Reddit CEO Triples Down, Insults, Whines | Hacker News Reader

Reddit CEO Triples Down, Insults, Whines

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My favorite subreddit essentially killed itself, locking all new posts, with a stickied thread linking to alternatives. I tried one of the alternatives (a Lemmy instance) and like it significantly more.

There are a couple subs keeping me on reddit, but for less time, and I'm less engaged. They could be replaced with a modicum of effort.

Financially it seems like Reddit is between a rock and a hard place, and has opted to pick up the rock and bash itself in the head.

Love to see it, but it reminds me of the videogame industry with their trashy practices and they're still loaded. Pre-orders, microtransactions, selling literally the same game 10 times over with minor changes...

Could it be that your perception of the evils of the industry are not shared broadly?

People in general like playing games and don’t mind paying for them. See: Video game industry is loaded.

The whole market is tilted towards "Whale" purchasers who outspend everybody else by a longshot. That's why its all gamepasses, lootboxes, and micro-transactions.

"Whales" present the same problem to video game companies as a single large customer has on a small business or a lucrative vertical in large businesses (see Google, Facebook). That outsized revenue stream dictates where the rest of the product goes because nothing brings in close to the same revenue.

And yet we have games like Assassins Creed Odyssey/Valhalla and Horizon Forbidden West that are loved and don’t require any extra cost after purchase. Games are the cheapest entertainment out there outside of borrowing books from the library.

Are you really talking about asscreed as a game with no microtransactions?

I was at a cool hifi listening party in the bay yesterday and was going to post a picture on /r/audiophile, then I saw it’s still closed, and I realized that subtracts nothing from my life. Instead I just enjoyed the event more. This whole debacle is the best thing Reddit ever could have done for me.

The only social media I haven’t removed from my life is right here, on hacker news. Everything else gave me the same impression as you had. When it’s gone, nothing’s missing and if anything, something is gained. That was a very uncomfortable realization after using it for over a decade, but it was totally welcome once it clicked.

With hacker news, I don’t know… It doesn’t have the same vibe as something like Facebook. We all seem to be interested in the general themes here, conversation leans towards constructive, and there isn’t much noise to filter from signals. I wouldn’t mind finding that elsewhere, but no amount of feed configuring on Reddit or Twitter ever got me where I wanted to be.

Whenever I click a link over to Reddit I get the sense that I really haven’t missed anything since the last time, however many months before.

The hive mindedness of Reddit only gives the perception that it is actually useful or contains a trove of valuable information. In actuality it is foolish to follow just about any advice from Reddit, as the most visible comments are merely the ones that best fit with the hive mind and aren’t necessarily indicative of reality. Prime examples of this are relationship, legal, and health advice, but I’ve also found it extends to more niche areas as well.

I don’t just regret walking around for a few months stinking of Old Spice - I regret drinking Apple Cider vinegar, recommending my sister look into nootropic drugs, and arguing with family members based on flimsy political talking points.

So apple vinegar is a hoax?

BTW was it a reflex that you capitalized it? ;)

If they’re on an Apple device, it’ll automatically capitalize it.

That's Nuts.

Edit: Sorry, I'm on a Nuts device.

I’m not sure if it is entirely a hoax, but I had to get quite a number of fillings to the sides of my teeth where I believe the acid damaged them. I didn’t notice any positive side effects.

Also, I tried to correct the capitalisation but it auto correct again, and I couldn’t be bothered to fix it ;)

To be fair, and I don’t say this in a spirit of criticism toward you, but taking medical advice from Internet strangers is not recommended generally.

Many (myself included) have relied upon Reddit in the past for niche advice or recommendations. My key is to only do so in applying topics I already understand enough to apply safely, so I know whether I’m reading a clever idea or someone talking out their ass.

I’m going to miss two things and both are replaceable with a bit of legwork: animal gifs and niche hobby sub wikis. I find the former calming when I’m stressed out and Reddit was a convenient place to find them. Reddit certainly does not own a monopoly on cute critters though. The latter, even if I never posted, often had a great “getting started” guide with collections of community advice. It just means a little more googling for me

I’d say Imgur is remarkably better than Reddit for the purpose of cute animals.

Some of the sub wikis are troves of data that aren't elsewhere available in compiled form, like the mechanical keyboard one. It's not exactly the library of Alexandria, but there's something of value being lost.

What's funny is that the Mechanical Keyboard one is sort of a refugee from another set of communities. And much of the knowledge also exists on the other communities.

