Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@mcapodici

mcapodici/gist:f0676eb8da3e801f41bb28cd9c1d9c84

Created June 18, 2023 07:30
Show Gist options
  • Save mcapodici/f0676eb8da3e801f41bb28cd9c1d9c84 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save mcapodici/f0676eb8da3e801f41bb28cd9c1d9c84 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Hacker New Discussion Text For Training Nano GPT
Raw
gistfile1.txt
wpietri 6 days ago | next [–]
Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit.
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.
reply
jcims 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevant or actively contradictory to user needs. Or just flat out ignoring things users liked, as with them closing down Vine and letting TikTok come in to win as the short, fun video platform.
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.
reply
GolfPopper 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the users and the network as a whole) as something more along the lines of non-profit foundations.
reply
dasil003 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Meh, Twitter and Reddit monetize just fine with ads. The problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die. These are not bad businesses, they're just small compared to Facebook or Google. What's needed is mature leadership that recognizes the value comes from the community, and following the private equity playbook of strip-mining the value is short-sighted.
reply
Wowfunhappy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Meh, Twitter [...] monetize[s] just fine with ads.
Well, not anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
reply
FormerBandmate 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The New York Post has never been profitable under Ruoert Murdoch's ownership. He doesn't care
reply
Prickle 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/...
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!"
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
At the beginning of COVID there was a sense that WFH might be a permanent change and that companies might need to start competing on a lot of social distancing features. Look at Clubhouse exploding then, etc. Doubling the size of your workforce (and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong) is a pretty reasonable bet. It has a known cost (measured in the hundreds of millions to few billions) if you try it and it is unnecessary (which it turned out to be), but a possible "death of the company" result if all the talent is gone just as you need XYZ to be competitive in a new landscape.
reply
re-thc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong
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.
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences. If you hire a bunch of new low level people for a bunch of teams and then prune those same people out, it's tough but doable.
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.
reply
re-thc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences.
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".
reply
marcosdumay 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either.
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.
reply
re-thc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either.
Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
reply
smileysteve 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
When you double in a year, especially in the great resignation, 75% of your company will be new hires at the end of the year.
If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
reply
moneywoes 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now?
reply
re-thc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now?
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.
reply
froggit 3 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
So... fine as long as you don't compare it to its past self?
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It does not. They have more frequent and longer outages now. Heck, when Musk tried to do a town hall for DeSantis to announce his run, the livestream was buggy specifically because no one had returned one of their vendors phone calls. That's a stupid reason for a major fuckup.
reply
thulle 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do you have any source for the part about the vendor? Searching for a bit just gave me a ton of articles about the failed announcement in general.
reply
brokenmachine 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I read somewhere that it was because they didn't pay a bill to Redis. Maybe throw that in as a search term.
reply
chimeracoder 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. It then took a bath in 2020 (like almost all advertising-based businesses), and then was projected to recover to profitability in 2022 before Musk announced the takeover, which threw everything into a tailspin.
reply
throwaway2990 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It wasn’t projected to recover. It was struggling. They had wayyy too many people working there.
reply
rattray 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Nit, by then it would have been public market investors, not VCs, for the most part.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Twitter was a public company in 2019. VCs has nothing to do with it.
reply
dm319 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I think we have to stop chasing growth like this. It's destructive to many things.
reply
simonh 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I agree in general, but network effect companies are highly vulnerable to being out-grown. A bigger rival with a bigger network is inherently more attractive to users, and it's competitive advantage increases exponentially with size.
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.
reply
behnamoh 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Better still: change the definition of "growth" to encompass more nuanced, non-quantifiable things like user happiness, employee happiness, etc.
reply
antupis 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
those can be faked always that's why I personally don't like those kinda metrics.
reply
chii 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
why would the current shareholders want anything other than profit (which is by proxy measured by growth)?
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.
reply
hellweaver666 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
on of my favourite books is "Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big" by Bo Burlingham. It's worth a read if this is something that interests you.
reply
rjh29 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
According to the spez AMA, Reddit is not profitable.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Profit is a balance between income and expenses. He's hired a ton of people in hopes that they could radically increase their revenues. So it's a little rich for him to complain that Reddit isn't profitable when he's the one who made the choices making that way. In contrast, they could have taken the path of Wikipedia or Craigslist or Whatsapp, keeping the costs very low as a way of achieving profitability.
reply
rjh29 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That was the path they took for the first 5-6 years, it didn't work. Tech savvy userbase with adblock and nobody bought Reddit Gold. Remember the monthly donation bar for their server costs? It never got close to filling. That was pre-new reddit.
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.
reply
InitialLastName 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Remember the monthly donation bar for their server costs? It never got close to filling
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.
reply
benj111 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Really?
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.
reply
sbtokarz 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Depends on whether you view your donation as a good will gesture/reimbursement of sorts for services rendered – or if you consider in an investment with more clearly defined objectives at the end of the fundraising campaign.
reply
benj111 3 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I suspect it's just basic human behaviour. If other people are doing it, then it's somewhat normalised.
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.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Most users were using the app on mobile. Adblock had little to do with it.
reply
rjh29 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Not in 2015. After that heavy users switched to third party apps.
reply
adamc 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
10 to 1 they burn.
reply
ivlad 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Profit is revenue deducted expenses, taxes, depreciation, loan payments, and other costs.
Income is the same as profit.
reply
miked85 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I have a feeling that once they turn off the old reddit UI option, it will be even much worse.
reply
ridiculous-fish 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
You can literally look up their profitability, Spez is full of it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260066/reddit-advertisi...
reply
JumpCrisscross 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Reddit took $1.3 billion in investor money. What makes you say they're not having their chain yanked? Going public solves an investor problem, but I don't see it solving anything for Reddit's community.
reply
JumpCrisscross 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Reddit took $1.3 billion in investor money. What makes you say they're not having their chain yanked?
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Your implication is that if they don't need more money, they can just ignore all those investor-owned shares? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Reddit's an odd duck given their ownership history and their investors. But I don't think they're that odd. Nobody gives you that kind of money without expecting to be well paid and soon.
reply
JumpCrisscross 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> implication is that if they don't need more money, they can just ignore all those investor-owned shares
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.
reply
FormerBandmate 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit was literally bought by a magazine company in 2005. Their parent company still owns 70% of their stock or so
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
That's the current board. Do you know how much control the investors have to change the board composition if they are ignored?
reply
JumpCrisscross 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Do you know how much control the investors have to change the board composition if they are ignored?
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.
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Isn't it also possible it's like Tesla with Musk. Even though the investors could oust him, they don't think it's worth losing his talent.
reply
dasil003 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Twitter's problems started with VC investment where they were always compared against Facebook. I don't think Wall Street is much better, but by the time they went public, valuation and growth trajectories were already established by the VC narrative.
reply
djbusby 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The chain is yanked whem you raise your first round. The yanking stops at Exit/IPO
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeah, I don't know how it is for everybody, but I'm reminded of the line, "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip." When I've been at places that have taken VC money, there's always a deep, pervasive awareness that the deal is "exit or bust", and that every investor call should include good news in up-and-to-the-right form. At least with us, they didn't have to do much explicit yanking of the chain. Probably for the same reason that Fat Tony doesn't often have to remind people that he expects to be paid on time.
reply
compiler-guy 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The yanking doesn’t even stop then; it just changes who is pulling. Various institutional investors are all over Google to do better than it is. Google makes billions of dollars a year. More. More. More.
reply
bradleyjg 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Google has founders shares. Everyone always like to blame Wall Street. Management listens to them not because they have board seats but because they want to keep the equity based comp party going.
reply
nathants 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
the generation of companies that defeat these vc companies will bootstrap, and use things like remote and chatgpt to make it work.
reply
marcosdumay 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism?
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.
reply
mapt 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
These network effect businesses are WILDLY PROFITABLE for a good long while if you keep overhead low, keep the product stable, and don't try to Take Over The Internet by doing something novel, developer-intensive, and (usually) stupid.
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.
reply
civilitty 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Is Facebook not a network effect business? It’s not only wildly profitable but bigger than those two combined.
Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
reply
unreal37 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Twitter and Reddit are messageboards. Like Hacker News. Every time they do something controversial, someone thinks Usenet needs to be reincarnated.
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.
reply
drewrv 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I feel like reddit could serve better ads than Facebook if they tried. Sure Facebook knows what college I went to and who my uncle is. Reddit knows my hobbies and interests.
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.
reply
realusername 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You nailed it, Reddit ads feel very amateur, close to weekend projects. And I don't know why they complain about third party apps, they never allowed them to display said low quality ads anyways in the first place...
reply
mapt 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
What did Usenet cost to run?
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.
reply
halfbrite 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I wish there was a Usenet client for iOS that matched the beauty and usability (and accessibility) of Apollo.
I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.
reply
pjc50 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Usenet cost was distributed to ISPs, which eventually sank it as they lost interest. And it never solved the moderator conundrum; at one point, a third of Usenet was spam, and another third was "spam cancels" deleting the spam.
reply
hparadiz 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It's not hard. Reddit has every niche community right there. I go to subreddits to find advice on product and there's no reason why reddit can't be selling it.
reply
weaksauce 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
and i don't get why they can't sell ads in the third party apps. just send it down the feed and have a tos that you need to be feeding that to the users. cut the apps in on it if you think the apps won't game that(could tie the cut with something like clickthrough rate to successful conversion by whatever metric that is... might be impossible who knows).
reply
Nuzzerino 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.
Good thing nobody is asking for that.
reply
unreal37 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–]
Elon Musk would love Twitter to be profitable and Steve Hoffman would love the same for Reddit.
reply
Hary06 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Agree.
reply
firecall 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm not sure I agree with that, as it's hard to ignore Facebook.
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!
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yeah, the way I think of it, the modern dogmas of Increase Shareholder Value and The CEO is Always Right might work for some businesses, but fall down badly when applied to user-generated content. They treat broader stakeholders as both morally and economically irrelevant. We can argue about the "moral" part, but with Reddit it's especially obvious that the users are the heart of the operation, making them economically crucial.
reply
chemmail 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
There are huge conflicts of interests between profitability and good business. Just listen to the podcasts on how they started Gimlet. The second season they focused on dating sites and the ones that working amazing just did not make money so they had to kill it and just do the generic shit we have now. Saying money is the root of all evil is not too far off from reality.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Exactly. I'm headed back to wikipedia, where I found community as a teenager. I think you can draw a direct line from wikimedia's nonprofit status to 22 years of greatness and steady improvement.
reply
nebula8804 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
There is definitely interests that have captured Wikipedia. It takes the form of editors that have slowly built up a lot of credibility and power that then use it years later in some manner that does not agree with the neutral nature of the site.
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.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Sounds like a regrettable epsiode. However, looking at the deletion, I see he was deleted as non-notable. Debates about notability are common on WP and not inherently political.
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)
reply
B1FF_PSUVM 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of
I find it amusing that pokemons get pages, but real people don't.
Yeah, notability, I get it. Still.
reply
gverrilla 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
""" 36
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
reply
TeMPOraL 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
A more charitable take in this case: fictional anime characters may not be as important as real human beings, but Pokemon are shared culture. The right comparison isn't with this or that person, but with poems, or paintings, or landmarks, etc. - all kinds of social objects.
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.
reply
nebula8804 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
My litmus test in this case would be are other political youtuber of similar or smaller size being deleted? If you go through the page and the previous attempts at deletion you'll see that this was not the case. I also noticed this as well during the event as it was occurring. Thats where I think something more suspicious is occuring.
reply
paulmd 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Debates about notability are common on WP and not inherently political.
"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.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Did you try proposing a policy change that heavily used lists or articles, unique on the internet, should not be deleted? It seems like a good idea and browsing the policies now I don't see "people are using this" as a criterion anywhere. I think you might actually find broad support for that.
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... )
reply
paulmd 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> 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?
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.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
For someone so concerned about being nice to people... you come of as a little... brash. Your perspective seems more defeatist than helpful.
reply
paulmd 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'd prefer to think of it as being WP:BOLD. Sorry to be insulting your org to your face, but if it makes you feel better it's likely a case of a toxic 10-20% or so more than everyone. I know nice wikipedians too, but they're not the ones that represent the interactions that turn people sour.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> "sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".
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.
reply
CapstanRoller 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left
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.
reply
alexandre_m 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The Democratic Party is no longer center-right, not since at least 2016. The progressive faction has taken a lot of place. Just look at AOC and the likes.
reply
nemothekid 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>AOC and the likes.
Who are the likes? How many of them are there? AOC is a house representative; is there a progressive senator?
reply
specialist 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
US House and some States? Sure.
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.
reply
cool_dude85 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
What left wing policies did they pass when they won the presidency and both houses of congress in 2020?
reply
alexandre_m 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The 3.5 trillion budget in 2021 with broader socialism policies would be a good example.
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.
reply
CapstanRoller 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Socialism doesn't mean "when the government does stuff" (or "spending money")
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
What far left policies have passed since 2020? And 80 year old Biden a far left progressive?
reply
TylerE 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Eh, the Foundation has a lot of bloat and solicits donations far above actual operating costs.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Sure, they're far from perfect. I don't mind if build a nice big contingency fund or even become personally wealthy -- but I think it makes a difference that greed isn't the central organizing principle.
reply
ekianjo 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Its closer to its a scam than its far from perfect
reply
Aeolun 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do we have a massive, free, encyclopedia? Yes? Then it isn’t a scam.
reply
B1FF_PSUVM 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Needs competition. Another 'pedia or two would be healthy, and perhaps enlightening.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeah. Does H2G2 count?
reply
erikts 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Wikipedia entry[1] of h2g2 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition)[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2
[2] https://www.h2g2.com/
reply
ekianjo 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They are not the ones writing the content. So yes, it's a scam. They are making money on free contributors.
reply
pneumonic 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
True, but luckily they don't intrude on the community or impact the Wikipedia site too much beyond their ever more frequent "We desperately need donations" campaigns. As the Foundation has gotten richer, its desire for more milk from its Wikipedia cash cow has only grown.
reply
kaba0 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Which makes sense in case of a nonprofit that relies on donations and can’t predict whether the next year will be a hard one for people, making their sole income drop.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
A friend there once told me the exec-level staff basically just does what the users want and they lack any real “authority” over the site.
However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any changes.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It sounds like you think it odd that exec-level staff should be honoring the wishes of the people who do all the work, but I'm not getting why. Sure, most companies are authoritarian hierarchies. But most companies also pay people enough that they'll put up with the authoritarianism, at least for a while. When you pay $0 for core labor, that means you've given up most of your ability to push people around.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I didn’t actually say what I think about anything.
reply
wpietri 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And I never said otherwise.
reply
foobarbecue 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I think the pace of change has been just right, though. They added a graphical editor and modernifed the interface styling. Both of those changes happened about 5 years later than I would have expected, but you can tell they were carried out with extreme care not to piss off any users. We end up with an experience that pleases everyone.
reply
specialist 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> ...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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes, I think it’s the way of the world. If the power users and gatekeepers are aligned with the bulk of user’s needs it works well. We usually see issue like this when things get out of alignment.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The last year I could find for their largest donors from a quick Google search was 2018. Three of the big 5 tech companies are in the top 10 of largest donors. Do you think they are going to donate to Reddit?
reply
PaulHoule 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Depends on the platform. Facebook and Youtube monetize very well. Then there are platforms that lumber on marginally for years like Reddit and Twitter, or where the commercial pressures of advertising are particularly obnoxious. (I think of that band Jefferson Starship which never made up its mind if it wanted to be commercially successful or have artistic integrity.)
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.
reply
BizarroLand 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I wish we could somehow get the US government to make an alternative replacement.
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.
reply
bawolff 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Its not like wikipedia has a perfect history of making features with good user fit . There are some successes,but also quite a few failures. You could say the same thing that most of the successes were supporting what users were already doing (e.g. flow vs DiscussionTools)
I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses.
All of the BigTech companies are built on network effects and two sided markets
reply
WalterBright 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Non-profits still need enough revenue to meet expenses.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Vine shutting down may be one of the top ten stupid decisions in business history.
reply
tomcam 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
How is Twitter rapidly decaying? I am a daily, but very light user so I may not be observing the trends as well as you.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically, outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have departed, and the value of the company has fallen by something between half and two thirds. One of its core assets, the blue checkmark for verified notable accounts, has been permanently destroyed. I no longer use it, but word from my friends who still do is that is has become grimmer, less fun. Musk has stopped releasing statistics, but I expect that new users signups and net promoter scores are well down as well.
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.
reply
behnamoh 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't notice any of the things you mentioned. As a user, I haven't felt much difference before and after Musk's takeover. If anything, I think Twitter is a little bit better and more vibrant now, because the censorship is not like before.
Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
reply
tomrod 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Your comments reminds me of the metaphor of boiling a frog.
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).
reply
farhanhubble 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Twitter used to be my key source of technology research and almost all the folks I used to see in my timeline are either dormant or gone now. On top of that I see two tabs with mostly irrelevant stuff from someone far far afar in the network.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Oh? What are some examples of the "censorship is not like before" that you think have improved things?
reply
the_doctah 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
People aren't getting banned for telling "journalists" to learn to code.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
People were getting banned for harassing individual laid-off journalists. A tweet expressing a view about good jobs for journalists changing industries was not ever a problem, so it wasn't a free-speech concern. Being a dick to people is not a legal right.
reply
behnamoh 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Being a dick to people is not a legal right.
It's not illegal either.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Depending on how one does it, that's true. But that's also not relevant here. Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site.
reply
stale2002 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Originally you asked "that you think have improved things".
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.
reply
wpietri 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I believe you mean "non sequitur", but my comment wasn't one of those either.
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.
reply
stale2002 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Ok, use whatever word you want to describe it.
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.
reply
wpietri 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform
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.
reply
behnamoh 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They “don’t have to” say it but they legally can.
reply
the_doctah 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>Being a dick to people is not a legal right.
Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.
reply
clmckinley 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You realize that twitter is a corporation and not a government right? They don't enforce laws they enforce rules, which they also set.
reply
somethingreen 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Before: denial of violent events gets you blocked, disinfo accounts get marked and shadowbanned.
