mods?
1. You could have some kind of community influence over moderator selection for subreddits over a certain size. StackExchange has (had?) elections for moderators.
2. You could have rules preventing anyone from having moderator powers on more than a certain percentage of the site.
3. The best change would one that prevented moderators from sitting in IRC/Discord talking about reddit 24/7. Having so much meta-discussion happen "behind the scenes" is not good. The problem is that normal people who think "lol imagine having drama over an internet forum what a load of nerds" would be the best moderators but are the least interested in doing it.
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.
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.
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.
Be it sms, WhatsApp, telegram, phone, etc.
People get really skewed perspectives of what being socially active means. Instagram/FB/etc is not really needed.
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.
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.
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.
Your strawman is just that.
You can't comprehend that not everyone is as casual like you and will happily take whatever they get like a good boy because, "you don't really care".
Some people do contribute and care and are a significant part, on aggregate, of what makes reddit special.
Your expectations about "reddit will win because it holds all the cards" are pretty obvious to make. You're not some Nostradamus, when there's no clear reddit alternative like last time around but it's still too early to tell if the users who are intended to be driven to the main app will actually go there instead of empowering other places and causing a slow but eventual migration.
Internet is, many times, about power users and "what's cool" driving others there. Reddit is not Google or fb in that they can simply buy the competition when it appears.
But hey, there's always someone with an "the authorities are always right and will win" mindset.
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.
Might not be a bad thing tbh
Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
Reddit was launched in 2005 (which I admit is a year or two earlier than I remember/would have guessed).
But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?
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.
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.
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
I talked a little about their experience and, instantly banned from a handful of Reddit including a ban on my account that I appealed.
If literally… citations please.
I ask because I was accused of “supporting genocide” or some such nonsense.
I have not seen anyone literally calling for murder. The point of my post is that I have seen, first hand, people saying it’s rampant out there though. And since I was accused of exactly that, I’d like to see just how real this threat is.
100%. Trans people will talk about all kinds of possibilities and realities with nuance, patience, and insight when they feel safe with the people they're talking to and confident that the discussion is in good faith. But the 'issue' is so hot right now that those conditions are virtually never met in public online spaces.
This creates some serious bias problems in terms of what people get to see. If you're not close to any trans people IRL, most or all you get to hear from trans people will be colored by that 'siege mentality'.
I think it'll unfortunately be several years before that dynamic can change. It may take a generation.
Did the trans community seige mentality get you to write that previously?
Instagram, to name one, was using these "media mods" to basically ban or tag news that they claimed were misinformation. Those media outlets were absolutely pro government in every country and any criticism of covid gov policies was "misinformation".
Don't let the fact that reddit mods can be assholes distract from anti user policies made by reddit pre Ipo
It was so obvious that they wanted to portray a specific narrative and silent any dissent. Absolutely disgusting behavior.
I have this theory that religion is part of the human psyche, and that in 2023 we have more people that belong to a specific but as of yet unnamed religion than any point in history.
It just doesn’t have a bible, it’s a screen. Requires conformity, but doesn’t have a dress code. There is ceremony seen in emojis. And the priests are people you know are lying but it’s the other guys that are always “the problem”. You are a good person only if you do what you are told.
Honestly it explains A LOT.
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.
We also hired a well known Reddit power user to actually post the content. Which is also common. Those people get paid very little by comparison though. Like $50-100 a post. But they post a lot and have a lot of alts.
When you see a post that’s, “My girlfriend just got me this,” and there is a product in the person’s hand and the label is perfectly centered and in focus… there is no girlfriend. Someone paid for that.
I am always amazed how dumb smart people are in the comments of paid posts debating if things are real. Everything on social media is fake. Everything. When someone posts a photo of a new juice they found they didn’t find anything. It’s a paid ad. Same for damn near everything.
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.)
For free? I doubt they could find any for free.
You don't need a vast majority to do it. Lots of people would love to be a mod, just for the power-tripping aspect.