If you go back to the early 2010s, there was Geekhack. Back then, the hobby was much smaller and you had a lot of stuff done with Model Ms (the default "good keyboard", walkthroughs on how to order the few mechanical boards available from Japan or Taiwan, and the beginnings of group-buy culture. Deskthority emerged a few years later, and developed a bit of its own voice-- more of an EU audience, and these days more oriented around vintage keyboards than new stuff. Their wiki is still probably the deepest resource for some vintage switches and boards.

Meanwhile, there was a weird figure who was fairly large on both communities: "ripster"-- while incredibly knowledgable, a lot of people found his presence chafing. He eventually took the reins of /r/mk and faded away from the other communities.

If they didn't spend money on a stupid number of employees, endlessly developing "features" people don't want or use, self-hosting images and all of the rest... they wouldn't be in a financial bind. Their desperation to go public has driven their behavior for many years now, and the failure to understand that they don't have a 'trillion dollar product' has led them here.

It really is frustrating when companies decide to do anything except focus on and improve their proven core product, chasing dreams of wholly unrealistic valuations.

Improving their core product? That's entirely the problem. The product was finished 10 years ago. Nothing needed to be changed.

Improving the UX for moderators and fighting spam are two things they could never spend too much money on.

The search feature could also famously use an upgrade.

They could have nearly replaced Google if they wanted to.

True, though there’s always room for polish but nobody ever seems to bother with that.

The comment counts are never right.

https://nft.reddit.com/

> CryptoSnoos NFTs

> Non-fungible, highly collectible, and ready to take off

> Take advantage of this rare opportunity to own a piece of Reddit history—snag a CryptoSnoo NFT built on the Ethereum blockchain and start your collection.

Some time and money well spent there.

actually, i believe this was very profitable for reddit.

the others examples mentioned above are more pertinent.

I think the opposite, though I admit I'm very negative on NFTs and crypto. IIRC their NFT snoos came out well after the NFT bubble. A probably not insignificant amount of Dev time went into this, and I can't imagine it got much traction.

Of course, it was only this year that I realized reddit even has these snoo avatar things on people's profiles. So maybe I'm wildly off

Sounds like a security. Is reddit licensed to sell securities?

Why would you need a licence? It's innovation bro. I'm innovating with my new scheme. I call it "scheme certificates", basically you buy them off me and then I give you a percentage back each month which we'll call scheme earnings.

It doesn't sound as a security since the profits, dividents or any monetary value tied to these NFTs aren't mentioned.

They were just selling a feature on their website (ability to use an image in some way) with blockchain used as a way to keep transaction and ownership records.

Just like skins and items in the games that aren't securities with a COOL'n'TRENDY way to store database records.

And some subreddits reopened but in an interesting way... https://old.reddit.com/r/pics

That's because they are aggressively removing moderators to force reopening subs so a few of them decided to reopen in a unusable way

Can I ask you something?

I grew up in the 2000s. I've constantly seen people on the internet complaining about its modern state, saying the internet of the 90s was so much better, less spam, filled with smart people, etc. Basically saying that the mass influx of people is what turned the internet into the cesspool it is today.

I of course never got to experience this, so all my life I've only been able to dream about what this is like. But this Lemmy / Fediverse stuff seems promising. A discussion platform that requires technical expertise to engage in (for now) while also being completely decentralized... seems analogous to the early internet for sure.

Am I correct in this assumption? Are these platforms home to high quality discussion and little spam? If so, then I think I'd bite the bullet and try to figure out how to actually set this stuff up on my PC.

I don't know if holds for everyone, but I would say that it was more innocent, more intellectual, less comprehensive, and therefore less apathetic because everything hadn't "already been done".

There also was no pyramid scheme vibe because advertisement hadn't taken hold as kind of an important part of all things. Paying for hosting and thinking about like becoming viral were not concerns that I recognized then.

It was "better" like how the town you probably live in was "better" (I.e. cheaper and kinder, because it was smaller and emptier)

Getting on mastodon, specifically functional.cafe absolutely reminds me of “the old internet”/bbs era. That is to say it has been delightfully nerdy! (activity pub needs to figure out support for door games though)

In the 90s there was a phrase called “surf the web”. You would find a website, then click though links to different websites (usually through an affiliate/partner section on the sites menu bar) and end up in all sorts of places. You might start out looking at Dragon Ball Z gifs and end up discovering emulators and roms. You might find something cool, amazing, personal, illegal, scary, or pornographic. It was the Wild West and there was a massive sense of unguided, uncontrolled discovery.

Reminds me of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

I would love for this kind of thing to return to the web. I could see it being a fun way to search for new io games.