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.
reply
behnamoh 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Much of that “disinfo” you’re referring to turned out to be legit info.
reply
nomdep 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The bulk of what I said can be verified from other sources, so if you don't like Casey Newton, feel free to look for other stuff.
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.
reply
kaba0 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
So what isn’t true of the listed problems? One might argue that some of those are not big problems, but advertisers pulling out is an absolutely major problem.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Is there really any serious argument about Twitter revenue being down and major ad buyers leaving?
reply
specialist 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Hopefully Musk will buy NewsCorp or Sinclair next.
reply
adamc 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Blue checkmarks are now widely mocked.
reply
asveikau 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't know if this is true, but I heard that recently, searching Twitter for "cats" led you to videos of cats being mutilated. The story continued that Elon had fired the entire team devoted to preventing such outcomes.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...
Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.
reply
_djo_ 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes, it’s accurate. I tested it at the time and was shown that video. It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.
There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.
reply
benburleson 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This shows how much I don’t use Twitter, but I was curious to verify this and learned I need to sign in (or in my case create an account) to search…is that true?
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I believe it is now. Search used to work without being signed in, but I'm pretty sure that changed at some point in the post-Elon era.
reply
tomcam 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Couldn’t verify?
https://twitter.com/search?q=%20Cats&src=typed_query
reply
hoppyhoppy2 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
from the parent comment:
> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.
reply
tomcam 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Argh thanks
reply
_djo_ 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Not your fault, I had an edit that I’d forgotten to submit but sent a few minutes later when I remembered. I didn’t see you’d replied to me already, my apologies.
reply
fknorangesite 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Did you read the entirety of the comment you're responding to, or only the first third of it?
reply
_djo_ 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No, it was my fault. I edited it and forgot to submit it till a few minutes later. I didn’t see the responses before I did.
reply
chasd00 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos
I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
reply
asveikau 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
She's pretty close to teenage years. I wasn't much older than her when I started using IRC.
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.
reply
parineum 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You're parents had no idea what IRC was. You know what Twitter is.
reply
Shocka1 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Good point here. IRC was also nothing like Twitter or current day social media in general.
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.
reply
DonHopkins 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Or for cat mutilation. Until now.
I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.
reply
pjc50 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
ahem US privacy law makes it basically illegal for anyone under 13 to have an account on most services. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/rules/childrens-onl...
Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.
reply
tomcam 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Unfortunately, team size doesn’t mean anything directly. Don’t forget what happened when one searched for “black girls“ on google in 2009:
https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...
reply
asveikau 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Anyone who knows mythical man month knows team size isn't everything. But the team for this task should probably not be 0-1 people.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
And even though it’s improved. This is still an example of how Google has gone to shit over the years. Why can’t I just have “10 blue links” instead of pictures, videos, etc?
reply
thebigwinning 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
A 10 year old should definitely not be on Twitter, even before Elon.
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?
reply
machdiamonds 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
As a user, I think Twitter is better now, notably with the Community Notes feature that even Zuckerberg commended on Lex's podcast - I hope he introduces a similar concept. The option to post extended threads is appreciated. I hardly come across political content as I avoid engagement with it, and I find it beneficial that creating an account is no longer necessary for viewing Tweets and responses.
reply
nebula8804 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If I understand correctly this was a feature already nearly completed as Twitter was being acquired and Elon just rolled it out and took credit.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's correct. It was launched as "Birdwatch" long before Musk arrived: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
reply
Dylan16807 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> I find it beneficial that creating an account is no longer necessary for viewing Tweets and responses.
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.
reply
JumpCrisscross 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> How is Twitter rapidly decaying
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.
reply
two_handfuls 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The company lost half of its value in six months, according to Elon Musk himself [1].
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...
reply
ericd 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Seems like most companies could use a Defense Against the Dark Patterns teacher :-)
reply
midasuni 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The ones that are always evil or at best doomed to fail
reply
tiedieconderoga 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos.
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.
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Musk put over $20 billion of his own money into Twitter. If I put 10% of my net worth in a project, I care how it turns out.
reply
skinnymuch 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> If I put 10% of my net worth in a project, I care how it turns out.
Good for you and Musk! So proud of people who can put money into something and lord over it because of capitalism.
reply
HWR_14 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I should point out most people have things they put 10% of their net worth into. Cars. Maybe a house if you're doing very well.
reply
wyclif 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Eh, Twitter is not "rapidly decaying." It's faster and more fun than ever, especially if you're using it from outside the USA where they are adding capacity. Way better than back in the pre-Musk era when they were trying to cancel wrongthink and most of the hiring was focused on managing DEI instead of engineering.
reply
nebula8804 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Wait a second, I could be totally wrong on this but I thought Twitter nearing bankruptcy was the real reason they sunset Vine?
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Twitter wasn't doing great at the time, but from the way Dorsey now talks about it, I don't think it was Vine or Bankruptcy: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-biggest-regret-k...
reply
hyperthesis 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
myspace managed to be killed
reply
nyreed 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
In Vine we trust.
reply
mlcrypto 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Musk is actually very successful with Twitter. All time high users. Musk has never failed any business. Ignore the white knights
reply
amadeuspagel 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets).
Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Quote tweets could be used for a lot of things. I mainly used it to add positive commentary or useful context to something I wanted to share with my followers.
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.
reply
mattkevan 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I have a theory, after working for one of the UK’s largest social networks, that no-one who runs a social network understands what made it work or why it continues to work.
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.
reply
guyomes 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.
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.
reply
twobitshifter 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Could say the same for architects. It’s why many people hate modern towers.
reply
AmericanOP 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They wasted half a decade not building promised moderation tools for the people who create value on Reddit.
Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I still feel bad for whatever web developer had to check in the "this page looks better in the app" banner.
reply
sdenton4 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Pull request description: "Does it really, though?"
reply
vkou 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It's a job. Some people are paid to shoot rockets into cities, some people are paid to deny healthcare coverage, some people are paid to lie on television, and some people are paid to lie on dark pattern banners.
reply
adamc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
They should be hunted down.
reply
BizarreByte 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's a bit extreme. Your job is to do the right thing for the business your work for, no the users.
If they tell you to implement a banner or dark pattern you do it.
reply
adamc 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No, you resign, if you are a decent human being.
reply
unsupp0rted 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It’s a lot easier to be a decent human being with a big bank account, no sick family members and housing that you own, not rent.
reply
adamc 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Everything is easier with resources. But if you only have standards when you can easily afford to, you have no standards.
reply
BizarreByte 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Normal people have to feed themselves and their families. They aren’t going to quit over something so trivial.
reply
adamc 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That you think it trivial is a big difference between us.
reply
Lapsa 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
great levels of empathy. and I'm not sarcastic
reply
lelanthran 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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.
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.
reply
epigramx 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't think it's the viability itself. The many options also play a role: back at the digg exodus reddit was the only alternative to a large extend or at least the only alternative most people were aware of. But a new platform technology paradigm entirely might be better (decentralized).
reply
farhanhubble 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The theory seems correct. Social media like stock markets is a collection of lots streams of random user behavior. It's difficult to pin down what users value except the fact that controversial stuff, scam artists etc are always a hit followed by a long long tail of small niches.
reply
specialist 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes and: One of the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast, who has also worked in social media, had a long deep dive into why casual efforts would ultimately fail, once the trogs invaded, for entirely non-product reasons. Moderation, DDoS, lawyers, etc. IIRC, they were explaining why they'd never host a mastdon instance themselves. Or maybe it was a viral app of the week with two young founders, who accidentally caught the tiger by the tail. Or both.
reply
wesapien 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
As a moderate, new > old Twitter. A lot of progressives left because they're not favored and lost their echo chamber.
reply
762236 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.
reply
Nas808 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Many of the old default subs like News, Politics, etc are ran by the same group of moderators, and they will heavily censor things they don't like. But it's the same thing on the other side of the spectrum, a lot of the conservative subs aren't tolerant to whatever they think is "woke".
reply
id02009 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's true if you talk about content posted on those subs. But I'm yet to be banned from a conservative sub just because I'm involved in wrong other sub. I once posted on a sub criticizing vaccines, my post was not even friendly to the post- I was debunking flawed logic. And I got autobanned in few other places just for posting there.
reply
notadev 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This is the reason I mod subs. Mods love to come up with new things they feel is ban-worthy. I try to remind them that we already have rules and just have to enforce them without creating additional work. It’s not fun always feeling like the dissenter, but I do it respectfully. So far so good.
reply
skinnymuch 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I doubt the veracity of your story. As a liberal you’re complaining about how one of the most liberal capitalist sites has too much left ideology. What is left ideology to you?
reply
Gareth321 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I’ve been banned on multiple subreddits because I wrote that I don’t think children should be medically altered for “sexual transition.” I’m fine with adults making that decision, but not kids. I was respectful, but firm. This is one of those “left ideology” issues, compounded by a new left ideology issue: authoritarian censorship.
reply
noelherrick 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I would push back on this, because left ideology hasn't really changed since the term was invented, and they weren't talking about transition surgery in the 1700s. It's always about removing current power structures and institutions that harm the weak to enrich and empower the few. It started with the monarchy, and today it's about corporations and the rich buying politicians, academics, reporters, artists, and religious leaders to allow and promote the subjugation of workers and the destruction of the environment for profit.
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.
reply
whathowisthis 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I feel like your comment qualifies as ideological warfare, which is against the guidelines. How could a claim like, "conservatives don't actually care about children" not be. So if a moderator saw your comment, he ought to reprimand you.
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.
reply
762236 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Liberal no longer is equal to left. A true liberal doesn't censor.
reply
andrewfelix 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Care to give an example of something of yours that was censored? I've been on Reddit for almost a decade and only seen nasty ad hominin attacks and hateful speech censored. Seen plenty of right wing misinformation be downvoted into oblivion, but never censored.
reply
Rebelgecko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I was banned from a wrestling subreddit because I corrected someone who didn't understand how marginal tax brackets work. Not ad hominem and IMO I wasn't hateful about it, although I might've said something about how it's frustrating that some people spread FUD about how you're better off making $90,000 than $90,001 because that'll push you into the next tax bracket (there are a few edge cases where that'll hurt you financially, but there's pretty rare and the post I was replying to was solely about income tax IIRC)
reply
bookofjoe 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Mark Zuckerberg described Twitter as "A clown car that fell into a gold mine."
reply
throw_a_grenade 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Now let us remember how Zuckerberg descibed his first batch of users...
reply
accoil 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Right on both accounts?
reply
PaulHoule 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Not weird at all. This is the problem of the modern internet.
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.
reply
jimmySixDOF 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit is proof of Internet Rule No.51 "the better the content, the worse the User Interface"
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's the other way round from a cause & effect perspective: the worse the user interface, the more off-putting it is to the casual users that create and promote low-quality content.
reply
oska 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The old reddit user interface was/is remarkably good. Threaded, collapsible discussions with markdown for comments in a non-distracting (i.e. sparse) layout.
reply
devnullbrain 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Once you found the comments it was but the comment link was/is marginalised in favour of the link itself, making it easy to miss that they're 'the point'. Even before new.reddit it was a common complaint that it's confusing to new users.
Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
reply
courseofaction 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It rode that beautiful wave of techno-optimism. An undeserving beneficiary of Aaron Swartz's work.
reply
andrewfelix 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Capitalism destroys the best.
reply
HKH2 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit is not going to change. It seems quite a few people don't mind being abused a bit to get the convenience they want. Nothing's going to happen.
reply
uw_rob 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I am not so sure that I agree here. What's interesting about reddit is that it is one site with very different UIs. The official reddit app has a focus on video/images and looks to be in competition with TikTok. old.reddit.com and Apollo are very much text centric apps. From my understand, reddit has a traffic breakdown of 50/50 on the text centric vs. visual centric UIs. With the UIs like Apollo being killed, and old.reddit.com eventually going away as well[0], I think users will genuinely leave as they have killed the text based UIs.
[0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
reply
skinnymuch 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Is desktop new Reddit counting as text centric? From what others have said, 3rd party apps and old reddit have relatively low usage.
reply
Rebelgecko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
On the sub I mod, old and new reddit are basically neck and neck with ~10% of traffic. The bulk of traffic comes from apps, but I don't think there's a breakdown in the modtools of 1p vs 3p apps
reply
paradox460 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They killed compact a few months ago, in light of recent events probably to drive people to the "official" apps
reply
Somdubai 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Compact was perfect for me and its death really has curtailed my usage of Reddit
reply
andrewfelix 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Some of Twitter's best content creators have given up on it. That combined with blue tick prioritisation and lack of moderation has seen it turn into a cesspit. I don't see why that doesn't happen on Reddit. Sure the people who go to discuss player trades in international sport and doom scroll dank memes will stick around, but a lot of the quality content could evaporate.
reply
HKH2 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
How many people have stuck to Mastodon?
reply
jachee 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It’s popular despite itself… but It’s not successful.
One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it.
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.
reply
rafark 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Of course you as a user don’t care that is profitable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking sides, but if you were the ceo/owner, you’d probably care about its profitability. If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Me? No, I would not.
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.
reply
chocolatemario 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Unfortunately reddit isn't a tech commune. If its intent is to be publicly traded, then it needs to find a way to turn a profit sooner or later.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Reddit-the-community's intent is not for it to be publicly traded. That's the intent of a very small number of people who seek to profit off of Reddit-the-community.
reply
chocolatemario 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yea of course. Users of streaming services don’t use those services to prolong the success of the providers yet they continue to buy in for services rendered. I think a truly community driven approach is going to be independent of Reddit as a backbone.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The important difference with streaming services is that much of their revenue goes to pay people to create content. Reddit users contribute content and labor so it can be seen by other users. So trying to run Reddit with the iron fist and customer disregard of your usual company will, as they are discovering, sometimes lead to problems.
reply
lelanthran 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?
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.
reply
WalterBright 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Making a profit is how it becomes sustainable.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No. Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability. That's part of the devil's bargain of VC money. If it looks like your company will be a modest success, they will push you to make it a giant one no matter how much that increases the risk of failure.
reply
specialist 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes and: examples of modest success like craigslist, metafilter, ravelry, etc. Like you wrote elsethread, paraphrasing, avoid the trap of unicorn or bust.
reply
WalterBright 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
You cannot sustain a business by losing money.
reply
xdennis 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's not what he said. He said:
> 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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, and I never said otherwise. You can sustain a business by breaking even. Or by making a modest profit. Which is what the great majority of businesses do.
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.
reply
dijit 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Spez also presided over the headcount ballooning ten-fold.
He’s chasing new markets, not doubling down on current ones. to the detriment of everyone including his companies profitability.
reply
giantrobot 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They decided to chase TikTok and host a shitload of video content. Video storage and delivery is way more expensive than text-only or even text and images.
Congratulations Reddit! You pulled in users with no good way to cover the costs of those users.
reply
P_I_Staker 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do they even still have these programs? RPAN is dead, despite actually being somewhat different and refreshing.
reply
giantrobot 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Every video living at v.reddit.com is eating up storage and bandwidth Reddit has to pay for. Even a relatively small video eats up the storage and bandwidth of hundreds of self text posts and thousands of posts that are just links to some external video.
reply
littlestymaar 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Wikipedia manages to be extremely profitable, maybe reddit execs just suck at their job and should be fired…
reply
nomel 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Mostly through deception, and full pages ads, though.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835
reply
littlestymaar 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes, but that's still orders of magnitude less bad that what Reddit has been doing.
reply
nologic01 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
What are the alternatives exactly?
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.
reply
O1111OOO 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I find myself spreading out. I created accounts with lemmy (app: jerboa) and mastodon (app: trunks).
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.
reply
oska 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm waiting for big rooms support to be implemented in keet (which is already amazing)
reply
Tao3300 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm apparently in limbo waiting for beehaw to figure out I'm not Hitler.
reply
Gareth321 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Spoiler: you are. Best to avoid that “safe space.”
reply
Tao3300 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You caught me!
https://youtu.be/0ZM9-ZbBoAc
That's probably NSFW.
reply
bella001 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If any chance you were a victim of mining or investment scheme that required you to send your personal asset, money or cryptocurrency in any form to a third party then you obviously need some light in this dark tunnel. I have been a crypto holder since 2014 and was a victim of the Quadriga scheme in 2016. All the red flag right there but it was too late. Luckily I found an article where I was able to report and reclaim my lost asset, Now take a look at this article where you can Report and reclaim your crypto loss Bet you'd find all your missing pieces. Freddictine at consultant dot com he was able to recover my funds
reply
jacurtis 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
There's a term for this "market effect".
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.
reply
smeagull 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They lasted long enough for there to be no real competitors.
reply
technick 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If you build it, they will come...
reply
roflyear 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Happens all the time, really!
reply
JJMcJ 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The joke definition of Web 2.0: You make the content, we make the money.
Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.
reply
WellThenGood 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Uh doesn't Reddit owe its community 10% per sama's Series B article https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit ? "So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time." Whatever happened to this? Will we end up getting it before or after sama gives us UBI, open AI, and fusion completely altruistically?
reply
samtho 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Why haven’t we heard about this more widely?
reply
rewgs 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Uh. Is that language legally binding?
reply
keyle 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
To be fair I think Reddit predates "web 2.0" by a big gap. Which is probably why they were successful; they did it before everyone else.
reply
detaro 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
they didn't predate it. Reddit was founded when "web 2.0" was the hot new buzzword.
reply
keyle 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
My bad, thanks for the correction.
reply
etherealG 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Would you mind correcting your first comment please? It’s not a big deal but sometimes people stop reading deeper and they might continue to believe your mistake and misunderstand the history.
reply
fknorangesite 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> The term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999[3] and later popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004.
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).
reply
JJMcJ 3 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think 2004 is when the concept really gained currency.
reply
ric2b 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
So no one remembers Digg anymore, and how Reddit initially grew because Digg was pissing off its own community.
reply
vjk800 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It's the classic network effect. People use it because other people use it.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
…until people stop using it because other people stopped using it. They are playing with fire.
reply
dryanau 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Reddit of all platforms should know this, having risen to prominence on the heels of Digg v4
reply
nomel 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
There’s no viable alternative, at the moment (especially Lemmy). I fully assume this will blow over. Digg users had somewhere very obvious, already established, to go.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I mean, the web is big right? There are plenty of forums people still use, maybe some big subreddit just go back that route.
reply
GravityisaHoax 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's my plan. Most of the subs I visit on Reddit still have large and active forum alternatives that I'll just return to.