One of my favorite things about Mod self pity that always seems to come up is this insinuation that they did not want the job. The literal opposite of reality. All mods BEG to be mods. They lobby and work hard to get into their jobs and jealously guard them. They deeply resent and fear the idea of the community operating without them.
There have been times where I've thought, I have enough free time to be a help to a community I'm part of and would be willing to mod. But I've never done it because I wouldn't even know where to start. I'm not building a job application and selling myself for this or carefully waiting out position openings in Discord/IRC channels. I don't care that much. Use my labor if you want it or not. The mods that actually ended up mods? Oh they care and worked for it. You're free to quite any time if you don't want the job. Go on.... do it.
Also I question how much work there really is beyond mission creep. Filter out the spam and the occasional super psycho and you're done. Now if you make work for yourself by trying to be a gestapo nanny that deep reads all comments to weed out wrongthink and confers with mod star chambers on what is to be done to shape the community. Then yeah, maybe you can make a lot more work for yourself.
You might have visit a different reddit then. GP's comment is spot on. Oppressive moderation is rampart on reddit.
With that said, maybe Reddit management wants the site to change. In the future, this could be seen as a shortsighted failure or as an MTV-stops-showing-music-videos pivot to a different audience.
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.
It doesn't work even then.
I've never (_never_) seen a community get large and be able to moderate itself with just technology like upvotes/downvotes. Someone needs to say "You're violating our community standards; get out."
Large, in this case, means big enough that cliques form. That happens well before a thousand people.
Subreddits like askscience or askhistorians would be impossible without extremely strict moderation, for obvious reasons.
Absolute junk science that confirms a political bias? Straight to the top!! Any reasonable voice? [Removed].
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
> 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/announ...
It would for me, and thats the trajectory. The new UI is an absolute pig.
This is literally authortiarianism and the problem is that you can use it to justify any change by any company ever.
They're the owners so they know better because they're the owners.
No move can be criticized.
It turns out that you end, like many that defend this and is irrationally against others protesting, with a comment about how it doesn't affect "you".
Ok. So you don't get it. Good for you. Keep on doing whatever it is you're doing. Some people will absolutely quit using it with different UXs or decrease over time until they move elsewhere.
It's a risk and a decision and we will see what happens down the line.
But it'll be fun if other sites get much of the traffic and they likes of you come out with "it was obvious this would happen".
If trusting people with the strongest financial incentives to have the correct beliefs is "authoritarianism", then I'm an authoritarian. If there are betting markets out there that say that Reddit is going to crash and burn, then I'll trust them too. But the rando with an angry, self-interested opinion on the internet? Yeah they'll have to satisfy a pretty strong evidentiary burden before I trust them over someone with actual skin in the game.
They're not the correct beliefs. They're just actions that they're doing and knowing the inner context would allow you to glean whether it's correct or not. I think you probably have not worked in big organizations and had enough insights on how decisions are made, even in self professed data driven companies. People and politics matter. The best decision is not always taken or not always clear. Sometimes it's all about someone's short term or their ability to sell something to someone with power.
You're authortiarian through and through though and it's good you admit it frankly because it means that there's no need to try and debate you further. "They're right because they're right".
> If there are betting markets out there that say that Reddit is going to crash and burn, then I'll trust them too. But the rando with an angry, self-interested opinion on the internet? Yeah they'll have to satisfy a pretty strong evidentiary burden before I trust them over someone with actual skin in the game
Lol at the C.R.E.A.M attitude without a bit of nuance.
In any case, you've ruled yourself out as someone who can talk about this issue since you have "no skin in the game". You have nothing to contribute except "trust the experts".
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.
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.
When a sub is set to private "Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions."
Private subreddits are indeed invitation only
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.?
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.
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...
If 10% of users make a throwaway at a rate of 5 per month, then 100 monthly humans == 150 monthly usernames.