IMO you can experience a form of those good old days if you find an organically created community which doesn't care about popularity. There's a few on discords. Some on matrix. Some very small fedi instances. Smaller Lemmy boards will likely feel similar too.

It's basically the effect of people interested enough to be already connected on some level in a small group, but not trivial to find and flooded with people. Any group over 200 people losses that charm I think.

The last one I joined was a discord for a smaller podcast with maybe 20 active users and it's lots of fun.

I started using the Internet in the mid-90s, back when it was still primarily a communications platform. It's now primarily an economic platform with a side dish of conflict promotion. (But of course the Internet is huge, and you can find worthwhile things and communities if you try.)

But back in the 90s (and moreso before that), the average Internet user was more technically minded. For instance, everyone on IRC had a basic sense of how NAT affected TCP connection setup and whether a private message or DCC chat would be more appropriate, and who should initiate the DCC chat. They had a sense of what a T1 line was and had a better mental model of how pieces connected together. Nowadays, the average user doesn't have to navigate technical issues and can only be trusted to know the difference between swiping left and swiping right.

This makes it easy for major services to pimp their own users and make obscene amounts of money.

That said, the dream of the 90s is alive in Lemmy and other new technologies. It would be sad if you didn't explore what's out there.

The Internet was a place where people shared knowledge. Now it is a giant ad for shopping.

People were given the sum of human knowledge and instead of becoming more self sufficient they have become more reliant. Take for instance repair cafes, whose goal isn't to repair stuff for people but to teach people that things can be repaired which if you think about it for a bit is mind boggling.

Instead of taking advantage of knowledge and experience humanity has doubled down on denial, hatred, superstition and outright craziness. Witness the response to COVID and current political polarization happening everywhere.

Instead of sharing information, now a search of the Internet find SEO gibberish, scams, fake reviews and all manner of horrors that we never expected possible in the 80s and 90s from the Internet.

In the 90s you'd go on the internet to find or share information and communicate, and when you were done you'd go back to whatever you were doing.

Today, you go on the internet and oooo cats... wikipedia lookup "polydactyl", get ads for cat toys, check to see if there are any reviews for cat toys, ... 3 hours later, you forgot what you started to do but the Amazon Prime truck is stopped at your house dropping off 17 boxes of cat stuff. And you don't own a cat.

The Internet became corporatized and web surfing died. Search engines stopped promoting novel content, website design became homogenized, and everything became commercialized. Ironically, Hacker News with its lack of ads, niche audience, and unconventional web design is more akin to the 90s Internet experience.

What was the subreddit?

> “It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them,” Huffman told NPR in his first interview since nearly 9,000 subreddits staged a 48-hour boycott. “But I think the greater Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.”

I think what I'm struck by is less his attitude and his approach, and more by his sheer incompetence. He's not just a villain in this case, he's really bad at it.

I admit that personally I'm only lurking using the new web ui, both for desktop and mobile so this API change doesn't really affect me, for now...

I don't know if the quality of posts will degrade as time goes on, but even with that, there's some signs that reddit also don't want to hold the status quo for their web-based interface.

In desktop I see more ads are posing as legitimate posts appeared even when adblocker is on.

Sometimes I cannot hold on my login session and just learned recently that reddit is trying A/B testing that some accounts cannot login at all on the browser.

Let's say that I'm skeptical that reddit can hold on the content quality like today.

In the old web UI it’s a lot more clear what posts are ads and which ones aren’t, and a lot of the garbage no one uses like RPAN, the TikTok thing, etc. aren’t there. It’s no wonder why they fucking hate it so much lol

It seems obvious that Reddit could have altered the rules for 3rd party apps and made them include adverts in exchange for continued free API access, or am I missing a reason why this wouldn’t work?

It absolutely could work, but then they’re giving up extended monetization opportunities with the extra data they’d be collecting from pushing users into the official app along with the ability their app gives them to shove whatever they’re selling in your face.

Reddit dislikes third party app users because these users aren’t interested in anything but essentially original Reddit: a feed of posts sorted by recency and upvotes, with ads clearly marked as ads and no pushiness.

These changes are about exactly one thing: getting LLM companies to pay for data. There's nothing reddit can do to allow app developers to have cheap access and to charge, say, OpenAI a higher rate.

That’s not going to be much of a roadblock for LLM trainers… they crawl the web just as well as they consume API output. I don’t think this will accomplish anything but anger legitimate users.

OpenAI and other LLMs could offer browser extensions that scrape forums and send data off to them in the natural course of web browsing, no API required. No different than Recap for PACER with regards to mechanics.

https://free.law/recap

https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/02/03/pacer-recap-a...