There's only a few niche subs that will be hard to replace for me, but they're talking about moving.
reply
nomel 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> mean, the web is big right?
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.
reply
rafark 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Kind of like the kardashians?
reply
MichaelMoser123 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Is it possible that reddit tried to pull of the same monetization trick as twitter, however they forgot to check with the target audience. And that public is really stretched financially, it does not consist of establishment figures who have an extra five dollars to spare for their hobby.
But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
>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.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub.
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.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If you're claiming that the main things Reddit mods do is a bit of rule text and some CSS, then I don't think you know enough about the topic to be worth further discussion.
reply
subsistence234 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
in the best case mods remove spam and illegal content, and beyond leave the community alone to do its thing. unfortunately typical reddit mods feel compelled to do all kinds of other things, like they're on a mission from god.
reply
GravityisaHoax 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
There are some subs I frequent where the mods have created bots that have completed transformed the sub for the better. Examples are the several marketplace subs, where bots are heavily used.
reply
squeaky-clean 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Mods don't just edit the css, they moderate. You can clearly see the difference a good mod team does. After the reddit blackout is over, check out the difference between /gaming and /AskHistorians. AskHistorian threads are often 90% deleted comments because people try commenting without posting any sources.
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.
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I compare /r/gaming and /r/AskHistorians. The latter is overmoderated and exhibits what I call the "Reddit effect": people will take to be true and accurate anything that is said in a clear and authoritative tone. Yes much of what is on that subreddit is high-quality, but by no means is it all high-quality, and they often remove comments from people that dispute the narratives that are pushed there. The topics of history they choose to cover are very narrow and they have a pretty narrow view of what "history" is: the narrative of mainstream US academic historians.
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.
reply
bnralt 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's also pretty clear that some mods have relationships with Reddit admins and use that to skirt the rules themselves while bringing the hammer down on subs they don't like.
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.
reply
tester457 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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.
If you were the CEO of reddit what would you change? Replace the volunteer mods with paid mods?
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Ideas that could work:
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.
reply
stcroixx 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, I’d prefer reddit with no mods, maybe some spam stuff, but minimal and automated.
reply
gfaster 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You can experience that today by visiting 4chan.
reply
PM_me_your_math 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
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.
Truer words have never been written about reddit. It is a cesspit of censorship with tiny islands of insights.
reply
mbrameld 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Tell me you've never moderated a sizeable online community without telling me you've never moderated a sizeable online community.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I haven't. So what? Is there anything I'm wrong about in a way that you could provide meaningful evidence on? Surely you aren't arguing that only moderators are qualified to weigh in on the social value of moderators - this sort of logic wouldn't pass the laugh test if we were talking about police, or soliders, or middle managers, or low-level government bureaucrats. This whole "thin blue line"-style thinking that moderators are flirting with here is... cringey.
reply
arnorhs 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Fair enough. Usually this is the stance I would take in these sorts of discussions, since usually power users misunderstand how much they represent the majority of users.
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
reply
aceazzameen 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Same here. I just blacklisted Reddit on my pihole. Just in case I forget and accidentally visit it.
reply
drumhead 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Its community knowledge, just like wikipedia right now. Infact someone mentioned in another thread that maybe thats the ownership structure Reddit should have had.
reply
istillwritecode 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I will continue to use reddit.
reply
GenerWork 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Same. One thing that I've noticed is that this seems to be a rebellion of power users and not the average Joe, which is why this has gotten so much traction on HN. To the Average Joe, if Apollo shuts down, they'll just download the Reddit app. However, HN users look at the Apollo dev and see themselves, so they're jumping on this out of solidarity.
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.
reply
a2tech 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't think I agree with you. Every sub I'm on that has asked people if they should go dark (either temporarily or permanently) have seen overwhelming support for the protest. This includes subreddits such as woodworking, our local city sub, and arduino. These subs are NOT made out of power users and they all supported it.
reply
goostavos 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The site linked in this very post sorta disagrees with you, though. The subs not taking part in the strike vastly outnumber those who are.
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.
reply
stryan 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
To be clear, the strike isn't supposed to start until June 12th, which hasn't happened in North America yet. This headline seems to be jumping the gun a little as only a few subreddits went dark immediately.
reply
squeaky-clean 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
A lot of subreddits have begun in the past hour because it's already the 12th in Europe. Formula1 and FormulaE just went dark in the past hour for example.
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The people that engage with polls on a subreddit are the power users of that subreddit and are probably not representative of the broader group. Remember: most people lurk.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It depends on what "representative" means here. Most people lurk, but they definitionally don't contribute to the labor that makes the site valuable. I'd be interested in their opinion here, but honoring a strike isn't about what pure consumers want. It's about what the workers want.
reply
midoridensha 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
No subreddit is going to survive or have any activity if all the "power users" leave, and everyone that's left just lurks. The lurkers are there to see the posts by the power users, and to enjoy the moderation by the power users (assuming the moderation is good...). No web forum can survive without active users.
reply
JaumeGreen 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The decisions that reddit has taken were not affecting me for now. The new ui was horrible for my use case (text subreddits and focusing on the debate) so I was a old.reddit user.
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.
reply
Lapsa 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
it will. saying that from experience. makes you bit of an outcast though - be ready
reply
isaacremuant 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Only if you are incapable of keeping relationships with people directly.
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.
reply
Lapsa 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
well yeah... for new contacts I mean
reply
isaacremuant 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't get it. If it's meeting new people then offline is probably better and if it's reinforcing connections and activities with those new people, if the interest is there, you can definitely accomplish it with my previous points.
reply
Lapsa 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
try telling hot chick you just met that you ain't using a phone and see how it goes
reply
isaacremuant 3 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Nice strawman. In any case, I'd say that the old adage of confidence and being attractive (personality, presentation, etc) is more important than many of the things you're insecure about.
reply
dmix 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
At most this comes down to Reddit’s inability to provide a quality mobile app that satisfies the 3rd party app users. The niche ones like disability friendly UIs is likely a different issue that may simply require a different app entirely given the typical product dev demands of most big companies.
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.
reply
themagician 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Couldn't agree more.
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.
reply
ifiht 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Have created two accounts in the past year and successfully posted once, despite trying dozens of times (ironically the one that made it was a rant about how impossible it is for new users)
reply
PM_me_your_math 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit is trash. Nearly every community is designed to build resonance chambers for self-serving 20-something idiots. It is rare you find a sub that isn't helmed by some immature activist type with an inferiority complex, drug or mental problem, and no real-world prospects for dating or gainful employment.
reply
xenophonf 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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'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.
reply
isaacremuant 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> HN users look at the Apollo dev and see themselves, so they're jumping on this out of solidarity.
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.
reply
latortuga 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Same. Regardless of how they've bumpy the pay increase and related comms have been, it's their platform. Nobody uses third party apps to access Pinterest, tiktok, Facebook, ig, or any other major internet property and I don't see a problem with reddit running their company to make money. Yeah it sucks that Apollo, rif, etc all are getting shut down.
reply
_djo_ 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Reddit and Twitter embraced third party clients because it saved them the early cost of doing it themselves and provided extra avenues and incentives for power users to create content and moderators to cultivate communities. Both benefit the platform and in the end revenues.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It is really theirs? They have legal ownership, sure, so they can do this without forcible intervention by the state. But laws are things we make up to memorialize our agreements on what we think should happen, so focusing on legal ownership doesn't really answer the question of who Reddit really belongs to.
reply
jitix 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I will probably do too but much less frequently. Apollo increased my reddit engagement, without it mu usage will likely fall back to the occasional scroll 1-2 times a day.
Might not be a bad thing tbh
reply
BearTiger913 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I'll just be here for tech news, and other sites for my niche interests. Nothing of true value will be lost to me.
reply
cyanydeez 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Make sure to logout though
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU, Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US.
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.
reply
eshack94 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The entire goal of these API changes is to intentionally price third-party app developers out of the market without imposing a strict blanket-policy ban.
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.
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This is kind of like the Twitter fiasco where in the eye of the storm a lot of loud people are pressuring more people to make this seem a lot bigger than it is.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could have a free version of the API that includes the inline ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a share of that revenue to client makers.
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.
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be rendered by the 3rd party client?
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")
reply
lelanthran 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be rendered by the 3rd party client?
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.
reply
UncleMeat 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Because if it isn't then reddit can simply revoke their access.
And then we are right back at the complaints that reddit is killing 3P clients.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Sorry, why do you think this is a hard question? They look around at the big clients, see anybody who has violated the API's TOS by removing ads without special permission, and kill their API keys.
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Wouldn't it be easier for the app to pursue its own monetization and charge for API use?
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I get what you're saying, but that's a bad approach for all concerned.
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.
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The pricing for Reddit (as I understand it) is similar to the pricing for Imgur.
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).
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> You're also proposing that someone periodically audits the different reddit clients to see if they are displaying enough / all the ads
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.
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The simple and fair approach to monetizing the API is to have it be a simple "this much for these many calls."
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.
reply
wpietri 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This seems very backwards to me. The job of business isn't to do the "simple and fair" thing. It's a) to generate maximum value, b) to extract enough cash to pay the bills and then some, and c) work to keep costs at an effective minimum.
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.
reply
pawptart 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Right? That's what I've never understood. Putting ads in the API is irrelevant, since the 3rd party clients will just ignore them.
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.
reply
scarface_74 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The easiest method is don’t have a free version at all and only people with a paid (ad free) subscription could use third party clients.
reply
zirgs 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Imagine paying to access a site that can ban you for posting an opinion that a random moderator disagrees with.
reply
devnullbrain 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's not how site-wide bans work
reply
kbenson 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This isn't over one app. Many (most?) the app makers have noted the change is unsustainable for them.
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?
reply
pests 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit.
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.
reply
kbenson 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
They're offering paid API access. Do you think they're only expecting non-profits to use it?
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...
reply
_djo_ 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, it is. Why wouldn’t it be?
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.
reply
pests 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Eh, even if we can agree on it being fair I still don't see anything wrong with what Reddit is trying to do. While the profit might be minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking for, its still currently more than reddit is making.
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.
reply
_djo_ 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Eh, even if we can agree on it being fair I still don't see anything wrong with what Reddit is trying to do. While the profit might be minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking for, its still currently more than reddit is making.
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.
reply
stickfigure 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If reddit needs to capture every hundred-thousand dollar niche, there is no room for any ecosystem whatsoever. That's a choice they can make, but it might not go the way they want in the long run.
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
At "just a couple hundred thousand per year" and a $5/month subscription for "Apollo Ultra Monthly"... ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 ). Apple's cut of that is 30% for the first year and 15% for all following years.
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.
reply
jonchurch_ 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The price of Apollo according to their website [1] is $1.50/month subscription for their highest tier (Ultra), or a $5 one time payment for their secondary tier (Pro).
[1] https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
On https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575
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
They may have a separate subscription service that isn't using Apple's. Or it is possible that the page wasn't updated at some point. Those prices, however, are the prices and match the app.
reply
pests 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> average user 344 requests per day and the polling rate of 600 requests per hour do not seem to be in agreement
I don't think the app is making those 600 requests 24/7.
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The app isn't. The server doing push notifications on behalf of a user is.
reply
ArchReaper 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This is a reasonable take in a vacuum, but a bit of an insane take given the context of everything else that has happened with this fiasco.
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.
reply
adrr 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
1password is $3 a month. They could charge that price and still make money and reddit would make money for the loss of ad revenue from people using a 3rd party client.
reply
raincole 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> The app they’re burning down Reddit over is
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.
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If you ran a website, would you allow 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free?
reply
Blackthorn 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I ran a popular wiki for a decade and did exactly that, complete with API.
Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.
reply
wahnfrieden 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
How do we educate the masses on avoiding insane digital landlords?
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
reply
rtsil 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You can't because the digital landlords make everything free or almost free in the beginning, before raising it to stratospheric levels once the market is captive. Google did that with Maps. OpenAI is doing it with its API. And people like free or almost free things rather than reasonably-priced things.
reply
wahnfrieden 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's not always so capital intensive anymore to make things free, there are technical advancements that make that easier these days so I believe there is edge to be found. In particular I'm exploring offline-first apps in addition to decentralization/self hosting, because offline-oriented apps help avoid expensive servers. Users like the privacy benefits and I enjoy the benefits of minimizing UGC custody.
reply
moneywoes 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Help me understand, how would Reddit work offline?
reply
wahnfrieden 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
it obviously wouldn't, don't play stupid / go away
reply
treyd 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't know to what degree that this will be a watershed moment, but I'm hopeful that this is a high-profile enough of a wakeup call that some dedicated subset of power users puts their efforts into developing the ecosystem around federated alternatives that have the possibility of breaking free from extractive models of social media. Even if that's 100 people out of the millions potentially affected by the reddit changes, that could bring a lot of benefit.
reply
creatonez 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
MediaWiki has DataDump^1, and ArchiveTeam has a bot that can use it this extension as an API to mass-archive many wikis at once. Very useful since it gives an archive of article revisions and images in a machine-readable format that can be used to recreate the entire wiki, minus user accounts.
^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png
reply
raincole 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free
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.
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yea that's how business works - you take parts, add value, and produce new parts. In this case a curated set of links with discussion. The costs for you the user are so low (ad supported) because users do most of the work. You'd have to pay a monthly fee if Reddit had to employee thousands of people to curate the links for you. And given you don't like paying money in the first place, there would be no Reddit.
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.
reply
dragontamer 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit didn't make any of that data. It was community members.
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?
reply
whyenot 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It’s not your data. It’s your user’s data.
reply
jeltz 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, I do. I give users access to the API for free and then I do not monitor their use of it. So it is almost certsin that some of our competitors scrape our site and use our data for free.
reply
creatonez 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, aside from selling. It's important for archival efforts.
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.
reply
dude187 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Users created, curated, promoted, moderated the entirety of the content for free. Guess that should stop
reply
AshamedCaptain 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If all the content on my website was literally donated by 3rd parties for the explicit and practically only purpose of online dissemination, I'd definitely think twice before paywalling it.
reply
wahnfrieden 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes. I love CC0 and hate IP. I find other ways to make the money than licensing access to data (or aspiring/building toward in some parts).
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
reply
bagels 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The point of mentioning the ARPU is to demonstrate that Reddit is letting these apps capture (or in most cases flush down the toilet) the value. Reddit goes out of business if they don't capture it themselves or continue to dump investor money in to a hole.
reply
Blackthorn 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> our content
Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content it actually is.
reply
BaseballPhysics 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I like that they went back and edited their comment to change that wording.
Of course, given the edit, one must wonder who's data they think it is given who they're collecting it from...
reply
bredren 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If it is the company’s content, it’s the company’s moderation and I know a lot of folks ready for due and past due compensation.
reply
Glench 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If anyone else is interested in leaving Reddit I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
A curated set of links, rated, sorted, filtered, and discussion. That’s the content you want and are having a tantrum about not having free access to.
You are free though to access the referenced content on your own if you can find out about it on your own.
reply
Blackthorn 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Who curated them, rated them, sorted them, filtered them, and discussed them?
Not Reddit. They're just the landlord here.
reply
Ekaros 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And the landlords still have costs. It is not free to run a platform. They have to pay for it in one way or an other. Time of free beer have come to end.
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.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's not free to run a platform. But this is not about platform costs. This is about the standard pre-IPO juicing of the stats to maximize IPO pop, allowing insiders and VCs to sell shares and make bank. People here should understand this more than anyone else.
reply
monetus 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It takes a lot of optimism about lack of human greed to think that this is not the case, IMO.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think it's not so much optimism as getting so blinded by the nominal, theoretical purpose that they don't pay attention to what people are actually doing. As they say, "follow the money". That'll tell you the difference between stated purpose and revealed purpose. "The purpose of the system is what it does."
reply
mynameisvlad 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Their hosting costs are not going to majorly change due to API access. By their own accounts, less than 5% of users access the site via the API and if anything, those would impose less costs than someone needing to load the entire UI alongside the API calls (albeit using a new GraphQL API that I’m sure is more efficient but not available to 3rd party apps).
API hosting is a drop in the bucket, even if their own accounts are to be believed wholesale.
reply
Blackthorn 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It appears there's quite a severe disagreement over what those costs ought to be.
Perhaps if Reddit the company had been more disciplined over the last ten years, it wouldn't have come to that.
reply
llbeansandrice 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If you think this isn’t pre-IPO bullshit and is just “hey we have costs too!” I have multiple bridges to sell you
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes and you rent the infrastructure needed to facilitate all those processes for millions of users.
You’re free to setup your own, or rent somewhere else. Regardless it costs money.
reply
whyenot 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I didn’t rent anything. Over 14 years, I provided Reddit with content and worked for free as a moderator. In more recent times, I even paid $5.99/mo for a premium membership. Users like me and the communities that we helped build, are what Reddit is throwing away. It’s sad.
reply
ipaddr 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You built your dream castle in someone else's yard. You managed to get a bunch of visitors to come make the castle even better. The owner makes money on ads on the property so the more visitors the more income.
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.
reply
whyenot 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I already was paying. As mentioned in my comment, $5.99 a month.
reply
ziftface 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The infrastructure costs next to nothing compared to what they're charging. There is a natural equilibrium point between communities, the landlord, the moderators, etc, and this clearly isn't it. Someone else will find it though.
reply
ipaddr 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The equilibrium is between what the market will pay and supply.
reply
dude187 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
You forgot the most important part. Who actually created the content?
reply
Someone1234 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit announced this price 30-days before they planned to enforce/charge it. If there was any doubt at all that Reddit wasn't trying to ban third-party apps with deniability, then that should settle it. That isn't reasonable.
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.
reply
not_a_shill 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
People would pay $5 a month. They do on discord for...animated emoticons.
It's actually hard to believe people are throwing this big a fit over something they don't deem worthy of $5 a month.
reply
opello 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think it's because Reddit came to a solution that put a rather large and sudden burden on the app developers.