Although only a small percent post, I believe those users are largely interchangeable and replaceable. This isn’t twitter - apart from a few exceptions, there are not personalities on Reddit that people would feel the loss of. All the big/main subreddits are all pretty low-effort content, just reposting memes and videos from elsewhere.
Mods maintaining the subreddits are the real ‘power users’ who would impact the site if they left.
If it’s slowly then it likely doesn’t matter in the context of going public and making a lot of cash for the investors. It’s hard to imagine that the people who are given the power to decide the fate of Reddit don’t care about its long term fate at all - but it might well be the case.
This would have to be a month or more. And I think that's the real threat - the 2 day is a shot across the bow, if it impacts statistics I think it will likely be extended until management cries uncle.
If I were management I'd do everything in my power to make this strike look like it failed (since the alternative to actually preventing the strike by negotiation seems to have been scrapped or unconsidered).
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.
I can't.
wendifur
Lowtax
drew
cmdrtaco
jatman
I choose CowboyNeal.
I only knew one name, once, because the other mod showed him the finger and started another sub. I followed the drama, agreed he was a dick and moved to the new sub.
PS: actually, I remember heroofwar and pinko from HQGifs because they're part of the meta jokes of the sub.
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
"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.
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.
"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.
This is quite an escalation though.
I'll be doing the strike, and possibly an extended strike. Then I'll briefly return to see where the communities I follow are migrating to. After that I'll have no more need for reddit since most of the communities I follow are tech related and will almost certainly be looking for a new home should the behavior at the top continue.
Doesn't always happens but it can happen and we can still hope.
The mobile site and official app have terrible UX and bugs that make the whole experience rather infuriating.
Alien Blue, BaconReader, Narwhal, and then eventually Apollo. All of them great apps, and that was Reddit for me.
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!).
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.
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.
That's actually one of the things that I dislike most about the site, and the reason I've stopped using it: there's no institutional memory. Subreddits can have two stickied posts. One of them is usually some sort of daily discussion thread and the other is some sort of announcement. Anything that isn't stickied will fall off eventually even if it would stay active otherwise. On traditional forums, replying to a post bumped it to the top. Most posts would be recent, but not all. Posts died when people stopped replying to them. And you could have as many stickies as you liked. Most forums had threads that were dozens or hundreds of pages long. For example, MTG the Source has a 399 page thread about the Merfolk legacy deck which was started in 2008. The most recent reply was on the 26th of March this year - it's still active. You just don't get that sort of thing on Reddit. So you get people asking really basic questions forever.
I think Reddit can be great for beginners to a hobby or a topic. It tends to cater to them relatively well. You can get lots of upvotes on your "Hey I made my first [X]" post, and the culture encourages people to hold the hands of people with basic questions. On traditional forums, the culture was usually "RTFM noob, read the sticky". Less kind? Yes. More productive? Yes. People get burnt out answering basic questions repeatedly pretty quickly. Subreddits have to invent all these new ways of maintaining information (subreddit wikis, sticky threads with links to other threads and external links, off-site information linked from the sidebar, etc).
I think Reddit has the same problem just over a longer timescale. Discord can't maintain a conversation for much more than an hour. Reddit can't maintain a conversation for much more than a day. On both, people try to work around it by having special channels or posts that have links to external resources, etc. But what those communities should actually use is phpBB.
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.
There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't replaced.
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.
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.
From casual use alone this isn't clear to me can you explain?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
edit: presumably, https://tildes.net/ with an s
Worked great for Google+!
At first glance it looks like a nice place. Most other alternatives seem to turn into a right-wing hell-hole quite fast. So I understand the need to let new people slowly trickle in.
Can drop it to vildravn@gmail.com, don't think HN has DMs.
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.
It just doesn't fulfill the same purpose. IME, I ignore discords from most subreddits because they do basically nothing for me unless it's a topic i'm extremely interested and engaged in.
Regardless of anything discord does, the lack of searchability will always be a core problem compared to reddit.
Improved fork: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think so. I would rather say Reddit made Trump president, so the US establishment got pissed off. Then Reddit appeases them.