Sam Altman is on reddit's board. If he wants openai to have access to reddit data, he'll get it

Sam Altman's OpenAI already has Reddit's data. He is more interested in making sure nobody else can get it.

I think for a big company they would get sued if they try to build an LLM just on a website's data without paying them anything for it. For a search engine they can do that, but the search engine actually benefits the original sites. An LLM doesn't really send any money towards the original websites.

They already do that, the dataset is called Common Crawl...

If your robots.txt allows access to the user agent crawling (which Reddit does except for a very small denylist), and the crawler isn't making any attempt to bypass the site's security, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on legally.

TOS + require the user to login in to browse Reddit pretty much solves that right?

Going login-only would be suicidal. A large chunk of Reddit’s traffic and probably the majority of new users come from search engines, which login walls lock out. It’s not like Twitter where most growth comes from existing users linking tweets and user profiles.

TOS as far as I know is not legally enforceable, and even if it is there are people in countries that disregard such things who are training LLMs.

Technically they could allowlist Googlebot and deny everything else, but yeah I don't see them really doing that.

It's a legal barrier, not a practical one.

Sure there is. Require apps to be approved by reddit, actually approve them, and monitor API usage to see if it's all reads or a mix of reads and writes

Duh... just make API users pay for the access rather than apps.

That's it, solves all problems, but they aren't interested in that for whatever reason.

If that were true, there are any number of simple solutions that would have allowed third-party mobile apps continued access at a reasonable cost.

I think it's much more about collecting data about users' behavior. The official Reddit app already records every keypress, even text that you delete before submitting.

Tiered pricing? Post/download ratios as a pricing factor? Per-user API keys, where a "human" key is free and restricted to a handful of requests per second, but the "LLM" key opens a full firehose?

I don't think any platform has ever successfully done this. It would require too much auditing to ensure impressions are being tracked correctly.

It's probably possible to automate. Deliver ads with an image that has an identifier unique to the request, and ensure that some percentage of delivered ads have their images accessed.

No one wants to build OR integrate with some bespoke ad server. We want to deal with one of the 3-4 big boys and move on with our lives.

Or made API access require reddit premium

Agreed - an alternative (but much simpler) approach. Users have to pay reddit, and then can use their choice of 3rd party app.

Is there an example of a corporation successfully selling/offering ad enabled API access?

Requiring third party apps to serve ads for you sounds like an huge headache and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done. How do you prevent the ads from causing problems for the “tools” use case? Do ads have to be exempted from e.g. Apollo’s keyword blocks? How can you guarantee to advertisers that their brand safety rules are being followed?

Oh they could make it work. But what they actually want is to funnel people away from 3rd party apps an into the official one.

They could have just removed the API, but instead they set it to a ridiculous price that no app dev can afford. That way they get to shift the blame to those devs and say "see, they just don't want to work with us!"

Or even added API pricing, but made it reasonable and given devs at least 6 months to make it happen. A year, even better, to let existing subscriptions sunset.

I pay $5/month for Ivory to browse Mastadon, and I don’t like Apollo any less.

“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”

Not the same, but this makes me think of that line from Shrek: " Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"

The Reddit protest reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street. I expect it will simply run out of gas as reddit waits out the populist fury.

It may remind you of [any other protest] in that it will end, but the question is whether the 2% of Reddit users responsible for its value and culture go with it.

I think that 2% is also the problem for them. The most active users are also the most deranged

The article mentions, but doesn't get into, Elon Musk. Apparently Spez is a huge Musk wannabe, and is basing his latest set of actions off of that. Viewed through that lense, it all almost makes sense. Why you'd want to be a raging butthole is another story, but that is the path Spez has chosen. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it works out for him.

Spez doesn't realize he's not an eccentric billionaire with a track record of success, and even if he was, Reddit isn't Twitter, and Elon isn't actually doing a good job with Twitter anyway. Maybe Discord forums will become indexable, or maybe lemmy will get to be hosting friendly, or maybe a web3 something will take Reddits place. All I know is both Slashdot.org and Digg.com still resolve, but I haven't been to either in years. They're still up, paying its owners ad revenue from readers. Which, under capitalism is all you can ask for, really.

>and Elon isn't actually doing a good job with Twitter anyway

Are there any user engagement numbers to back this statement up? I constantly see and hear this, but a lot of the people I followed that initially left Twitter for Mastodon after Musk took over have recently returned.

EDITED: not financial, but user engagement.

Fidelity has downgraded their Twitter debt at lest twice now.

From $8.63b in November to $7.8b in January, to $6.55b in April.