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.
reply
symlinkk 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No it’s because Redditors love being drama queens about things. Remember “net neutrality” and how every Redditor was acting like the sky was falling down? This is the same thing. In 2 weeks people will forget about it and move on.
reply
kemotep 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The trick is the end user of the third party app doesn’t have to pay. The app developer is the one being charged by Reddit.
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.
reply
jupp0r 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It's not Reddit's content, it's the community's. It's literally users wanting to access their own stuff in a different way.
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.
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No it’s their content. You gave it to them in exchange for a platform on which people can find out about it.
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.
reply
saxonww 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think you're missing the point. Reddit is not entitled to a user base. They have to provide a product users are interested in using. Right now, a lot of users are upset with Reddit and have decided to stop using it. It doesn't matter whether you agree with them or think they are being reasonable.
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.
reply
raverbashing 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Their TOS literally says otherwise
reply
8note 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I granted a license to the content; I retain ownership
reply
bottlepalm 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Obvious and inconsequential as what you want access to are the links submitted by other people which you don't have ownership of.
And we are just talking about links, which in most cases the submitter does not own the referenced content anyways.
reply
lelanthran 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that nothing is left of their business when those communities have moved elsewhere.
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.
reply
ric2b 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
There are multiple reddit clones, I think the biggest one is Lemmy.
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.
reply
lelanthran 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Anything federated the isn't a Reddit replacement, too much friction and users don't want to join multiple instances just to see all comments on a single topic.
reply
jupp0r 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
My best guess is that somebody will write a clone. It's not rocket science.
reply
lelanthran 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> My best guess is that somebody will write a clone. It's not rocket science.
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.
reply
CWuestefeld 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app
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?
reply
dotnet00 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million.
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.
reply
antonjs 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't think he was even saying they were paying $20M in server costs. He was saying that if their claim that they're missing out on $20M in potential revenue from those users is correct, they should buy the app for $10M and make a 2x return on investment in one year.
reply
not_a_shill 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If it's that low they could have just locked 3rd party apps behind a reddit premium account with some reasonable rate limits for non commercial use. So similar to what Spotify does.
Wouldn't have got nearly as much backlash.
reply
wilg 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU
And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without causing a shitstorm.
reply
wpietri 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'd also point out it's not Reddit who wanted a $30 ARPU. It's a small number of Reddit execs and venture capitalists.
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.
reply
numpad0 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If they can’t make $30 ARPU stick, what could ever be profitable on Web, other than by deceptively recovering damages through ads? Is the only value prop of Web that it’s free-beer?(my mental answer is nothing and yes)
reply
alangibson 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
These subreddits disagree that this is Reddit's data
reply
faangsticle 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit has for years and years, and built their shoddy little website on that fact.
reply
Mystery-Machine 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
You are right and everyone else is wrong.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
“Our data”.
reply
Mystery-Machine 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Unexpected communism
reply
gremlinsinc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
wait till you learn about Wikipedia.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Or how CERN and DARPA get their money.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The internet is built on communism!
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | next [–]
There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong.
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.
reply
themagician 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it because—surprise—they ban those people.
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.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Disagree with this for lots of reasons:
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.
reply
Thuggery 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation.
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.
reply
chambers 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Thank you for coining the term "mod pity". It makes me think about roles where people, myself included, have sought the pity of others as a shield against criticism.
reply
themagician 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The power trip is enough for most people. And for the right subs, brands approach you with outrageous offers. It can EASILY make you six figures *a month. When I read, it was much smaller. Years ago when reddit it was much smaller and I was working for an agency. We paid $60,000 just for 2-3 months of “posting support”. It amounted to something like 12 posts. I know first hand how much some mods get compensated. And this wasn’t even a major subreddit.
reply
Yhippa 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If this is true, this sounds like a bad deal for Reddit. If I were them, I'd want my cut.
reply
cellularmitosis 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
What are they paying for? For the mod to look the other way for certain corporate spam posts?
reply
themagician 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes. That’s basically all we paid for. We also asked for some help coming up with ideas for posts which ended up being like a 10 slide presentation. Mostly around wording, popular memes on the sub and a few ideas about what would feel “organic”.
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.
reply
anthonypasq 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
guerrilla marketing on reddit is rampant. the days of trusting reddit comments for product reviews has long been over.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>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.
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.)
reply
zouhair 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> And they'll find new people to do it for no compensation, just as they did before the mod tools in question existed.
For free? I doubt they could find any for free.
reply
Breza 1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Well said! I saw a chart on r/dataisbeautiful a few years ago showing that a small percentage of Reddit users ever comment or post. Most people just read content. I topped the front page a couple of times and I used to moderate a default sub. It's a huge amount of work. You don't need to lose many power users to change the feel of Reddit forever.
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.
reply
lelanthran 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> The vast majority of people with a life are not going to want to do this.
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.
reply
bitcharmer 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Disagree with this for lots of reasons
You might have visit a different reddit then. GP's comment is spot on. Oppressive moderation is rampart on reddit.
reply
melagonster 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
haha, look how users scoff the mod of r/AskReddit because they don't participate this
reply
altonas 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll have you blacklisted from modding other subs". That same exact mod on multiple occasions has deleted my posts from subs he mods, just to reupload them for karma himself. I don't even care about the karma, I just wish mods wouldn't delete my posts that don't break any rules in any way, shape, or form, especially when it's for blatant karma farming.
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
reply
jrnichols 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This problem became much worse when Covid-19 came around too. Still to this day, there is a mod that will auto ban you from like 30 different subs including /r/pics and others if you so much as make a comment in a sub that they consider "covid minimizing" at all. How on earth reddit continues to allow such actions like that are beyond me.
reply
SV_BubbleTime 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>actions like that are beyond me
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.
reply
zehnfischer 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I agree. But the word 'religion' doesn't fit anymore. It is believe system and the need to be part of a group that one can identify with. Compliance with the set of rules that this group subscribes to gives one an feeling of belonging and identity. The German author Juli Zeh talks about this. We are social animals and with the collapse of basically all societal institutions - not just religion, but also political organizations - we are desperately trying to figure out how we are and how we have to be.
reply
wincy 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This is honestly a pretty profound comment. Also, I think you’re right.
reply
isaacremuant 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit was behind those actions, dude. It's not about mods. That's tech companies controlling narratives and, specially in the case of covid, happened well beyond Reddit.
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
reply
jrnichols 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Agreed, although in this case it was a mix of Reddit itself and individual mods. The mods in /r/coronavirus for example got media attention and it was clear that it went right to their heads. They stopped making the mod log public, transparency went out the window, and AutoModerator basically went nuts.
It was so obvious that they wanted to portray a specific narrative and silent any dissent. Absolutely disgusting behavior.
reply
ImaCake 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This stuff happens on the mental health subreddits too. Its bad enough to always second guess your own diagnosis but its worse when a mod decides you are excluded from one of the few places that will tentatively accept you.
reply
SV_BubbleTime 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I have a direct family member that was very ill, thought maybe they were transgender, tried that out, their mental state was not improving, got professional help from a doctor that listened instead of supporting every thought, got a lot better, and spent this year de-transitioning.
I talked a little about their experience and, instantly banned from a handful of Reddit including a ban on my account that I appealed.
reply
ImaCake 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeah, mental health is so stigmatised that there is little room for the grey, like in your example. A few radicals end up controlling the discussion and most of us, who are too busy with life, are left confused and locked out by the hysteria. I am more sympathetic to those who support trans rights but go too far because the other side is literally calling for their extermination, but the lack of reasonable voices leaves eveyone poorer and disenfranchised.
reply
SV_BubbleTime 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> the other side is literally calling for their extermination
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.
reply
ImaCake 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I guess it is very marginal rhetoric. People like De Santis are not actively saying it, although their actions indicate a great deal of opposition. For what it’s worth, I dont think its fair or right that you were blocked for your example. But I think it is the siege mentality of the marginalised trans community that explains why you got blocked.
reply
pxc 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> But I think it is the siege mentality of the marginalised trans community that explains why you got blocked.
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.
reply
SV_BubbleTime 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> the other side is literally calling for their extermination
Did the trans community seige mentality get you to write that previously?
reply
Shaanie 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Self-moderation doesn't work for any reasonably large community, if you don't want your community to be generic Facebook/Instagram quality posts. Community-based moderation inevitably makes any subreddit into "fun phots/videos" because people who browse largely don't care about where the post is, they might not even realize what subreddit it is in when up-voting.
Subreddits like askscience or askhistorians would be impossible without extremely strict moderation, for obvious reasons.
reply
SV_BubbleTime 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Ok, but flip side… Reddit “Science” is the one of the most ridiculously biased and censoring of dissent subs I’ve ever seen.
Absolute junk science that confirms a political bias? Straight to the top!! Any reasonable voice? [Removed].
reply
patrick451 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
As always, censorship is common sense moderation if it aligns with your existing biases.
reply
AlexandrB 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people post what they want and vote on it.
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.
reply
NegativeK 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> This only works (mostly) for legal content.
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.
reply
stevenwliao 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If you've ever moderated a large subreddit before, you would know that it's not self-moderating. Garbage comments attract more garbage comments, and pretty soon your userbase is toxic as everyone else who's looking for a civil conversation leaves.
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I do agree this is an issue that needs to be addressed but you are also posting this on a website that is heavily moderated and runs as smoothly as it does because of the efforts of dang and the other moderators so I can't agree that reddit should just be the wild west.
reply
seydor 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
reddit should auto-retire mods after X months. We can do that in mainstream politics - not on reddit politics
reply
currylover 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
There's nothing softer than reddit mods. Reddit mods are so soft that dumping fabric softener on them would harden them.
reply
isaacremuant 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Except if you search in Reddit right now you'll find plenty of posts where mod asked the users if they should join the blackout (sometimes rather meekly) and userbases, almost always, said yes.
reply
allmadhare 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The fact that you can go on reddit right now and enjoy it without all the annoying power users is only more reason to start visiting in my books. Hell I might even finally download the app.
reply
graeme 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Have a look at the link being discussed. Subreddits all the way down to 5K+ subreddits are going dark. It's all across the board.
reply
opportune 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The reddit replacement I am scoping out eliminates mods and subreddit squatting. I don't see a need for mods as they exist in reddit really, just "janitors" like in 4chan, most likely paid. Moderation seems like it could be done purely on the basis of voting and a sitewide content policy.
reply
mynameishere 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Agree completely. Get rid of all the large-sub mods, replace them with paid moderators who are instructed to only remove spam and illegal content. Giant, giant improvement. The mods as they are just power trip on their own politics. Why else would they do it for no money?
reply
danpalmer 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users.
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.
reply
pests 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> because those users are almost by definition power users
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?
reply
danpalmer 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's a fair point, but I still think there's a strong correlation. To address that point specifically, users who started using Reddit early enough that the official one didn't exist, and have stuck around and are still active now, are more likely to be power users just based on account age. Additionally, many years ago those seeking out mobile apps may have been power users as well. Mobile apps are the default now, but unofficial apps have only recently been more mainstream.
reply
teaearlgraycold 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
For power users, advertisers flip from paying for their eyes to paying for their thumbs.
reply
mrtksn 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
So, what happens if reddit just kicks out the mods participating? It's not like the owners of the subs actually own anything, they just happen to do work in exchange of clout or money(from 3rd parties). There will be unlimited supply of volunteers waiting in line to acquire this privilege. If anyone actually manages to do some damage, they can just roll back the database or something.
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.
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
What happens if reddit crosses that line is completely up to community response. People could go on as usual and nothing happens or there could be an even more visceral backlash. History says business as usual but no one really knows what would happen.
reply
mrtksn 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
There's no real community though.
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.
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
reddit is not a community. The subreddits are the community. I don't care about reddit as a whole but there are individual subreddits that if they change or go away then I no longer have a reason to use reddit.
reply
mrtksn 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Are these subs small or large?
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Both. A few are in the 500k+ sub range and some are way under that and more niche.
reply
busyant 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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.
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).
reply
crazygringo 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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.
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.?
reply
Sholmesy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users
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.
reply
crazygringo 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Everybody's reporting "Reddit had 430 million monthly active users in 2020", so that's the half-billion that seems to be fact-based.
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...
[2] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
reply
hunter2_ 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Does "user" mean "distinct human" or "user account" in this context? Need to keep in mind the culture of throwaways.
If 10% of users make a throwaway at a rate of 5 per month, then 100 monthly humans == 150 monthly usernames.
reply
mliker 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I highly doubt Reddit has 1.5B monthly users, otherwise they would have reported it in the media. Very few companies have the execution capabilities to reach 1B+ users
reply
r00fus 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
If management has shown themselves to be adversarial in this case because they think the power users aren't correct, a 2 day strike isn't going to do much to convince them otherwise.
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).
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
>Engagement is a power curve
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.
reply
brucethemoose2 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Would removing old.reddit.com break the site for you?
It would for me, and thats the trajectory. The new UI is an absolute pig.
reply
weaksauce 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
yeah i could probably get by not using reddit on my ipad even if i didn't like the change... but not having old.reddit would be a monumental no from me.
reply
BenisMaximus 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Without that, RES, or a third-party interface, I'm 100% out. I do not need to deal with cluttered, shitty interfaces that are designed to "increase engagement" instead of giving me what I want. Respect my time or fuck off.
reply
kitsunesoba 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
With how low post quality has gotten on Reddit, the only reason I'd continued using it is because Apollo offers a nice smooth experience that isn't trying to sell me anything or shove irrelevant posts in my face and makes it reasonably easy to filter. The official app crapifies the experience enough for it to no longer be worth using.
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The developer of RES said they do not know if the changes will hit them and it is up in the air.
> 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...
reply
isaacremuant 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own internal analysis?
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".
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>This is literally authortiarianism and the problem is that you can use it to justify any change by any company ever.
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.
reply
isaacremuant 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>If trusting people with the strongest financial incentives to have the correct beliefs is "authoritarianism", then I'm an authoritarian.
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".
reply
madeofpalk 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
This is brought up a bunch, but I’m kind of sceptical about this.
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.
reply
andrei_says_ 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> slowly bleeding itself to death
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.
reply
spokeonawheel 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
they are wrong because 3rd party apps are the only way the site is actually usable on a mobile device.
reply
MisterBastahrd 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
And now I want to explain why you're wrong.
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.
reply
marcomourao 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have not yet subscribed to the subreddit.
When a sub is set to private "Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions."
reply
aniforprez 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
They're wrong. I was subscribed to EarthPorn before it went private. It is inaccessible to me now
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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.
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.
reply
OldManRyan 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
One of the subreddits I subbed to has gone dark and I cannot access it so I can confirm this is not true.
reply
beanaroo 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I can no longer access subreddits I have been subscribed to. They are also no longer listed in my subscriptions.
Private subreddits are indeed invitation only
reply
eksapsy 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Strike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life".
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.
reply
cedilla 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Rossmann seems to have misunderstood what a strike is. A strike is always between two parties that depend on each other.
"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.
reply
htag 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I use to be a reddit power user, but my relationship with the platform has been extremely casual (less than 5 hours/yr) for the last 10 years. Even after all this time, Reddit could win me back as a power user if the platform was better.
reply
teaearlgraycold 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
And powerful strikes go on for weeks if there is no acceptable compromise made.
reply
mikewarot 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The two parties here are the public, and the corporations owning social networking sites.
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.
reply
DamnInteresting 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life".
"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.
reply
brucethemoose2 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Subreddits have been striking for years. This is not the first response.
This is quite an escalation though.
reply
itzworm 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This my take as well.
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.
reply
munchler 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Many of us are quitting Reddit for good on June 30 when Apollo and the other third-party apps are killed. This week's strike is just a warning shot across Reddit's bow.
reply
0xr0kk3r 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don’t believe that for a hot minute. These peoples’ identities are so wrapped up in Reddit it’s be like amputating a limb. No way.
reply
srslack 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
To be fair, Reddit's mobile app is comically bad, and the prospect of having to use it might be akin to amputating two limbs, for some.
reply
anthonypasq 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
it really isnt, supported by the fact 95% of people use the official app.
reply
Black616Angel 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Okay, do you have numbers for that? (honest question) Most "statistics" I have seen were done via a reddit survey, which 3rd party apps can't do due to API-limitations. So all the users sying "yes I use a 3rd party app" did so either via their mobile or workstation browser (where you have to auth again) which is a hassle most people (me included) are not willing to take for some random reddit survey.
reply
Nuzzerino 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
They pretty much force you to use the app if you are on mobile (nag screens at best). Maybe there are ways to get around that but your average andy won’t bother
reply
SllX 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
There is a ton of information I need to make sure I have saved, so I might not be out by June 30th, but I can’t see myself using Reddit remotely like I do through Apollo. Mobile apps made Reddit for me when the primary reason I hadn’t made an account till 2013 was because I thought even the old website was bad.
Alien Blue, BaconReader, Narwhal, and then eventually Apollo. All of them great apps, and that was Reddit for me.
reply
Nuzzerino 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm inclined to believe this considering how toxic of a place it has become. If that didn't drive them away I don't see how losing some 3rd party "enhancements" are going to break the bank for them.
reply
hapticmonkey 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I’d like to continue using the site, but third party apps are the only way to do so in a bearable way.
The mobile site and official app have terrible UX and bugs that make the whole experience rather infuriating.
reply
Double_a_92 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I will definitely not use it on mobile anymore. I was already using it very casually, because even the alternative apps are very clunky. If I had to use an even worse app, or god-forbid a mobile browser I would just stop.
reply
_sword 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I only browse Reddit on my phone, and I use Apollo, so when that’s gone I’m not sure I’d use Reddit anymore
reply
revscat 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Who are you talking about, specifically? Name names. Otherwise this appears to be a straw man.
reply
jachee 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
FWIW, Many of the participating subs are going dark indefinitely. And the real APIcalypse will happen in a couple of weeks, when people actually using third party apps literally can’t anymore.
reply
arthens 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Indefinitely until reddit picks new moderators and reopen them. No way they'll allow major subs closing down.
reply
jacksnipe 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Mods are not fungible. It’s tempting to feel that they are, but they have an enormous influence on their communities.
reply
grecy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I agree with you at heart, but that's like saying the head of a hospital or the head union guy dictate what the experience of being in a hospital or shop floor are like.
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
reply
pests 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Name a single mod.