But several times, mostly when the controversy got too hot, the admins have killed subreddits, like /r/The_Donald, /r/incels, and /r/FatPeopleHate.
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.
The point of free speech is to protect against "the vast majority of people". The vast majority of people are against lgbt, atheism, etc. Do you think such content should be banned as well? What if the vast majority of people want huckleberry finn banned? The vast majority of people was once against women's rights, civil rights, freeing the slaves, etc. Rights exist to guard against the mob.
> And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.
That's fine. You can be pro-censorship. It's a valid opinion to hold. And certainly there is a lot of trash online. What I despise are people who are pro-censorship and yet claim to be for free speech.
Also, my point isn't whether I agree or disagree with the content on reddit. My point was there was a time when reddit prided itself on being a free speech platform. As long as it was legal, it was allowed. That changed. Not because the "vast majority" wanted it but because a select group of elites wanted to install a censorship regime on reddit. Reddit was never a democracy. And censorship came to reddit because the business and media elites demanded it.
This is a very common strawman that I see. Sure, not a lot of people are in favor of literally infinite amounts of free speech.
But nobody claimed that. Instead, people are claiming that there can be a wide range in support for free speech, and even if someone is OK with banning death threads and CSAM, that such a person could still be very much on the pro free speech side.
So yes, someone can be more in favor of free speech than you are, because they do not want legal speech to be banned on major platforms, even if you can nitpick their position and find some extreme outlyier hypothetical where they are not 1 million percent in favor of everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's heavily censored but that's fine as it exists to serve a niche business community. And HN never claimed to be a free speech platform like reddit did.
> dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while
He does that for sure, but he also censors heavily to meet the corporate, social, etc agenda.
When the admins and power mods of reddit decided censor more, HN is one of the censorship models they looked to - the psychological tricks, front running, shadow banning, etc.
Two completely different platforms that were never in competition with each other. I think you dont know what youre talking about.
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.
No need to worry, any mention of HN is being mostly censored in all the "Reddit blackout" propoganda Discords now there's actual real discussion happening here about how the strike is stupid and just a vocal minority of mods taking the users for a ride and they can't downvoted those comments into non existence.
I really hope not. It would be the eternal September for HN.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit has no real moat.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama, too.
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.
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.
What is this based on? All of the third party clients that I've used don't show reddit ads, so as long as I'm using the client, it's a cost sink for reddit. I don't contribute content.
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.
> 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?
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
And when I went to log out of reddit, I got https://www.redditstatic.com/youbrokeit3.png
For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2].
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
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?
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.
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.
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?
This may be myopic though.
If you start out at $5/month. $2.50 goes to reddit. $1.50 goes to apple. That leaves a buck a user, 960k earnt. The first tax calculator I found for novia scotia estimates $489,203 tax owed on that. So that's $470k/year. (Ignoring the difference between CDN and USD, because it makes relatively little difference to the tax due.)
I'd be curious how many users you could keep migrating from $5-once to $5/month.
They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.
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.
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
Apollo’s dev never released the source code to the app, only the server which sends out push notifications.
And why? Before a few days ago, it wasn’t an issue at all.
While it's still here: https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/145y787/tutorial...
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w... ("Why not just increase the price of Apollo" section)
Telling the devs about the change 2 months before applying it, low balling the price at first, smiting them at every corner, while not having any room for schedule adjustment... is just unreasonable for a change of that order of magnitude.
Reddit shows absolutely no willingness to make that relationship work, so it's kinda dead whichever way you look at it.
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.
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.
The Reddit protest does not stand alone and is not caused by u/spez or Reddit management or whatever. There is a vastly broader context here. What will be the lasting effects of a migration away from Reddit, or of a management change, or of a structural change in how this and other websites are administered?
I couldn't care less about Reddit because I don't use it and don't like the posts and discussion on there. At the same time, I do care, because I know many of the Reddit users and moderators are also probably going to end up here, and for the above reasons.