I don’t think all of his choices are bad (headcount reduction as an example, but I think he went overboard with it), but there are numbers that back it up somewhat.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/fidelity-marks-down-value...

In addition to what Flutas already posted https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...

> But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its U.S. weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent, the document said.

> That performance is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to the documents and seven current and former Twitter employees.

If that isn't abject failure, what is?

Waterloo baby, it's their Waterloo. Woa Woa Woa.

If that isn't abject failure, what is?

Musk apparently laid of massive numbers of engineers, each news story seemed to grow the tale.

If he laid off 50% of engineers, and the highest paid ones at that, I'd say profits would be up, or at least the same, even with that drop in revenue.

I wonder what the true story is, re: profit, and without any tax savings writedowns / earning reports in rhe mix.

> I'd say profits would be up, or at least the same

Unfortunately, even if that is the case, there's $1B of debt servicing per year which wipes that completely out.

Even in what I think was Twitter's best year, they only made $580M profit (which ended up being a $220M loss because of an $800M settlement) - and that included a much better ad revenue situation, etc.

I should have clarified I'm looking for user engagement numbers, not stock price. There are dozens of Tech stocks that have had prices slashed: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/07/here-are-10-of-the-worst-per...

>If that isn't abject failure, what is?

Users fleeing the platform and no longer providing revenue would be abject failure. Companies pausing advertisement dollars as rates rise and tech generally having a tumultuous time in the market isn't an "abject failure".

advertising revenue isn't stock price

and advertising revenue isn't profit

> Apparently Spez is a huge [Elon] Musk wannabe, and is basing his latest set of actions off of that

Oh yes, NBC had an interview with spez and he said exactly that. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

This is a good analysis, I think.

I was going to say that “my opinion is that he’s doing a bad acting job of an extraterrestrial attempting to play the role of sociopath CEO”, but you capture it much better than I did.

Put another way, everyone reaches their level of mediocrity at some point. He seems to be coasting above his. I wonder what his crash landing will look like.

I don't understand the impulse to aspire to be like an insufferable asshat (musk). Is this some kind of power thing to be a famous/infamous figure of industry that gets to be an absolute piece shit with impunity?

Before Elon people were copycatting Steve Jobs. I think every decade has the Insufferable Successful Asshat that pervades the Id of business owners and managers.

Mortals who are concerned about impermanence deflect their worries and focus on accumulation of wealth and power, controlling others and making supposed success occur in their lives.

that's my opinion

https://youtu.be/Cb458PRJ43s (Louis Rossmann: Reddit CEO learns going to war with the internet is a losing battle)

The second time I arrived at a privatized subreddit, I added all of Reddit to my ublock list. A few days later, I don’t feel like anything is missing

They’ve actually screwed themselves. The 10% or so of people (a guess) who are outraged and have left reddit or locked their communities seem likely to be the small percentage of users who post the most (keeping the site alive for the majority of comparative ‘lurkers’). They’ve pissed off the most devoted people, and the less devoted will just follow the ‘outliers’ to new places.

I have a probably silly question:

Has anybody ever made a mirror of Reddit? Like something somebody could use with Kiwix?

Voat

I thought that was a totally different website. Voat has all of the text from Reddit?

No no, no content from reddit. It was a very similar clone. Plagued by slow speeds and that 'special' crowd from /b/.

Ah, I should clarify. I meant a mirror as in a copy of the content that someone could put on a big drive and search locally.

There were ceddit and removeddit, which kept a copy of everything, for viewing deleted comments/posts.

Maybe someone out there still has an automated dump set up.

There's a reddit community for that too: https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/

Seems to be working though. Some subs are folding despite initial strong conviction

There's no doubt that one way or another the subs are going to come back. Whatever holdouts there are (well, large holdouts anyway) will be forced open one way or another.

The question is how many users will leave once the dust settles, and are those users major contributors or not.

Yeah the forced part was inevitable. Was just surprised that very little of that was necessary though. eg homelab seems to have caved all on its own despite have a very blackout supportive user base

https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/14coph4/rhomelab_i...

Seems the CEO called it right, but as you say long term effects are tbd

Funny, I deleted my account some time ago because I was starting to see how much of a dumpster fire Reddit has become.

Then this happens...

Spez is such a pissbaby lmao

Looks that there is a en masse migration to Raddler and Lemmy

I posted this as a separate "ASK HN" but shouldn't we all just be using GDPR to force Reddit to delete our data? Those of us in Europe, anyway.

At worst, Reddit will break the law.

At best, it forces Reddit to delete data that they apparently consider incredibly valuable.

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