I can't.
reply
AlexandrB 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Mods are like air traffic controllers. If you know their name, they probably fucked up badly. I suspect we'll know the names of many more mods if Reddit goes ahead with replacing them en-mass.
reply
makeitdouble 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'd hate to be so aware of the mods that I remember their names. As much as they deserve gratitude and praise it's supposed to be transparent.
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.
reply
grogenaut 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
dang
wendifur
Lowtax
drew
cmdrtaco
jatman
reply
natebc 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
cmndrtaco, he counts right?
reply
jachee 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Looks at list
I choose CowboyNeal.
reply
pugworthy 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Old school cool...
reply
jacksnipe 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Thank you! dang and Lowtax are exactly who I had in mind.
reply
pram 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
pud of fuckedcompany deserves to be in the pantheon imo
reply
mahathu 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
dtxer
reply
teaearlgraycold 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes but there are too many big subs closing. My guess is they couldn't support more than a couple dozen on their own.
reply
thyrox 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
But sometimes sites do die. Digg is a big example of this. It started with the top users like MrBabyMan posting against the site and then it quickly snowballed taking the whole site with it.
Doesn't always happens but it can happen and we can still hope.
reply
treyd 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
That Louis Rossman quote is really great actually. I feels to me like a lot of people see very popular platform services "suddenly and unexpectedly" turning around and start changing things in ways that are very unpopular, but I don't see it very common for people (on reddit at least) to point out the common characteristic between them, that they're almost always startups with investors to answer to, is the reason that they end up making unpopular changes. It really does feel a little bit like an abusive relationship that it keeps happening and yet people keep using these investor-backed startup platforms that initially offer deals that are too good to be true.
reply
LelouBil 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Some subreddits are private for 48hrs, others are indefinitely private until the issue is resolved
reply
dom96 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I honestly didn't expect this from Reddit. It seems like investors are really tightening their grip and they are banning subreddits and long-time users who oppose these changes left and right.
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!).
1 - https://api.reddiw.com
reply
thefourthchime 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Wow, that’s a low blow. These guys seem to hate their fan base.
reply
bink 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't know of any site that will allow someone to set up a "secondary" API where they proxy all user requests, especially if they're using a variation of a trademark.
reply
sillysaurusx 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That wasn’t the low blow they were referring to. Sending a C&D is standard. Banning a 13 year account isn’t.
reply
aprilnya 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
yeah but deleting the creator’s account is uncool
reply
Double_a_92 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I like the message is You have been banned "for breaking reddit." Not the reddit terms and conditions, just reddit itself :D
reply
slantaclaus 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
They want to go public, have wanted to go public for about 2 years now but when the market got soft and started demanding income more they’re trying to juice those numbers before they IPO. I don’t really use Reddit anymore anyway, but that is what is driving these decisions I think. Kind of basic commentary but this has a lot to do with upcoming IPO
reply
collaborative 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Would be cool to have a "federated" group of people offering their endpoints to route things like this API. With enough of them, they wouldn't be able to block it. Actually now that that I think of it, we could already use the Tor network for this
reply
moneywoes 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
How did they block your requests, your ip from server? Can an app use a users ip?
reply
93po 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The api requires authentication. They banned the account
reply
dom96 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Nope. My site doesn't use their API at all. Reddit's .json endpoints also don't require authentication (I don't actually use them either).
They actually banned the user agent, which I made unique and forthcoming (literally `web:reddiw.com v0.1 (by /u/dom96)`). I tested and changing anything in that user agent bypasses the block. So I could easily work around it, I am giving them a chance to unsuspend my account though.
reply
93po 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
my mistake
reply
bstar77 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
reply
unshavedyak 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think they're right. Lemmy/Kbin exist, but they're not ready for it. They're in a worse (less mature) place than Mastodon was with Twitter, and even that was rough.
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.
reply
ItsMonkk 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> but that's a solvable problem
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.
reply
joseph8th 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Interestingly, I've found Lemmy to be surprisingly engaging and active after just a day of Reddit Migration. Sure, there's still a lot of "Reddit sucks" posts, but certainly not all, or even close to the majority.
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.
reply
unshavedyak 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Agreed, and i should clarify that i didn't mean it was inactive or w/e, i just think it's less mature of a tech stack, less active as a whole, etc than Mastodon was in it's time of need. That difference i think has a meaningful impact on how quickly new instances can spin up, tooling available, UX of users, native mobile apps, etc.
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.
reply
pclmulqdq 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit wasn't in great shape when the Digg thing happened either. Reddit is just a platform for forums. There are literally thousands of alternatives.
reply
Wowfunhappy 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
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.
reply
Panzer04 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Discord won't make it. I find reddit useful because for any particular query I want a mostly user-based answer for I can google term + reddit. Discord jsut doesn't have the same discourse because it's designed for quick back-and-forth chats, not more in-depth self-supporting commentary.
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.
reply
moneywoes 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
What about discord threads?
reply
Panzer04 2 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
More a way for already engaged users to start another conversation while in the same channel. It doesn't serve the same purpose as reddit.
Regardless of anything discord does, the lack of searchability will always be a core problem compared to reddit.
reply
gremlinsinc 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
if discord were smart they'd create some sort of built in wiki system or news aggregating and multi group search to essentially merge discord with Reddit like services..
reply
karaterobot 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Another thing they're betting on is that most users could care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back later after this is all done.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Don't agree with that. While people may have been unaware, the news is literally plastered all over reddit at the moment - it's impossible to miss. Most people may not care about it that much, but the "zeitgeist" if you will of general anger at reddit management permeating nearly every subreddit is impossible to miss. Just one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is...
reply
com 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Have you checked out https://tilde.net - I’m not connected to it (not even a registered user) but it looks solid.
reply
forbiddenlake 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That gives me a cert error then an Outlook Web Acess login. What is it?
edit: presumably, https://tildes.net/ with an s
reply
wds 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha
Worked great for Google+!
reply
nukeman 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Because we don’t want the site to be completely overwhelmed and turned into Reddit 2.0. Currently, invites are turned off, but are likely to be turned back on in the next week or so. Normally, they are pretty easy to get (asking for one in the r/tildes invite thread).
reply
skerit 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I've seen a few Tildes threads that I want to interact with, but I can't because I don't have an account
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.
reply
georgebcrawford 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Are DMs possible on HN? I have about 9 invites on Tildes :-)
reply
vildravn 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Hey! Sorry to drop in like this, but could you spare one invite for me too please? The community looks interesting and I'd also like to participate in some discussions but I haven't had any luck finding an invite (I missed the last reddit thread by a few hours)
Can drop it to vildravn@gmail.com, don't think HN has DMs.
reply
PsynFyr 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
DMs aren't possible, but I sure wouldn't mind an invite sent to <my_username> at hotmail.com, if you still have one free.
reply
InRivendell 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If you still have some free, I would love one. Email is Stuck<HN_username> @ gmail
reply
skerit 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Oh! Well now I wish they were Feel free to send one to skeritc@gmail.com though ;)
reply
Gazumbo 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Could you shoot one to gaz1411fal@hotmail.com please?
reply
thuruv 3 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Hi, been a read-only lurker on Tildes posts for sometime now & liked it. Would be much interested in an invite. If you still have invites left, please shoot me one on mailto<username> @ gmail dot com (bWFpbHRvdGh1cnV2QGdtYWlsLmNvbQ==)
reply
P_I_Staker 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Did the digg migration have anything to do with bad management or appeasing investors?
reply
doublerabbit 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Voat won the show last time, then it capsized and sunk.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Voat didn't win shit. This is one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex:
> 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.
reply
Loveaway 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's. Reddit got Digg's business because Digg gambled away all of it's good will. That was a long time ago, Reddit since been going down the same path.
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.
reply
lordnacho 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics.
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.
reply
Loveaway 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Start small, add things that would naturally fit here. /hn/apple, /hn/crypto, /hn/gpt. Don't need images and video, it's fine as is I think. Probaly not going to happen right? This is the only place that has the momentum to pull it off though.
reply
oilchange 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics.
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.
reply
twelve40 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> it was not censored like HN!
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.
reply
SantalBlush 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If a comment or post is particularly unpopular, it can get flagged here, even if it is perfectly civil.
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.
reply
twelve40 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'm not sure this qualifies as censorship. There are a bunch of posts and comments that get flagged and unfairly downvoted for no apparent good reason, yes. It might depend on the mood of the users with voting power on that day, and that's unfair, yes. But from what I've seen there is no central agenda to systematically filter out topics or people. Subjectively, I find HN to be much less judgemental than Twitter (musk or not) and other places.
reply
SantalBlush 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's a completely fair point. But I suppose that regardless of whether it technically qualifies as censorship, it's people removing content that bothers them, and the end result can still be the same.
reply
oilchange 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> I don't feel like HN is censored.
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.
reply
dotnet00 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Agreed, especially compared to modern Reddit, HN is a free speech haven.
reply
nwienert 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's super heavily moderated here.
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.
reply
dotnet00 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The difference is that here I've been able to see many opinions expressed and given a fair shake which would've resulted in a ban on most of Reddit. The title moderation also helps with keeping them neutral and/or informative (biased titles set the tone of the conversation).
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.
reply
nwienert 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think that thinking of HN as anything close to being free speech though is a really wrong take. Sure it’s less leftist biased which is nice, but for example the title changes aren’t just to reduce controversy, they consistently favor the in-group. If you believed the HN homepage and comment section as anything close to the zeitgeist you’d be doing yourself a disservice.
reply
dotnet00 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I said that it was free speech relative to Reddit. Not that it's outright free speech. I have a personal misskey instance for that.
reply
SantalBlush 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's more free-speech than Reddit along the political spectrum, but less free-speech than Reddit along other spectrums. We're not allowed to insult each other on this site, for example, and posts that are specifically about politics are not allowed. Even Reddit has subs for different political groups.
reply
nwienert 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I still think relatively it’s possible more moderated here, if you just remove the most popular reddits which I’d guess most here ignore.
reply
goykasi 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Wut? People migrated to reddit, because it was one of the few similarly featured platforms at the time. HN was (and still is more or less) a niche forum revolving around startups and SV. reddit was literally the only centralized place on the net that was positioned to handle the posts, discussion and users.
Two completely different platforms that were never in competition with each other. I think you dont know what youre talking about.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”. And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.
reply
lkt 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That wasn't the case back then, there was a very strong "if it's legal, it's allowed" sentiment on reddit. It was only after it started getting attention in mainstream media that it was banned.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes, exactly, that sentiment isn’t mainstream. It goes against dominant social values and norms.
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.
reply
oilchange 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”.
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.
reply
amanaplanacanal 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The number of people who are actually free speech maximalists has got to be tiny. I really like the way it is done in the US: the government isn’t allowed to censor you, but I don’t have to let you stay in my house if you start insulting my family or going on racist rants. This seems like the perfect balance to me.
reply
stale2002 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> The number of people who are actually free speech maximalists has got to be tiny.
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.
reply
lordnacho 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
But you at least need someone to clean up spam? Not sure whether there was a forum spamming business back then, but there certainly is now.
reply
TJSomething 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The neat thing is that Reddit is community moderated. Each community is allowed to set their own standards, but they also need to clean up their own spam. So, /r/science doesn't allow any jokes at all while /r/Antiwork bans anything that's pro-corporation.
But several times, mostly when the controversy got too hot, the admins have killed subreddits, like /r/The_Donald, /r/incels, and /r/FatPeopleHate.
reply
oilchange 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes. Subs had moderators and they got rid of spam, but that was about it. The mods themselves were heavily pro free speech just like the founders and corporate. Back then, reddit was predominatly american and we all adopted the free speech as an ideal. Then as reddit gained a larger foreign following, they slowly chipped away at free speech. It's pretty much what happened to social media and the internet in general.
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.
reply
rightbyte 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Then as reddit gained a larger foreign following, they slowly chipped away at free speech.
I don't think so. I would rather say Reddit made Trump president, so the US establishment got pissed off. Then Reddit appeases them.
reply
treis 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm somewhat hopeful this gets the far left activist class to move to their own echo chamber like the Trump peeps did. Wish Reddit would go back to the let the upvotes handle it days. Would be nice to be able to sort by controversial again and see some reasonable takes.
reply
umanwizard 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I’d be really sad if HN turned into Reddit, tbh.
reply
P_I_Staker 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Fear not, it's basically impossible for that to happen
reply
dec0dedab0de 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's.
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.
reply
clnq 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over?
I really hope not. It would be the eternal September for HN.
reply
gremlinsinc 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I think lobsters might be better, it's very much like HN, but I think it being open source and looking at the code it wouldn't be too hard to have sub groups.
reply
nukeman 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
My hunch is that a decent bit of tech-Reddit will migrate to HN. But more general stuff, no.
reply
jbaber 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Shhhhh! They don't all know about HN!
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> Shhhhh! They don't all know about HN!
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.
reply
HeckFeck 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The Reddit source is out there, mercifully sans all the redesign code. It would just be a matter of funding + will.
reply
WXLCKNO 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Having the code is fine but they do have infrastructure and the architecture of it which is necessary to run the site. That part someone else will need to figure out again over time and optimize.
reply
Tao3300 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The federated alternatives have collapsed under the strain. It's all about the infrastructure.
reply
moneywoes 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Where
reply
HeckFeck 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Original: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Improved fork: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit
reply
seanalltogether 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I think its important to remember that digg was changing the way content was generated and promoted to users. They kneecapped the entire democratic principles of the site, and reddit, a site entirely based on democratic promotion, was waiting in the wings.
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.
reply
Tao3300 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeah, this isn't anything like Digg's ending. If you think it was, you weren't there.
reply
HeckFeck 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I remember the whimsical memes and comics made by the refugees. It was a different air; optimism that safer shores were ahead. This is more like confusion in the vacuum of space.
reply
hinkley 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
What’s the new Reddit though?
reply
lobstrosity420 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.
reply
hinkley 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The hobby and craftsmanship forums are a lot less link farming. You can take or leave politics and current events I suppose, but something like discord or slack can’t sustain a conversation over hours or days. It gets flooded out by other conversations in four to twelve hours and then poof it’s gone.
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.
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Can reddit sustain a conversation over days? Except on the most inactive subreddits, nothing stays on the front page for more than about a day. The result is that the only people continuing the conversation are people responding from their inboxes, getting into back-and-forth arguments sometimes 50-100 replies deep.
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.
reply
pokoblond 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This is a super interesting take I haven't thought about before, maybe it's time for me to find forums related to my niche hobbies.
reply
afavour 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If that were the case people would have left long ago, Reddit has plenty of downsides.
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.
reply
chefandy 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
There's a whole lot of inertia opposing people either replacing or discontinuing using reddit. Alternate subreddits gaining prominence is much more likely. Your average redditor has no clue what an API is or why some users and mods care about them. Generally, people need to have significant positive or negative incentives to change a years-long daily habit, and using r/radXYZ instead of r/XYZ will be a negligible change for most. I think reddit has a greater likelihood of strangling themselves by hobbling the overall UX with monetization efforts but their user base is entrenched enough that they could take it pretty far with the "boiling a frog" approach. Who knows, maybe what they've done so far combined with the blackouts will be enough to push people away, but I doubt it.
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.
reply
jeltz 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> 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.
reply
chefandy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You clearly know more about their finances than I do. I don't really follow that stuff.
reply
laserDinosaur 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
>Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives
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.
reply
danieldk 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Many communities are not simple link aggregators. Eg. I was active in the ergo mech keyboard subreddit and there it is mostly people showing their latest keyboard creations, sharing PCB gerbers, case STLs, and helping each other debugging issues with their keyboards.
There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't replaced.
reply
ketzo 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Why would the vast majority of users stop using Reddit because of, to the average person, a totally meaningless policy change?
reply
chx 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Because who wants to engage with an inane nazi cesspit? We know what happens to unmoderated spaces.
reply
anthonypasq 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
i dont see the link between the api policy change and all of reddit becoming unmoderated.
reply
chx 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
When moderation heavily relies on bots which need API access and the latter becomes too expensive... what do you think happens?
reply
anthonypasq 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
moderator tools are excluded from the new policy
reply
dv_dt 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The thing is, killing or hobbling third-party moderation tools will significantly degrade what is available on reddit.
reply
mikrl 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I don’t know, but hey you heard about that Ukrainian cat themed dating sim?
reply
DANmode 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Discord
reply
tomstockmail 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Lemmy, tildes, and arguably pixelfed for those subreddits that were image heavy.
reply
dingusdew 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The fediverse has places like https://kbin.social/ or there are instances of Lemmy, (https://join-lemmy.org/instances) but most people will want to avoid the "main" lemmy instances for places like https://beehaw.org/
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.
reply
michaelmrose 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> 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?
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The admins of the main instance have displayed a distinctly pro-authoritarian and anti-US stance. The pejorative for this ideology is "tankie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie ).
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.
reply
oilchange 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out...
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Necessity is the mother of invention.
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.
reply
hombre_fatal 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The moat is that it has users, not that it’s impossible to clone.
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I mean more like “going head to head against Microsoft in office productivity” type moat, vs “this is hard for a solo dev with no budget” type moat.
Reddit has no real moat.
reply
bstar77 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
To prove your point... https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-clone-react-firebase/
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes and no, the tech of a forum is not interesting, but fostering a healthy community that generates value is an eternally novel problem as every success has been the result of good timing more than anything else.
reply
rchaud 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
This is different. Maybe you are referring to the Voat thing a few years ago when people were mad about the "fatpeoplehate" subreddits being banned. As it turns out, only a vocal minority opposed that move and left Reddit.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
reply
BeFlatXIII 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> 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.
You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama, too.
reply
john-radio 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
To self-reinforce my participation in the strike, I logged out of reddit and disabled Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Old.reddit Redirect add-ons, and looking at the front page without those improvements (which I'm sure a minority of users use) it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is for the uninitiated. For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.
reply
barbazoo 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I don't get it. If I log out and go to reddit.com I see it he "Popular" view with a pretty good looking UI, 4.5 "cards" per screen height, I don't think that's what someone could mean by
> 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?
reply
wasyl 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/ueQfJsc.png. Huge cookies popup, I don't even see one full post immediately. When scrolling the feed I mostly see 2 posts, sometimes a bit of a third one. With old.reddit.com it's a compact list where you see a lot more content at once.