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.
https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/reddark for a webclient
Not sure why. Maybe I'm missing something about what they chose to display.
edit: I see now, as it clearly says at the top of the page, it’s for subreddits that “are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Anything that would take functionality or access away isn't "evil" it merely decreases the value proposition potentially putting it below a threshold where its not worth bothering to provide the content that make's reddit worth visiting leaving the shell of reddit owned by its corporate overlords worth little.
The protest is demonstrating to Reddits CEO that it is in fact a negotiation because while they have no right to tell Reddit how to run its ship they don't have to join they voyage much less act as crew.
It's not their job to make Reddit profitable. If they wanted reddit to be profitable they could have not spent years adding negative value to the platform and wasting expensive developer hours. Alternatively they could have made third party app access a paid feature instead of asking developers to predict and then pay for usage.
Sure, this would make sense, but obviously there's a lot of moralized rhetoric being thrown around here which go beyond a dispassionate expression of "if you do this Reddit will no longer be personally valuable to me and I will leave." Uncharitably, people are trying to wrap up their ill-based moral indignation in these dispassionate expressions - "if you do this than I'll be so outraged that Reddit will no longer be personally valuable to me and I will leave." The moral indignation still lacks justification, though.
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.
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If anyone wants to fund the development of a platform like this let me know lol
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).
Of course an independent judiciary system to keep the powers at be in check.
I'm going to be a virtual lawyer that specializes in subreddit law.
Seriously, do you have any clue how much just YouTube alone spends on content moderation? Or Facebook? These are absolutely massive investments.
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.
You bring up legitimate concerns and you're met with either stony silence, or you get called an asshole.
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.
If a community bans you it’s the wrong community for you, it’s not a conspiracy at play, you just don’t belong.
Find the people who do share your views and go play in that sandbox.
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.
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.
They are free to run the biz into the ground, won’t be the first or last to do so. Meanwhile YouTube will keep printing cash.
also ... nothing.
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.
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.
It does matter that people have identified a trend of corporate behavior, and are finding ways to take stands against it.
Do people forget that making a subreddit is free?
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
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.
All of this has left a sour taste in their mouths. They also see the writing on the wall; they'll shut down old.reddit.com, push more ads via the official app, and continue to milk as much money as possible.
The claim that it's not profitable seems kind of crazy to me. They have a huge amount of data on their users to target ads. It's mostly text content so the bandwidth shouldn't be horrible. Maybe I'm naive, but how can Facebook make so much money and yet they can't make a profit? It smells like poor management to me.
The rest of the ad inventory is more or less anonymous and gives very poor roi to spend ads against. That's why Reddit has a total revenue of like $100m vs $50b+ for facebook.
Maybe they're doing some sophisticated tracking of users by interest and showing relevant ads there but somehow I doubt it.
Click uBlock Origin extension -> click gears -> click "My Filters" tab -> paste this line
||reddit.com^$all
i found myself unconsciously opening reddit.com and starting to scroll and consume content mindlessly ... only to realize after a few seconds that it happened... and then closing the browser
I suspected i had a habit ...but only realizing now the autopilot effect of it
Reddark, the Twitch stream, the Discord, the Lemmings instances popping up, the way people are talking about this situation. I'm so sad, and so FREAKING PROUD.
I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible
If they're not breaking even with revenue then that money starts to run out quite quickly.
Venture capital funds are for a limited time - e.g. five years. At the end of the time, the fund is liquidated - the companies are either sold, or closed down.
They can sell to another round of VC funding, sell to a competitor (who wants to "acquihire" the team), or by IPO.
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.
At my company, my small team ends up doing about 80% of the work, while four other teams, each with 10-plus members, seem to do absolutely nothing.
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.
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.
New chat is only available on the new site and the latest mobile apps, so it’s also likely a way to funnel people towards those. IIRC legacy chat was also available on old reddit and the older versions of the apps, but never the 3rd party ones, which only had PMs.
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 $$$.
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™ 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).
