Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

36 pointsaio229 comments

I know why it happened, but who started it and how did they start it?

It grew organically to the best of my knowledge. But the extent and addiction of various mods' dependency on these third party apps was something that came as a surprise to me. Didn't knew they actually depended so much more for moderation tools on these 3rd parties than the official reddit platform itself.

Someone must have been the first to suggest it

Sometimes, the time and situation has an energy of its own. It didn't matter whether Leibniz invented calculus or Netwton did, someone had to do it at that time (as a matter of fact, they both did independently in their respective countries).

If I had to guess it would be on some private mod chat like discord or something, and probably more than one subreddit mod group decided independently since it's a known way to protest. I am curious too, but it grew so quickly that establishing the origin would be difficult

Sure maybe by a few milliseconds, but I guarantee "boycott" jumped into thousands of people's heads the immediate moment they read about the pricing changes.

It's pretty common for subreddits to do the blackout thing for various causes (eg. net neutrality) and has been for years.

This was the largest one I’ve seen by a very long shot. The last one was when Reddit hired someone who worked with her father despite knowing he was a sexual predator who had been charged with over 20 crimes and censored people who used her name in comments to criticize her, which didn’t last very long and ended pretty quickly with Reddit firing her.

I had been under the impression it was relatively common knowledge that the reason Reddit had been keeping both the API and old.reddit alive was that power users - both moderators and the most prolific content submitters - disproportionately used those interfaces and were considered too valuable to alienate. I have been surprised not to see much discussion about what, if anything, changed about that situation leading up to the current kerfluffle. Have enough power users been moving over to new.reddit and the official apps? Or has Reddit's calculus as to the importance of that segment of the user base shifted?

They want to IPO and that means bringing everybody onto an experience they can control- in terms of ads, showing awards and any other features.

They also found out that GPT 2.0 was trained on reddit links and that other companies were using their API to train their generative AIs. There would have still been pushback with the API lockdown, but it wouldn't have been nearly as large if they'd updated the official app to include better mod tools, features to help those with disabilities, and a better user experience first.

archives of most of the site's content are already available elsewhere on the internet, I don't see why anyone would be using the reddit api to get that data, if they knew what they were doing.

I think the first one who talked about it was Christian Selig the developer of the popular third-party Reddit app Apollo. He said that it would cost him $20 million per year to keep his Apollo app running if he had to pay Reddit's new API pricing structure.

I don't remember seeing him post anything about calling for a blackout, but his posts definitely kicked off my awareness and I think many others as well. I'd be very interested to see if he mentioned it before the 10th, which IIRC (probably not - it may have been 8th or something) is when there was a tipping point and a bunch of mods announced they'd be going black. It seems against his personality, he doesn't seem like the type to call for action like that. Tried googling it but didn't find anything during a quick search

He specifically disavowed (but supported, indirectly) the blackouts at first. He initially didn't want to risk Reddit retaliating at him for calling for a blackout when (at the time) communication was still somewhat positive.

But he did acknowledge the protest, which I'm sure gave it a lot of attention it didn't have before.

i mean I guess Spez started it by trying to monetize the API, unless you meant who started the idea of a blackout as a reaction to that, in which case Im not sure.

That’s not a fair characterization of the problem.

It’s been known for a while that Reddit was planning to monetize their API, and that was never an issue.

The issue was the incredibly high pricing of the API (which would cost some external apps $20 million a year) combined with a surprisingly short-notice notification.

This combination is what made it impossible for third-party apps to adopt, forcing them to make the decision to shut down instead.

Where has it been known? They told the Apollo dev in Jan/Feb of this year that there were going to be no big API changes this year.

Nice try /u/spez

Hey man, I'm just curious

he fracked around and found out

it was reddit themselves manifesting a reactive egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore

u/spez

Hey, I wanna figure my stuff out.

fuck u/spez

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