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
reply
barbazoo 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You're right, the comments being collapsed is annoying. The sidebars you can get rid of though iirc.
reply
zouhair 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And when you use RES[0] there are hundreds of other tweaks for the old.reddit.com that makes it a million time more easy to use.
[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
reply
dv_dt 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
On Apollo, I have the UI configured to omit previews of images and videos, it’s also high density. It basically looks like HN.
reply
fknorangesite 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The new reddit UI has - and has always had - compact options. I often suspect that the old.reddit.com sticklers never bothered to check the preferences.
reply
dv_dt 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I tried the new Reddit and it’s compact options near the rollout and a couple of times after; it wasn’t satisfactory. One was one of many reasons to keep using old Reddit and third party clients.
reply
ezekg 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
That’s how my old.reddit.com looks too.
reply
hcks 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It’s just a tiny minority of nerds complaining about how what they think is theirs has changed
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The thing I think this conversation should be about is how horrible their site is.
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.
reply
nomel 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money
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.
reply
matteoraso 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
>For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.
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.
reply
marcod 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I just deleted my reddit shortcuts. sigh
And when I went to log out of reddit, I got https://www.redditstatic.com/youbrokeit3.png
reply
jimmytucson 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1].
For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2].
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/premium
reply
danieldk 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Yeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API requests their users are going to make and if they underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also, it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly, especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX.
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.
reply
jimmytucson 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium?
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?
reply
soneil 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think that's low-balling it a lot.
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.
reply
opello 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It seems ideal to me where Reddit loses the ability to complain about usage by being able to control pricing for access and app developers get to recoup whatever they feel is necessary to maintain the app.
This may be myopic though.
reply
iLoveOncall 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Pretty easy to handle if you don't buy a monthly subscription but instead buy X API calls and can reload when you run out.
reply
kevincox 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That doesn't sound like a great experience for users.
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.
reply
cipheredStones 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Per the Apollo developer's post, a huge amount of the problem is existing subscriptions already sold for $10/year, which are now massive costs - and negative on net if there's even four months left on them. Not that having the price of your app suddenly quadruple from $10/year to $40/year because of API fees would be a small problem on its own!
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w... ("Why not just increase the price of Apollo" section)
reply
iLoveOncall 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Reimburse the yearly subscription their prorated amount and offer the new subscription amount, or even offer to apply the remainder as credit towards the new subscription. Seems pretty easy and obvious.
reply
bink 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Easy and obvious if you're directly selling to users. Not so easy and obvious if the App Store is a middle-man.
reply
macintux 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I vaguely recall that Apple stepped in to help Twitter 3rd party clients sort out the refund situation when that platform pulled the same stunt.
reply
darknavi 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
A lot harder to do with ~30 days notice on insane pricing though.
reply
iLoveOncall 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
He is doing a reimbursement anyway, I'm not sure what that would make harder?
reply
drexlspivey 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't get why you can't just bring your own API key with Apollo. It seems pretty simple to have the user go through Oauth to set up an app and have his own quota.
reply
Monotoko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You can, I've already made a modified version of Apollo and sideloaded it onto my phone with a tweak to set my own key instead of Apollo's
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
reply
mynameisvlad 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
How?
Apollo’s dev never released the source code to the app, only the server which sends out push notifications.
reply
Monotoko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Sideloadly and a lot of messing about, it doesn't need to be jailbroken though.
While it's still here: https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/145y787/tutorial...
reply
ihuman 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That sub is private now
reply
charrondev 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Presumsbly you could disassemble the app, replace the relevant keys, then sign it with your own developer app.
reply
antonjs 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Probably possible to edit the API key resource without actually needing to see the source code.
reply
PartiallyTyped 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Probably jailbroken phone, but honestly I am equally clueless.
reply
hartator 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> How?
And why? Before a few days ago, it wasn’t an issue at all.
reply
mynameisvlad 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I mean the reason should be plainly obvious if you’ve been following the last few days.
reply
darknavi 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The developer of Apollo has no interest in working with Reddit after this cluster fuck.
reply
Rebelgecko 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The API TOS has some nebulous verbiage about doing things that let a developer avoid the per app quotas, I'm sure reddit would apply it to any app that publicly did this
reply
anonred 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Please don’t do this, it’ll just make it even harder for actual developers and moderators to use Reddit’s API if people start abusing it.
reply
esskay 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Using your own API key is hardly abusing it. Officially (not that it means much these days) they've said they're keeping it free for individuals with 'standard' usage, which is what one sole user in an app would be.
reply
dybber 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Would people maybe have been more okay with this, if the change was that you needed to pay for Reddit premium to be able to use API/other apps with your user? Then it was not be a bill forwarded to other apps, but a bill to each individual user using these apps?
They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.
reply
kitsunesoba 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a premium subscription comes to mind.
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.
reply
antonjs 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I wonder if this could also actually work against reddit's interests. I'm guessing that a lot of the power users / mods have the highest API load, by doing things like taking large mod actions. You'd effectively be charging them more for the privilege of working.
reply
kitsunesoba 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'd say it's better than shutting mods and power users out of better apps entirely. They could also do things like give mods of subreddits past a certain subscriber/activity threshold free premium to help them mod better.
reply
jazzyjackson 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Large mod actions? Like nuking a thread? I sincerely hope the API includes bulk actions so it only takes one call to delete a list of comment ids
reply
jimmytucson 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
do you think 3rd party developers would be okay with this? in this scenario, the Reddit premium subscription fee would be a price floor and developers would have to charge a separate fee to use their app.
reply
CivBase 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
That would have been completely fine with me. But it's obvious at this point Reddit's goal was not to effectively monetize third-party apps. The goal was to crush them.
reply
Seattle3503 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
For me, removing NSFW (what will that even be defined as?) means 3rd party clients will have an incomplete experience.
reply
memalign 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think that subreddits and posts already have NSFW tags.
reply
Yujf 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Problem is that NSFW is used as a general content warning not just for porn. So if all NSFW content is blocked you lose a lot of non porn content too
reply
Seattle3503 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit also forces the NSFW tag onto content and subreddits for cigars and alcohol.
reply
princevegeta89 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't see why the fuck anyone would buy reddit Premium. Enough with these subscriptions;
reply
thepasswordis 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Maybe if I could then bypass the ridiculous rules some mods put on their subreddits I would.
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?
reply
dybber 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If it gave you the possibility to use other apps than the official? I think people would want to do that.
reply
justinhj 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The business model being, we make a client so bad that you will willingly give us money to not use it.
reply
makeitdouble 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
That assumes cooperation between reddit and third party devs.
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.
reply
lopkeny12ko 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Great. I'd happily pay $2.52 per month. Now Apollo should release a version of the app with bring-your-own-API-keys, I'll sign up for developer access, and pay for my own API usage. Has no one thought of this?
reply
davidktr 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You are missing the point that the developer needs a good working relationship with Reddit. He said very clearly that for him this is not about the money but about a passion project of his.
reply
iLoveOncall 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And Mark Cuban said he'd rather be an entrepeneur earning 50K a year than an employee earning 500K. Pretty easy to say when the developer of Apollo already made many millions off of it.
reply
joelcollinsdc 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The 100 requests per minute fee oauth tier is how you would want to handle this right? The requests should be authenticated as if it was the current logged in user anyways.
reply
detaro 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
that's per app, not per user.
reply
poisonborz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Of course it would be doable but Reddit doesn't want this. They rather have complete control over the platform. They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.
reply
bentcorner 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.
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.
reply
Apofis 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Usurious!
reply
moomoo11 6 days ago | next [–]
Hopefully this starts a "battery" approach to dealing with APIs, 3rd party apps, keys and a way for end users to quickly and seamlessly sign up to use services via 3rd party apps.
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.
reply
_dan 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
That doesn’t sound very far away from how Apollo/etc work today - you authenticate the app with Reddit via oauth and it accesses the api as you.
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.
reply
corrigible 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
This still needs a network effect to get started
reply
moomoo11 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeah true, that's why Reddit doing it would be kinda interesting (they won't).
reply
acyou 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
If we think we don't care about Reddit because we don't use the site, we should probably care. The future of Reddit may have a wide-ranging impact on the future of the Internet as a whole. Will content be created and consumed in walled gardens, or easily linked? Will AI-generated content flood forums and stifle meaningful discussion? Will moderation become an AI task instead of a human task?
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.
reply
EscapeFromNY 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
They put an impressive amount of work into that site. There are notifications and an autoupdating counter, and even a livestream. https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
reply
valine 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
It’s honestly better for subreddit discovery than anything reddit has made in the last 5 years.
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.
reply
jackdh 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
In which case, could I interest you in a list of lists of lists?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
reply
ec109685 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
1st gen Yahoo agrees.
reply
capableweb 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
There is a IRC channel for the same effect (useful as it uses less cpu, ram and bandwidth), #reddark at irc.hackint.org:6697, hanging out with the people from Archive Team too, who are achieving reddit at the moment (in #shreddit, same server)
https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/reddark for a webclient
reply
EdwardDiego 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Doesn't show the sub I mod though, and the search box isn't working for me.
reply
drivers99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I don't see r/politics or r/worldnews
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”
reply
aquova 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Have they agreed to shut down? I think this site is only displaying subreddits that have explicitly announced they're going down.
reply
drivers99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Oh thanks. It even says that at the top of the page. Duh.
reply
mvdtnz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The site is frequently breaking for me.
reply
_b 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make that data junk for awhile to make a statement?
reply
orev 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I suspect Reddit already has protections in place against this type of coordinated attack, as it would look exactly like when a whole sub (or 4chan) decides to brigade another sub for some other reason. There’s probably a hidden limit somewhere that when you downvote too many things at once, those vote become shadow-votes that don’t really count anymore.
reply
_b 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That is a good point. Are there modifications to the voting strike idea that would make it effective?
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.
reply
mcintyre1994 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I remember reading that downvotes on the posts/comments page of a user's profile don't count for a similar reason, but no idea if that's actually true.
reply
P_I_Staker 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
"coordinated attach"... don't you think you're being a bit dramatic?
reply
joeframbach 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Years ago during the maxwellhill r/technology debacle, many users did that, and we're all banned. My first primary account, which today would have been 13 years old, was banned.
reply
ec109685 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
That anomalous behavior would be easy to filter out, especially given they have protections against brigading.
reply
wvenable 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If nobody upvotes anything you can't protect against that.
reply
mvdtnz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Yeah nothing shows Reddit who's boss like checks notes aggressively engaging with their product.
reply
PUSH_AX 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
If everything is downvoted nothing is downvoted
reply
pugworthy 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
RIP anyone's karma on comments or posts
reply
t00ny 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I’ve been on Reddit for more than 13 years and I never cared about karma. Why would anyone care about this?
reply
pkju62dqmx 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I scrubbed and deleted my account. I’m done. They will have to make major changes in their trajectory for me to consider making a new account. It’s even less about the API changes than the way that they treated Christian Selig, a CEO throwing an indie dev in the mud like he did is disgusting and doesn’t give me hope for the site improving for anyone other than investors and advertisers.
reply
zouhair 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
This actually makes me sad. Over the year Reddit became a treasure trove of great and diverse information and thinking it could just disappear like that makes me so sad.
reply
jackdh 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
A large amount of it (I think they were going for all) has been saved by /r/datahoarder. So I wouldn't worry about it disappearing. It'll likely end up on archive.org at some point.
reply
hiepph 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yeah, sites like Reddit (or Youtube) makes me believe there is still hope in (knowledgeable) social media. But the situation right now in Reddit is purely chaotic.
reply
newqer 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Is there a good way to scrub automatically? My account is almost 10 years and it seems like a good time to end. I did it with MySpace, Tumbler and Facebook before and I never looked back.
reply
pkju62dqmx 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I used [shreddit](https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit) in an endless bash loop until it had overwritten and removed everything.
reply
atleastoptimal 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Is the inevitable fate of any social media site to be antagonistic to its most dedicated users?
reply
fnimick 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Yes: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
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.
reply
chx 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It is astonishing to watch the enshittification of Reddit and StackExchange at the same time.
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.
reply
ItsMonkk 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This is not happening at the same time by pure chance. Once the Fed turned off the free money, all of the negative profit companies need to adapt or die.
reply
chx 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeah but it's surprising to see neither have better ideas.
reply
mostlysimilar 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Link to the same article on his personal blog: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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.
reply
CSMastermind 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I've long thought that the only way to make a sustainable social media platform is to have it be controlled by its contributors.
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.
---
If anyone wants to fund the development of a platform like this let me know lol
reply
shagie 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> 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.
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).
reply
newqer 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Complete with a police force and secret service.
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.
reply
maccard 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't know if it's inevitable, but it's clear at this point that people are unwilling to pay $ for access to the content in the forms we know now. I think until we find a better way of having people pay for content and curation, we're likely to see this happen again. That said, Reddit has (so far) lasted a decade on the throne, which is a third of the life of the www. It's not like there's anoter competitor sitting there ready to dethrone it so I suspect it's here for another while.
reply
MostlyStable 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
So I think it's relatively clear that Reddit doesn't _want_ to reach some kind of deal with 3rd party apps, but honestly, I think that if they _had_ wanted that, most of these apps could have survived with a much smaller userbase of paying customers. I would have paid the $3-5/month it would have cost to keep my preferred app. And while yes, it definitely would have been fewer people, my guess is that it would have been enough to worth continuing. And if Reddit had been willing to figure out some kind of deal with ads, it might have been even more.
reply
Ekaros 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
When was a last time a big and popular social mediaish or like platform properly died? Media companies have not survived, but platforms seem to have been sticky or then I just haven't used them.
reply
philistine 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I would be interest in seeing Pinterest’s usage numbers. That place has turned into a Wish.com ad farm faster than you can blink.
reply
JasserInicide 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
That's just how most VC-funded projects run. Give away the product for free to build a community. Once it's large enough, start building the real money making products and start exploiting said community. Then IPO/get acquired and fuck off with money.
reply
atemerev 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, if you want to keep that sweet growth. If you are OK staying where you are as a relatively niche outlet (like HN), you are safe. But transitioning to the general public stage will require you to sell your soul. No getting around that.
reply
freediver 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
That is true of any business, as long as the business model does not align incentives.
reply
cragfar 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
This is 99% manufactured drama by the power mods wanting to be able to keep modding 100+ subreddits with their 3rd party tools and AI companies wanting to mine reddit data for free. The fact that Spez has let them do it for this long has probably put him in the hot seat.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The fact that he isn’t keeping his free labor force happy is the problem. Other companies put hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of staff into moderation. This moron has people doing that FOR FREE and he’s pissing them off.
Seriously, do you have any clue how much just YouTube alone spends on content moderation? Or Facebook? These are absolutely massive investments.
reply
cragfar 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
There's always another power hungry person to step up. The site would probably be better if the entire crop were removed outright. How many social media websites have you used where you can't even comment on a basic news forum for the first two months?
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Why don't you mod then? Everyone thinks it is an easy job with all these 'power' perks, then when they get onboard they figure out it is actually a lot of work and mostly just pissing people off because you can never please everyone.
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.
reply
cragfar 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do you even use reddit? I'm genuinely curious because your post comes off as someone who doesn't know how it works. To be a mod I would have to cozy up to the current mods and play politics to become one. I was banned from r/news years ago for saying the migrant caravan existed in response to a comment saying there was no evidence that migrant caravans existed and linked one of the multiple videos. The message was simply "get out" followed by a presumptive muting so I couldn't respond to it. I was also blanket banned from ~70 subs because I made one post correcting someone in r/nonewnormal.
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> To be a mod I would have to cozy up to the current mods and play politics to become one.
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
“Yes, but you see the problem is I want to pee in YOUR pool. If I were to build my own pool then I’d have to swim YOUR pee.”
reply
delecti 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I've used reddit regularly for 14 years and have never been banned from any sub. I share Eisenstein's assumptions. Also, having looked up what r/nonewnormal was, I don't fault any mod for noticing a pattern and trying to save themselves some trouble, even if casting a wide net has false positives.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
“If you think everyone around you is an asshole, chances are…”
reply
cragfar 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's not even close to what I was saying. Were you just hoping it was with that response?
reply
BrotherBisquick 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And that there is why the system of volunteer moderators doesn't work.
You bring up legitimate concerns and you're met with either stony silence, or you get called an asshole.
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
How do you propose to engage with people who are antagonistic?
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I’ll never figure with an internet this vast, anybody would be unable to take a hint that a particular community doesn’t want them and move on to one that does.
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.
reply
BrotherBisquick 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The powers that be have deemed that they don't care what the "free labor force" wants or thinks. They care about the experience of the users, not the experience of the rulers of petty internet fiefdoms.
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That’s my point: they benefit from a huge volunteer labor subsidy. They can’t afford to moderate it themselves as they clearly don’t have the financial resources.
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.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
When the most dedicated users are fundamentally hostile to the idea that the social media site may need to limit features for the sake of profitability, it seems likely. Rhetorically the activists here are a step or two away from treating Reddit as a public utility and free API access as a human right. At least until they shift focus to finding wrongthinkers that they want to ban again, then we'll shift back to the usual "it's a private platform sweetie and your presence has negative value" smugness.
reply
michaelmrose 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
You are fighting a straw man you yourself erected. Nobody believes they have a right to reddit but nor does reddit have a right to viewership. They are trying to leverage the value their communities bring to the platform. There is nothing morally wrong with this.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>Nobody believes they have a right to reddit
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."
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> t'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.
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.
reply
michaelmrose 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Users are deciding whether or not they should trade their comments, moderation, and submissions to reddit in exchange for the platform reddit provides.
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.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
>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.
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.
reply
khalladay 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Does subreddits going dark for 2 days matter? Seems like an insignificant ampunt of disruption to make much of a difference, or am I wrong?
reply
joecot 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
The initial plan was 2 days. Then Spez did his AMA where it was clear they were not interested in compromising, not planning to change anything, even seeing the enormous protest forming.
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.
reply
danieldk 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Also, quite some people seem to be removing their accounts along with all their post history. Maybe not in numbers that are significant to make it a ghost town, but in some subreddits you already see gaps appearing in prior discussions.