I wouldn’t call all that “nothing”
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.
The gist was that the function started out with a (fixed-size!) malloc, then copied the source key while applying the substitution cypher into the buffer, and then returned the result of calling a JNI function (NewStringUTF, IIRC) with the buffer, but did not actually free the buffer (which wasn't necessary in the first place). And this function apparently gets called quite often.
I'm scratching my head that the general attitude seems to be that Reddit just shouldn't get paid.
That will probably have a knock-on effect across the entire Internet. If users start to accept, for instance, account creation as the cost for entry for consuming content, the Internet will become a very different place. Reddit is one of the only big sites where you don't need an account to consume content, and there are tons of links in and out of the website. Is that about to change?
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.
[nitpicky note: it's iOS, not IOS - the latter being Cisco's one]
This in turn gives Reddit much more control and a very powerful moat.
This in effect discredits almost any alternative by the user base itself, thus giving Reddit control.
No, the real problem is that now on reddit you get side-wide banned by the administrators for saying words that they've deemed to be unspeakable slurs, regardless of any context. You might want to debate whether it is a slur on a debate subreddit. You might want to talk about how you were shouted at on the subway. You might want to talk about the fact everyone used to use it, and now doesn't. Today, you have to do all those things without actually saying the word you mean. That's the kind of censorship reddit does now: site-wide, unappealable, automated and contextless, based on keywords and not intent.
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.
Once you take away the “grossly illegal activity” dividend neither is nearly as rosy as it seems.
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.
"Watch the Reddit strike unfold live"?
Plenty of other companies have figured out how to price APIs in a way that works for developers: AWS, Twilio, Stripe, Okta, MongoDB, and Plaid, to name a few.
It's not like these companies aren't making money with their API pricing; they've all generated enough in revenues and profits to drive their valuations into multiple billions of dollars.
It's as if Reddit didn't do the basic work of rolling out API pricing: talk to customers, find price points they can live with, offer prioritized customer support in exchange for API charges, etc. Literally hundreds of software companies have followed this playbook, and have rolled out API prices without drama.
Am I missing something here?
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.
The core site functionality has not changed in over a decade, there’s no need to try to be Instagram.
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.
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!"
The same way Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and other loss-making companies do? Bring in new financing and new advertisers, fire staff.
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…)
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?
TD was quarantined under false pretenses (ironic ones too, since a very pro police sub was accused of being anti police) and then basically killed while pretending it was alive.
KIA is alive but heavily muzzled by admins on some topics such as a prohibition to mention trans in any shape or form. The mod takeover was because the original founder who didn't use the site took over it once and destroyed it something.
There's been other cases where founders wreck havoc after years of not being active and were removed.
> Of those who are active, most just comment
You don't need the 'vast majority' or 'most'. You just need a few.
> It's a vanishingly small group who actually want to moderate
Not really, more people thank you seem to think are desperate for any sort of internet power.
But Reddit doesn't need shitty mods. They need good mods. Shitty mods kill communities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
CEO and everyone that though this is the way to monetize need to go.
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.
2. Moderator actions are exempt from the API charges... But I think this decision was made after things had blown up.
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.
Yeah, I don't believe it. Go back and read his posts from 5+ years ago when Imgur went from $25/mo to $250/mo for 7.5 million requests.
You are telling me he is still grandfathered on a plan from over 5 years ago? As one of their heaviest API users? (probably)
That was 5+ years ago, it's only gotten more expensive.
Also, he implemented a caching system that saved some 18 million requests (I think 90%, forget off the top of my head).
But he'll never talk about how even if he's being completely honest, he's getting an INSANE deal from Imgur.
The same plan today would cost $3.3K to Reddit's $12K. But he'd never tell you that.
But more importantly, it's patently obvious that Reddit's sole goal was to shutoff every 3rd party app, because that is exactly what happened. This isn't just about Christian, literally every other 3rd party app developer found the new API terms untenable as well. If it was just Christian being unreasonable, as you are suggesting, but some other app developer ran the numbers and thought "well, that's OK, I could still make a business off that", they would be thrilled to come in and fill the void with Apollo leaving.
None of them are doing that. Your point is totally moot.
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.
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
Wow, that'll really show them who's boss! /s
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."
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.)
> 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.
Probably had to shut the database instance down once they exceeded the AWS free tier limits and realised that internet infrastructure actually costs real money and doesn't run on magical free fairy dust like the protesters seem to think.
Without a very clear statement of demands -- what it would take to end the action -- that everyone (or at least majority) of those participating understand and agree too -- it makes this even less effective as a form of pressure.
Those planning on going away "unless the issue is adequately addressed", what does that mean? Completely ending and reverting all plans to charge for API? That's not what they say, they say "adequately addressed", so that probably isnt' consensus (and probably isn't winnable? Or reasonable?). Making the charges some kind of reasonable... so every mod just decides on their own if any change announced is "adequate" or not?
What makes a boycott most likely to be effective as a pressure tactic is if the target knows exactly what they have to do to end the boycott, and has some confidence that if they do it the boycott will indeed end.
Now, whether this is actually winnable here (and via this tactic) is another question, but you might as well do your best if you're trying it.
I feel like at least some of the people participating in this boycott are just sick of reddit (and the internet, and society) and would be just as happy to see it burn though.
There's very little discussion of strategy and tactics in this thread -- how we can actually win, when organizing collectively for collective demands. If we want to be able to win, it's a good thing to think and talk about, not just react instinctively.
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
Not likely. Reddit already controls the r/popular feed which is the default experience and highly influences traffic.
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.
So, being anti-hate-speech is a bad thing, to you?
You seem to be very principled but from what you have written so far you don't seem to acknowledge or understand that some people operate in bad faith. This comes across particularly when you state that people should operate within reddit's rules but neglect to take into account that reddit is not adhering to the rules themselves and that this is a breach of any ability to have a civil relationship. This is also frequently the case with the loud 'free speech' cries by 'bad targets'. Many of them have no intention of ever giving anyone who disagrees with them the same offer. How do you deal with people like that except to disregard them entirely?
That is indeed the point of principles. If you drop your principles as soon as the going gets tough, then they weren't actually principles to begin with.
> Many of them have no intention of ever giving anyone who disagrees with them the same offer.
Letting your opponents define your own principles is another mistake that unprincipled people often make.
Principles are important not because they help you defeat your enemies. They matter in and of themselves.
Something that is used to fight your enemies is called a strategy or a tactic. Thats completely different from a principle.
If you want to say that you don't care about principles at all, and are willing to do anything and everything that is the most effective to defeat your enemies no matter what it is, just say that instead of talking about principles or morals or values.
That way at least we'd be on the same page as to what the conversation is about.
No idea matters exclusively 'for its own sake'. To think like that is to abandon utility and reason for dogma.
> If you want to say that you don't care about principles at all, and are willing to do anything and everything that is the most effective to defeat your enemies no matter what it is, just say that instead of talking about principles or morals or values.
When were you at all confused? I asked a specific leading question and gave a specific reason why the answer was what I lead it to be. Please let me know how I could have been more clear without being patronizing.
“Utility” is an idea, too, and now we know which idea you value for its own sake.
Utility: The quality or condition of being useful; usefulness. [0]
for its own sake: if something is done for its own sake, it is done for the value of the experience itself, not for any advantage it will bring [1]
If something is useful, it exists because of the advantage it will bring. The two things are antonyms.
Think a bit more next time you try and dismiss someone offhand with a clever sounding quip. Just because a quip sounds clever does not make it so.
Correction. Those who didn't love it were banned or left or were censored out of default views.
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.
It works great!
Frustrating the people you want to support you rarely works.
I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits has tanked over time.
People have been complaining about decreasing quality of content on reddit since the beginning of reddit.
Edit: 1 minute later already 658.
Edit: 2 minutes later 661.