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.
reply
codeslave13 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I nuked 12 years of content. Yes i know its archived and like still available. But at least on the public site i withdrew my consent (my thought process/reason) for them to have my content that i can now only provide with thier completely shitty apps
reply
mcjiggerlog 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Many are now committing to either going dark indefinitely, or to reassess after the 14th, maybe with a poll to their members on how to proceed. This will definitely be going on for more than 2 days.
reply
jeffrallen 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If my Reddit communities are making polls, I won't even know to vote "keep it dark". I don't cross picket lines.
reply
bredren 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
History is littered with fits and starts of people working together to bring about change.
It does matter that people have identified a trend of corporate behavior, and are finding ways to take stands against it.
reply
macintux 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't know how widespread the sentiment is, but some mods have decided after the disastrous AMA that they're going dark indefinitely, until Reddit walks back the changes.
reply
afavour 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Don’t you remember the Reddit net neutrality blackout? That did… uh… raise… awareness… kinda?
reply
0xr0kk3r 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Victoria Taylor blackout in 2015?
also ... nothing.
reply
wvenable 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That one was trickier because there were no demands that could be met. Victoria didn't want her job back after all this.
reply
seydor 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
does anybody remember what net neutrality was about? That's right redditors memory is probably less than 48h long
reply
404mm 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Only means Reddit is going to end for me a few weeks early :(
reply
dv_dt 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It would not matter if that were the only thing occurring, but as a discrete event in a significant cluster of events, this leads to more awareness and more reassessments by communities looking at what value and future reddit actually provides.
reply
guerrilla 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes, I think it does. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283553
reply
x86x87 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Why only 2 days? This could happen again or it could keep going. Thus shows reddit what they are without all the freely contributed content and mod work.
reply
seydor 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
If they do it for more than 2 days , other subs will spring up
Do people forget that making a subreddit is free?
reply
comfypotato 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Some subs are going dark indefinitely
reply
cm2012 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Usually I am anti-internet stunts like this. The vast majority of boycotts are dumb wastes of time.
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.
reply
thefourthchime 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
If they hadn't blatantly tried to slander him personally and had given a reasonable price or timeline for the price changes, people wouldn't be nearly as upset.
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.
reply
cm2012 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I can answer your last question. Very few reddit users (as a % of the whole) actually subscribe to advertiser-valuable subreddits. Any targeted ads on Reddit have tiny tiny inventories.
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.
reply
graeme 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I mod a sub with high advertiser value. Just checked without ad block. Reddit it showing completely untargeted irrelevant ads to the userbase.
Maybe they're doing some sophisticated tracking of users by interest and showing relevant ads there but somehow I doubt it.
reply
thefourthchime 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I appreciate that insight. Thank you.
reply
michaelmrose 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The first party app is pretty garbage and the mobile experience tries to continually redirect you to the garbage app. Honestly if that was the only experience available I never would have started using reddit.
reply
rany_ 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Besides this boycott is at best useless, most are only going offline for 48 hours; it should be permanent until they reverse the decision if they were being sincere.
reply
joobus 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The third-party apps shutting down on July 1st will be the real test. If Reddit notices a significant drop in traffic on that day, they will probably start walking back the change. I agree that this boycott, while the intention is good, won't do much.
reply
MostlyStable 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Unless a large number of people who don't use 3rd party apps also leave in solidarity, it won't be a "significant drop". 3rd party apps make up quite a small amount of total traffic. And that's also assuming that TPA users _leave_ and don't just switch.
reply
michaelmrose 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If you have 10,000 users you have 1000 commenters, 100 people posting, and 10 moderators. If you keep 97% of your users but you lost half your mods, 25% of your posters and 7% of your commenters its going to lead to an eventual decline bigger than 3% and it can create a self re-enforcing trend because the people contributing to other networks can drag their connections along with them.
reply
nomorewords 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I don't think Reddit is doing anything based on that day's data. I suspect that they will wait for a month before starting to rely on the data for any long-term prospects.
reply
philistine 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The true number to look at is not traffic, it’s moderation actions. The real problem is the site will get harder to moderate without the API.
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.
reply
BeFlatXIII 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The real boycott is to stop moderating and let the place become a junkyard of spam and disinformation.
reply
BrotherBisquick 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit mods are addicted to power. If they don't ban anyone for 48 hours, they get the shakes.
reply
breadsniffer01 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Afaik, mods get free Reddit API usage for any tools. There’s been some misinformation being thrown around that claims they also are subject to the API price changes.
reply
8organicbits 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Source? My concern is that the 3rd party tools will shutdown or stagnate if usage drops to basically just mods. Reddit doesn't support mods, so it's looking grim.
reply
iLoveOncall 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Official stats showed that only 3% of moderation actions come from 3rd party apps, this was just a made up argument all along.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
reply
mustacheemperor 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This leaves out a significant share of how moderators use the API, which is for bots and external services that augment moderation without actually doing the moderating.
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.
reply
iLoveOncall 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And if you read the source you will see that all those tools will retain free access to the API...
reply
appletrotter 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
That’s for all actions, including auto moderator actions. I understand that the % of manual mod actions is closer to 30% on 3PA.
reply
anonred 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do you have a source for the 30% manual mod actions claim?
reply
jeremyjh 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Oh, well if spez says it, it must be true!
reply
michaelmrose 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I know he is a paragon of virtue who would never use access to production to edit people's comments!
reply
anonred 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It’s impressive what a determined, vocal minority can achieve with just a bit of drama. I hope this ends quickly so everyone else can get back to aimlessly doomscrolling on Reddit.
reply
appletrotter 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It’s impressive the power of a misleading statistic more like.
reply
SCUSKU 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Great! For any other compulsive Reddit addicts out there with uBlock Origin installed, you can block Reddit as follows:
Click uBlock Origin extension -> click gears -> click "My Filters" tab -> paste this line
||reddit.com^$all
reply
true_blue 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
It seems like you can just add "reddit.com" to "My Filters", and it still works.
reply
albert_e 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
is there a way to achieve this on Android Chrome? that's my prime gateway
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
reply
Riffz 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Oh god me too. Doom scrolling habit for sure. I had to remove the Apollo icon from my Home Screen to force myself to take part in the protest.
reply
Marcan 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Thanks for the filter, very useful! I'm keeping this on until Reddit backtracks.
reply
predictabl3 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I was on reddit 17 years. Needless to say, I have emotions.
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.
reply
dehrmann 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
One of the magic things about reddit was it was acquired by Condé Nast very early in its life. They didn't know what to do with it, so it was a bit neglected. That meant most of the time was spent on high-priority scaling issues, and there wasn't time to squeeze it for money. This helped with organic growth because the users were real and engaged. The downside was they didn't have resources to develop good first-party apps, and ended up depending on third-party developers for that.
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
They bought a good third-party app, turned it first-party, and destroyed it. Seems that they had resources enough to do that.
reply
dehrmann 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It takes resources to ruin tech products. There's a happy median between neglect and manufacturing growth and ruining something in the process.
reply
drumhead 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
The cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app. Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour, creativity, stories, humour, talent, wisdom, advice, skills of their users to try and make themselves billionaires whilst delivering a hopeless piece of tech in return, thats only been made useable by others people writing software to make the site bearable, Reddit Enhancement suite, Apollo, RIF. And yet here they are ready to make it rubbish again to get their filthy lucre. The more I think about it the more infuriated I get.
reply
WXLCKNO 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees.
I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible
reply
TulliusCicero 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Normally I'm the one saying "well there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you know".
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.
reply
thefourthchime 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think people dramatically underestimate the importance of having a small team of passionate, highly skilled, dare I say, 10x developers, creating the actual product. When venture capitalists come in, they just hire someone somebody they know, then get lost in architectural complexity, even outsourcing some coding. The whole thing turns into a mess.
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.
reply
drexlspivey 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They raised $250m 2 years ago and have tripled their workforce since. Now they're losing money of course but why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money recently?
reply
civilitty 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Everyone wants to cash out before the ship sinks.
reply
rossriley 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
2000 employees at an average cost of 200k / year is a $400m a year burn rate.
If they're not breaking even with revenue then that money starts to run out quite quickly.
reply
B1FF_PSUVM 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money
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.
reply
Panoramix 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
That's their main problem. No the APIs but wasting an enormous amount of resources and for what? so they can host videos and gifs themselves? Greed is a very effective way to destroy things.
reply
ZacnyLos 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Effectiveness of capitalism.
reply
KnobbleMcKnees 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Are you saying that you don't use the _groundbreaking_ one-on-one chat functionality that is a) running against the entire point of their anonymous discussion platform and b) total crap?
reply
infoseek12 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think you are taking too pessimistic a stance. For instance the new one-on-one chat feature is great, I’ve had some OnlyFans creators send me messages out the blue to tell me about what they’re up to and I’ve received info that will get me in early on some very lucrative crypto investments.
reply
kbenson 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I open that chat at least once a month.
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.
reply
morkalork 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The only thing I've seen PMs used for is harassment. And how about the "reddit cares" suicide prevention tool? Just another tool for abuse by trolls.
reply
mynameisvlad 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Do you mean “Legacy chat” or “Chat”?
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.
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
So there are now three ways of contacting someone? Private messages (have been around forever), legacy chat and chat?
reply
mynameisvlad 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yes. It’s bonkers.
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.
reply
fotta 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The chat which doesn’t show up on old.reddit? So if someone sends you a message on it you miss it? The one you have to disable on new.reddit so people only use PMs? I missed tons of sales on BST subs before realizing people were sending me chats on that.
reply
whyenot 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I’m telling you, the avatars that are also NFTs are absolutely the bees knees.
reply
Kiro 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
What makes Apollo better than the official app and why is there such a discrepancy? (I haven't used either.) I know the classic take is that the app is made for advertisers and not users, but I'm interested in what the actual difference is.
reply
realitythreek 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The “official app” on iOS is AlienBlue which Reddit bought. So to start with, Reddit relied on the work of a 3rd party developer to make it for them. They’ve since made it bloated and slow and full of ads.
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 $$$.
reply
EscargotCult 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
It uses the native iOS video player APIs, which (to my knowledge, it's been a while since I tried) the official app doesn't. Also overall, it follows a lot of the "recommended" iOS design guidelines and has the look and feel of an Apple-made app (fonts, long-press behaviour, slide elements to perform actions, haptic feedback, etc).
reply
nunez 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
A number of things. I'm comparing it to the website, though I think a lot of this holds true to the app as well.
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).
reply
cragfar 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit app used to preload all kinds of shit that would absolutely destroy your data usage. They appear to have fixed it. I used Apollo for a little bit and didn't have any strong opinion on it.
reply
martini_p 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
This sounds a lot like https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
reply
tgv 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Did you see the post where someone had reversed engineered some key encryption/obfuscation(?) function from the Android app which was just a substitution cypher and had a 66 byte memory leak on every call?
reply
goykasi 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No. Do you mind linking to that?
reply
tgv 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It has been deleted! It was posted on r/programmerhumor two days ago (had "reverse engineered" in the title), there was a post about how the original post was deleted, and now everything is private.
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.
reply
bushbaba 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The Reddit iOS app and mobile redesign are improvements from past UX. In app media seems to also be better than the past link outs. And the ads have overall gotten better and less intrusive feeling.
I wouldn’t call all that “nothing”
reply
mynameisvlad 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Getting a popup, sometimes undismissable, to read the thread in the mobile app (with no option for alternatives) is the opposite of what I would call an “improvement”, even if the before is old.reddit on mobile (ignoring mobile specific sites like i.reddit et al).
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.
reply
LanceH 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
The strike is less meaningful when imposed by moderators enforcing it. It's not simply a boycott of those using the app, which would be proportional. Moderators are dragging a lot of other people along with them that may not share the same opinions.
I'm scratching my head that the general attitude seems to be that Reddit just shouldn't get paid.
reply
edgarvaldes 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
The subs I follow made a poll, I'm fine with that, even knowing not everyone voted.
reply
skilled 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Are you implying the new Reddit design is cheaper to maintain than the old one?
reply
acyou 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I would also like to add that the dark side of this protest seems to be the "walled garden"-ization of Reddit. It's entirely possible that post-protest, the website or particular sections of the site and users will continue on in a Private mode where accounts, authentication, credentials, verification are required for creating and consuming content to a larger extent than before, and content is not visible or linkable to or from this and other sites.
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?
reply
TheCaptain4815 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
As I’ve continued to repeat, a change in user preference (mostly from one ideology) is to blame for this.
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.
reply
htag 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I've come to associate online platforms marketing themselves as free speech havens as being extremely far right ideologically. Are there any examples of non-censored media that either doesn't cover politics or covers the entire spectrum?
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Reddit before about 2018?
reply
depingus 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit didn't censor itself because Americans are not accepting of free speech. Reddit started censoring itself to appease corporate overlords. And the only reason those corpos embrace censorship is to stay out of the political crosshairs. How long did /r/jailbait exist before getting shutdown in 2011...and only because it was featured on Anderson Cooper?
reply
memefrog 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's not true. Reddit "censorship" that is the problem isn't things like banning questionable subreddits. Some of them were stupid. For example they claimed many were banned for "harassment" when there was no way for any subreddit to control whether subscribers harassed people, and it was inconsistently applied only to certain subreddits.
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.
reply
TheCaptain4815 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
My point was even given an alternative, most users agree with and support the censorship.
This in effect discredits almost any alternative by the user base itself, thus giving Reddit control.
reply
miniBill 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
No? This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or censorship. What are you on about?
[nitpicky note: it's iOS, not IOS - the latter being Cisco's one]
reply
TheCaptain4815 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If the original Reddit popped up today it would be rejected by most users for allowing certain content, and rejected by all marketplace stores for the same thing.
This in turn gives Reddit much more control and a very powerful moat.
reply
low_tech_punk 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Thinking on how to forward from here.
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.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
The age of adtech as the dominant technology revenue model is drawing to a close and Reddit missed out on the golden age. Trying to make ads work now, when it’s clear the future is subscriptions and the like, is just dumb.
reply
rchaud 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Only Google and FB figured out ads, and they were planet-scale companies. Twitter pulled in ad revenue but couldn't make a profit. Reddit's audience is extremely hostile to ads, and they've never managed to attract big advertisers anyway.
reply
TX81Z 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And they haven’t figured out a way to do it *legally*. Both are getting fined more by the day in the EU and fending off more class lawsuits than you can believe in the USA.
Once you take away the “grossly illegal activity” dividend neither is nearly as rosy as it seems.
reply
belinder 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Amazon?
reply
jachee 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Aside for my own curiosity: Why do you capitalize the word `ad` like that? It’s not an acronym, it’s an abbreviation; short for `advertisement`.
reply
rchaud 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem?
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.
reply
calessian 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
They could very well convince me to pay a subscription fee if they promised to not change the site anymore. Sure, that’s not exactly a great business model, but I do wonder if they’ll eventually pull the plug on old.reddit
reply
quenix 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I suggest the title be updated to reflect the live tracking nature of this site
"Watch the Reddit strike unfold live"?
reply
justinhj 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Forgive me if I'm making a simplistic reading of this, but it seems the CEO has said that whilst apps and bots are making some good money, Reddit is losing money. Assuming Reddit has already taken cost saving measures (with 2000 staff maybe not), then how can they continue as a business losing money? I wonder if a model would work where all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself, and they do a 30% revenue share with the apps?
reply
sahaj 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I think they are fixing this by making bots?
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.
reply
pndy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Last week I had an attempt of contact via this new chat-thing from a completely empty new account
reply
rchaud 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> then how can they continue as a business losing money?
The same way Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and other loss-making companies do? Bring in new financing and new advertisers, fire staff.
reply
bibabaloo 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
None of those companies allow third party apps, do they?
reply
cbsks 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Spotify does. But only for Premium accounts. That would have been a good way to solve this problem, in my opinion.
reply
Monotoko 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Apps were always willing to pay money for their usage, but not the insane pricing Reddit put in front of them ($12k for 50 million calls)
reply
hcks 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
2.5$ per user per month doesn’t seem insane at all
reply
cbsks 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It does when it is enacted with one months notice.
reply
asd88 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
They can stop losing money by slashing their workforce and stopping working on features nobody wants (e.g. chat, an official mobile app, etc).
The core site functionality has not changed in over a decade, there’s no need to try to be Instagram.
reply
anonred 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself
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.
reply
justinhj 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I would say that making money from sites content by putting it somewhere else with your own ads is simply not allowed. What I would allow is you to charge a subscription to use the api which goes to Reddit and you get some cut like 30%.
reply
HaloTop 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
>how can they continue as a business losing money?
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!"
reply
candiddevmike 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
What's the endgame here? Why even turn the subs back on? The admins have made their intentions clear enough, I think.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
The endgame should simply be:
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?
reply
x86x87 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Ideally yes, but the opposite is going to happen. They're gonna push their heads so far their asses they're gonna hit the stomach.
CEO and everyone that though this is the way to monetize need to go.
reply
breadsniffer01 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Mods get free API usage. It’s only for 3rd party apps. It seems the Apollo dev has been throwing around some misinformation.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> It seems the Apollo dev has been throwing around some misinformation.
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.
reply
CamelCaseName 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
1. He said he spends $166 / 50 million Imgur API requests. He must have a sweetheart deal because I see the prices at $3,333 / 50 million API requests (and if you go above that, it gets crazy expensive FAST)
2. Moderator actions are exempt from the API charges... But I think this decision was made after things had blown up.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
So fine, he was grandfathered in at a lower price (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214427) - that doesn't mean he was being untruthful in any way, and as that linked thread shows most API changes have a much longer lead time. Reddit's sole goal was to kill all third party apps, and they were obviously successful.
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.
reply
CamelCaseName 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
He was grandfathered in at a 95% discount?
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.
reply
hn_throwaway_99 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Again, more baseless speculation from you, in a way that is totally irrelevant. As you point out, even at 3.3k that's nearly a quarter of what Reddit wants to charge.