Edit: 2 3/4 hours later 840.
The fun has begun ;)
“These subreddits are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after. ”
UTC would be reasonable standard meaning 6 and half hours still to go.
Remember, when you wake up on June 11th in the USA, June 11th is almost over for most of the world.
I'll really miss a couple of the good communities I've found there if this adventure ends up being fatal.
The live site has been difficult to reach. (https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/issues/49)
It must be a pretty stressful coding session now.
If you want change, vote with your eyes and go elsewhere out of reach of absurdity.
... I'll see myself out.
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?
You could make your Api usage go really down this way
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.
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.
Context for those who missed it:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/02/20/carmen-ortiz-investigat...
I think of Sci-hub and Alexandra are the continuation of Aarons fatal push:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
Ongoing attention on the circumstances:
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...
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.
There's 3.5 million subs.
Less than 8000 are participating in the 'blackout'
That's 87% of ~8000, not the whole of Reddit.
Is reddit even safe for younger folks or folks at the office?
About 3%
> What leverage do users have here
None
Don't hurt the people you want on your side.
Because 99 days out of 100 the majority of people including Redditors hate Reddit mods for being power tripping egomaniacs who actively censor any discussion that they don't agree with. It's a literal meme at this point how bad Reddit mods are - but today they are the 'heroes' because it suits the narrative.
It's amazing how many people have bought into the mods agenda regarding this whole 'strike'
1. Technical. I don't think it's apples to apples. You don't need a single You don't need a single fediverse instance to handle 9 digit MAUs, and if you think of each subreddit as a different instance of a fedi-server then I think it would hold up, and I'm sure it could with some work.
2. Social: I don't think the strike/black out will succeed in any significant way unless the mods have more leverage. Threatening to go fedi, and starting to do it for some of the subreddits, will dramatically change the power dynamics. As a thought experiment, game out the current situation. Reddit needs to make money, and if they want to IPO (i am anti IPO but that's not my choice) then they will also be expected to grow exponentially. They can't do that with third party apps that don't show ads so they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The community very much wants to have these communities, and everyone knows that. If they can stick to the strike it's mutual self-destruction but from reddits perspecgive given in is also self destruction. The CEO is right, the community likely won't be able to maintain it for all kinds of reasons. The main one being reddit can just make the subs public again if they want to. So what leverage do they have? None if reddit believes their only option is reddit.
You make a good point about leverage.
From there I started wondering if there was a way to distribute the costs to the users, and I think there is a way to do that, but will users really pay because of abstract ideals? I don't think so, and I think this is the fundamental problem. Users really want these types of communities and social media, but the vast vast majority will not pay for it, so you get forced into the ad model. Overtime that turns into what we're seeing with reddit, in order for reddit to grow, they have to find ways to grow the ad model and locking down third party apps becomes an existential thing for them. Not sure how we get out of this bind, or if it's just noise, people will complain but they won't pay directly so the complaints will never affect any change.
I’ll see them on the new site
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.
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.
This strike includes moderators actively locking down subreddits (whether making them private or read only) thus making Reddit less usable during the strike.
I think about the Tower of Flints.
Also, have a nice day.
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.
looks too tiny tbh.
There's more than 5000 subs. There are millions of them. These are big subs
As of now, six of the top ten subreddits have disabled posting. That doesn't seem tiny to me
I'm shutting down roughly 50 just before midnight CEST and I expect things to accelerate with the date change at GMT.
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.
I expect that quite a few will survive, despite people saying it is "impossible."
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.
Well to be fair, that appears to be exactly what was happening until the dev of Apollo spat the dummy and turned it into a public mega drama before actually consulting with the users of his App on how much they'd be willing to pay.
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245721 (there's probably a better source linked in there somewhere)
Soooo yeah the dev of Apollo should have just sat back and let Reddit's CEO control the narrative and tell lies to make itself look better?
No, users do, using their web client of choice for the site.
Reddit is fighting its own users, and fighting what it used to mean to be a web site.