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.
reply
lewisflude 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Do you have an example of the misinformation?
reply
dharmab 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Reddit has taken over "abandoned" subreddits in the past and replaced the moderation teams. By making this temporary, the moderators of topic-based subreddits can continue to organize their communities, including organized migration to new places like Discord.
reply
x86x87 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Subs are not some abstract things where you just slap a new mod on and it's all fine. You may be abke to do this in extreme cases but there is no way this works for thousands of subs
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It seems unlikely that they'll have to make it work for thousands of subs, and quite frankly if they do then they'll likely have a new cooperative group of powermods that they can delegate most of the work to.
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."
reply
MostlyStable 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yeah, I do honestly think that that would be the only way this works. If the majority of mods were just like "yup, we'll shut it down and leave", forcing reddit to replace _large_ swaths of moderation, things could get ugly for them. As it is, as far as I have seen, very few subs are committing to being permanently closed, and Reddit will only boot mods from a _very_ small number of subs over a 2 day closure, so they don't have to find much replacement talent.
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.
reply
chx 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That number is growing by the hour and we shall see what happens on the 14th. There's not much stopping the participating subs from continuing indefinitely. If it's not declared as infinite, it's even harder to justify replacing them.
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
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> /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.
Wow, that'll really show them who's boss! /s
reply
bhaak 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It doesn't make sense to go all-in all at once. You need to have leverage afterwards as well.
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.
reply
none_to_remain 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Eventually people would just start replacement subreddits and the powermods would be left with jack shit
reply
guerrilla 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It's a demonstration of power; a sampler. This is a common strategy. You want to show them that you have the power so that serious negotiations can begin anew without disrupting the service you want to provide.
reply
candiddevmike 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
What power? Reddit can just takeover the subs and turn them back on.
reply
ben_w 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
And do they want to put in the same effort to curating those communities as the moderators there've just overruled?
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…)
reply
spiralx 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Didn't both KotukuInAction and TheDonald get shut down by the sub's original creators due to them going off the rails and then forcibly re-opened by the admins and handed over to new moderators who were happy with the massive growth in a direction the original owner never intended and actively did not want?
reply
isaacremuant 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
No.
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.
reply
CyberDildonics 4 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Why get upset about reddit? There are places where you can say whatever you can be as toxic as you want, spread misinformation and defend putin, like voat.
reply
ben_w 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I wouldn't know, but the question is more "can/will they do this to order?" rather than "can it ever be done?"
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I expect that disrupting the powermod cabal would be a net positive for the site.
reply
dotnet00 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Most of the powermods seem to be opposing this blackout.
reply
0xr0kk3r 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They'll just put the same effort in that Twitter does.
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?
reply
x86x87 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Are you serious? Twitter is in shambles right now. Ads were pulled (59% revenue lost) and musk is throwing a hissy fit he does not want to pay the GCP bill and rent on the office space. Twitter is the walking dead
reply
0xr0kk3r 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
That's literally my point. CEOs don't care. Reddit is following suit. Reddit will become "a shambles". Although I think my sarcasm needs work.
reply
ben_w 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Yeeeas, it really wasn't clear and still kinda looks you were suggesting the board would be fine with a 2/3rds reduction in their estimated value right before an IPO.
reply
jachee 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
If you’re being sarcastic in text, throw us a `/s`.
reply
foota 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Twitter and reddit are substantially different though.
reply
macintux 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
They just have to keep the communities viable until the IPO; I'm sure they can find new moderators who are unsympathetic to the strike to keep the lights on that long.
reply
davewritescode 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Yes but unless they’re well moderated they’ll turn to crap.
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.
reply
bredren 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I also think the CEO is a scapegoat. I’d argue that Huffman showed more courage than Elon did, though.
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.
reply
x86x87 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Lol. What IPO? Do you think anyone is buying reddit stock after this clusterfuck?
reply
davewritescode 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'm not saying it's a good idea to IPO but if Reddit shows a 25% increase in ad impressions and minimal loss of users this might end up being better.
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.
reply
guerrilla 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
The power of an organize and commit to a strike obviously. Reddit is nothing without mods. Going private is, as I said, just a sampler. The endgame would be for the mods to just leave if Reddit doesn't change course. This signals that that is a definite possibility since they've shown a. their unanimity of objection b. their ability to organize and c. their commitment to action.
reply
BaseballPhysics 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
And then who will moderate them? Does Reddit have 18,000 employees ready to take over? Or a bunch of scans waiting in the wings?
reply
Ekaros 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Surely there is enough people who would apply to take position of power in subreddit. And plenty of them would ignore any principles for that power.
reply
BaseballPhysics 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I think you overestimate the number of people willing to take on that job. The vast majority of people lurk. Of those who are active, most just comment. Of the remainder, most just post. It's a vanishingly small group who actually want to moderate given the time commitment and all the headaches involved.
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> vast majority
> 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.
reply
BaseballPhysics 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Valid point, you may be right, there may be a lot of potential mods out there if you're not worried about quality.
But Reddit doesn't need shitty mods. They need good mods. Shitty mods kill communities.
reply
neilv 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Maybe Reddit can turn a this-could-be-a-Digg-moment to their advantage, in increased appeal to users, and maybe investors...
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.)
reply
constantly 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Small subreddits are largely not participating. Large subreddits I just browse from the All or Popular. I’m thinking if the large subreddits don’t inject things into the All subreddit than largely identical content will be injected and this will be a blip as small as the last protest that only saw the main subreddit names change and nothing more.
reply
jrochkind1 4 days ago | prev | next [–]
> others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed,
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.
reply
sva_ 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
It seems that the site broke down and now redirects to a Twitch stream
> 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.
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | parent | next [–]
> It seems that the site broke down and now redirects to a Twitch stream
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.
reply
seydor 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Honestly good riddance to most of the mainstream subreddits with powertripping mods. The same people have been moderating for free (because they are power-addicted) for more than decade and this is a good opportunity to start new subreddits.
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
reply
darkstar999 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
> Could it be that reddit actually wants the 'strike' to shake up the stagnant subreddit/moderation situation
Not likely. Reddit already controls the r/popular feed which is the default experience and highly influences traffic.
reply
Andrew_nenakhov 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
The website [0] appears to be down right now for me. Overload, or legal troubles?
[0]: https://reddark.untone.uk/
reply
blackle 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Classic hug of death, I think. Works on and off for me.
reply
quenix 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Likely the hug of death
reply
inamberclad 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Of course, this is why decentralized alternatives like Mastodon have an advantage. There's no equivalent group of managers to make such a horrible decision.
reply
pwpw 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
With users deleting their comments, Reddit reducing API access, and other trends such as moving discussions behind Discord, this certainly feels like a Library of Alexandria moment: a gradual decline of loss of knowledge. Hopefully we can find a way to better store the wealth of knowledge that has been shared over the internet.
reply
balozi 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Reddit has been purging subs and users with reckless abandon for some time now as they cleaned up the place in the name of "community safety" (aka advertisers). I guess the monetized government kids that stayed believ(ed) they were the good ones, the worthy ones. If y'all think it will end at the API changes, you'll be sorely be disappointed.
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
>I guess the monetized government kids that stayed believ(ed) they were the good ones, the worthy ones.
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.
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> When capitalist logic was being used to justify Reddit going after hate speech, powerusers loved it.
So, being anti-hate-speech is a bad thing, to you?
reply
yanderekko 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Hypocrisy is a bad thing to me. "No bad tactics, only bad targets" is a bad thing to me.
reply
Eisenstein 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If your principles were used as a lever to undermine your principles would you still adhere to them?
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?
reply
stale2002 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> If your principles were used as a lever to undermine your principles would you still adhere to them?
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.
reply
Eisenstein 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> principles are important not because they help you defeat your enemies. They matter in and of themselves.
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.
reply
dragonwriter 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> No idea matters exclusively 'for its own sake'. To think like that is to abandon utility and reason for dogma.
“Utility” is an idea, too, and now we know which idea you value for its own sake.
reply
Eisenstein 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Let's break this down.
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.
[0] https://www.wordnik.com/words/utility
[1] https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/for-its-own-sake
reply
isaacremuant 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> When capitalist logic was being used to justify Reddit going after hate speech, powerusers loved it.
Correction. Those who didn't love it were banned or left or were censored out of default views.
reply
king_magic 6 days ago | next [–]
My prediction is that the “strike” will be utterly useless. It will usher in the era of full-spectrum AI moderation faster. The world will keep turning, and most Reddit users simply won’t care that much.
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.
reply
king_magic 3 days ago | parent | next [–]
As I predicted, nothing has happened or changed. Entirely useless “protest”.
reply
bella001 5 days ago | prev | next [–]
If any chance you were a victim of mining or investment scheme that required you to send your personal asset, money or cryptocurrency in any form to a third party then you obviously need some light in this dark tunnel. I have been a crypto holder since 2014 and was a victim of the Quadriga scheme in 2016. All the red flag right there but it was too late. Luckily I found an article where I was able to report and reclaim my lost asset, Now take a look at this article where you can Report and reclaim your crypto loss Bet you'd find all your missing pieces. Freddictine at consultant dot com he was able to recover my funds
reply
rTX5CMRXIfFG 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Nothing will come out of this, in the same way that nothing came out of the “walkouts” on Facebook’s wall redesign and Instagram’s feed redesign from chronological to algorithmically-curated. And as a matter of fact user engagement increased with those changes.
reply
ayakang31415 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I feel like one day blackout is going to have an opposite impact as it might give Reddit a false idea that no matter what they do people will eventually come. Instead of one day, if people were doing it for a few months, it will be effective. But we know that is not going to happen.
reply
jimbob45 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This probably seemed like a good idea to everyone but I absolutely hate everyone partaking in this now. I was previously on the "fuck reddit" side but this has eroded all of my goodwill.
Frustrating the people you want to support you rarely works.
reply
MrPatan 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Reddit has been doing a great job for my use case. Since I decided to quit it a few years ago they've made so many absurd changes that every time I land on it by chance I can't make head or tails of it, can't find the post, the comments, nothing.
It works great!
reply
davemp 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I’m planning to build up an RSS feed or two to stay up to date with the niches I go to reddit for and supplementing with discord when I want to read general comments.
I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits has tanked over time.
reply
htag 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
> I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits have tanked over time.
People have been complaining about decreasing quality of content on reddit since the beginning of reddit.
reply
Cannabat 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It’s true, though - over the past few years especially. Substantial rise in spam, paid accounts trying to sell you on some product or service, direct message solicitation, bots with political motivations… it really has gone downhill recently.
reply
nabakin 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
If anyone is interested in how many of the top 250 subreddits are participating, I created a website for it here https://save3rdpartyapps.com/
reply
Nerd_hooligan 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I thought the start is tomorrow?
reply
Ekaros 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Define tomorrow? It is past midnight for Beijing and Tokyo for example.
UTC would be reasonable standard meaning 6 and half hours still to go.
reply
necovek 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Even most of Europe would be already in the 12th by that metric, not to mention around 70% of the world's population.
reply
Ekaros 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Nope, it is not midnight even in Moscow timezone so European part of Russia. Which is most Eastern part.
reply
necovek 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I am responding to "UTC being a reasonable standard".
reply
louistsi 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The link shows which subreddits have turned private. Many have begun already as it is currently the 12th in many timezones.
reply
wedn3sday 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
For many people in the world, it's the 12th already.
reply
Buttons840 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It's always tomorrow somewhere--or something like that. :)
Remember, when you wake up on June 11th in the USA, June 11th is almost over for most of the world.
reply
selykg 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
A bunch of subs started today
reply
redundantly 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Correct. OP jumped the gun on this post.
reply
Timon3 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Given that there are currently 655/5279 already private, no, they didn't jump the gun.
Edit: 1 minute later already 658.
Edit: 2 minutes later 661.
Edit: 2 3/4 hours later 840.
reply
Vervious 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I'm clicking on some of them, and can still view the posts?
reply
Timon3 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do you have an example? I tried a sampling of private subs, none showed posts for me.
reply
Vervious 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Oh never mind, I didn't realize that the mechanism was to go private. I thought that all the subreddits listed were already dark.
reply
IvyMike 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I mean, it has begun: https://www.reddit.com/r/diy
reply
Choco31415 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Just the title. The page itself acknowledges that the strike is scheduled to start tomorrow:
“These subreddits are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after. ”
reply
dpistole 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
looks like its a website monitoring the subreddit statuses with a handful of them having already gone private
reply
redundantly 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Ah, my mistake. I wasn't aware some subreddits had already started, thought it was supposed to start tomorrow.
The fun has begun ;)
reply
stndef 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's also tomorrow in some countries already!
reply
natebc 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I've dropped (\.|^)reddit\.com$ into my pihole block list to avoid any accidental visits during the strike.
I'll really miss a couple of the good communities I've found there if this adventure ends up being fatal.
reply
saos 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Just deleted the app. Not returning until Reddit undo this stupid decision.
reply
2devnull 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I just hope they don’t come here and Reddit the place up.
reply
DowsingSpoon 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This whole fiasco leaves me shocked and surprised. I never considered that Reddit would sink themselves this way. It’s incredible. Until the AMA, I really had hope they’d back off and implement a sane API pricing model. That apps like Apollo would survive, diminished, and things would mostly continue on business-as-usual. But now, well, that’s it I guess. It’s been a long, slow decline, but I guess this is the end of the road.
reply
aendruk 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbjkWVyHEhwkwCZ6yfTEkz9fM1...
The live site has been difficult to reach. (https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/issues/49)
reply
causality0 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Has anybody done a writeup on the old vs new API costs compared to what it actually costs Reddit to provide the service? How is Reddit still not profitable?
reply
sacnoradhq 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Reddit was 99% awful and this won't make it any better.
If you want change, vote with your eyes and go elsewhere out of reach of absurdity.
reply
GaggiX 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Knowing the dev behind the site, he got 11k connections, the RAM finished and the server went down.
It must be a pretty stressful coding session now.
reply
low_tech_punk 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I’d consider it a brand damage to Cloudflare too. Their CDN clearly couldn’t offload the sever traffic. Ideally they should just serve stale content while server recovers.
reply
aendruk 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
s/couldn’t/wasn’t configured to/. It’s not magic.
reply
CostcoFanboy 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I fund Squabbles.io to be EXTREMELY promising. I have no stake in it. I just really dig the simplicity, format, layout, etc.
reply
hker999 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Ironically, /antiwork is not on strike
reply
surgical_fire 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Doing a strike is perhaps too much work.
... I'll see myself out.
reply
AlbertCory 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
We know about reddark, but is there a list of the subs that are consciously not participating?
reply
internetter 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
consciously? no, but here are the largest subreddits still public: https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/
reply
phoe-krk 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
If the website does not load for you because of HTTP 502 or other timeouts, there is a Twitch stream at https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247 showing the protest live.
reply
JaceLightning 5 days ago | prev | next [–]
Reddit died a long time ago. It's just a cesspool of one-sided arguments.
reply
andruby 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Have the makers of the 3rd party clients considered creating a reddit clone?
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?
reply
gigglesupstairs 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
As an example, Apollo has around 50k paying members currently. Even if we say 10% are really hardcore ones and will jump ship (and not just use Reddit’s default app which is decent if not feature rich), how many of those 10% will still retain Reddit as a parallel app, and how many of those will get frustrated very fast because growth is very hard in this space owing to federated nature of upcoming social networks and growing personal server costs and the time it will take for that social network to become mature like reddit. Will the remaining ones who stuck with the new ship and probably brought new members as well as part of scaling, be enough to generate enough revenue for those apps to continue investing in the new social network?
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.
reply
raverbashing 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
One "easier" middle ground is that if they would work on aggressive caching of requests and then maybe building a "shadow reddit" in the background
You could make your Api usage go really down this way
reply
revskill 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
What is reddit replacement then ?
reply
spicyjpeg 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Most communities seem to be moving over to Discord, which is by no means a valid Reddit replacement (in my opinion at least) but it is the only option with decent popularity and moderation tools that are not completely unusable at scale. Lemmy is being thrown around as a "proper" Reddit alternative, but realistically it will probably meet the same fate as Mastodon: plenty of people will try it for a week or so, only to realize that the platform sucks and the content simply isn't there.
reply
ronnier 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
TikTok is def eating into Reddit. People only have so much time to look at stuff and TikTok is taking a lot of it.
reply
CostcoFanboy 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
So far the best alternative that I've seen was Squabbles.io A lot of communities seem to be moving towards Discord. It has announcements, posts, chat, etc.
reply
macintux 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If Discord wins, we all lose. Even dead forums, online and searchable, are more valuable than live chatrooms.
reply
jdlyga 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Typically Discord, but Discord has its own issues. When the Digg meltdown happened, Reddit was already a Digg clone at the time (this was the days before subreddits).
reply
IvyMike 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
The user experience is easy to duplicate; getting good mods with good participants, blocking spam and bots, and scaling are the thing that will be hard to duplicate.
reply
srj 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to clone the main elements of reddit. Hopefully someone is building one.
reply
nXqd 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
yes, we are waiting, the main thing would be their content and their communities. it's definitely not about the platform, but how it would be built and govern by the creator.
reply
ferngodfather 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I wish Imzy was still around
reply
guerrilla 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Lemmy, probably.
reply
applesan 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
I've seen some move to tildes.
reply
DantesKite 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This would work better if there was a viable competitor to Reddit.
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.
reply
motoxpro 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Scrolling and seeing all of the green here makes me so happy that so many people can come together to do something they believe in. Brings me back to early internet. Very very very cool.
reply
baby 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This is so sad. I hope Reddit doesn’t die, because there’s nothing to replace it, but I also hope that it stops all the horrible decisions it’s been taking in the last like 5 years? I miss the old reddit.
reply
mikerg87 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I just can’t imagine this is the Reddit that Aaron Swartz would have wanted
reply
fhsm 5 days ago | parent | next [–]
When this happened my thoughts also turned to Aaron. I had not thought about him in some time. It made me sad note that, to think of where we and of all we have done without and why that is so.
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...
reply
DarkmSparks 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Having watched literally hundreds of sites rise and fall over the last 3 decades.
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.
reply
gareve 5 days ago | prev | next [–]
Great Visualization! My perception was that only 10% of the subs were going to go private. At the time of this comment, 87% of reddits are private
reply
cjs_ac 5 days ago | parent | next [–]
That's only 87% of subreddits that announced participation in the strike. The remaining 13% have gone read-only.
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
> My perception was that only 10% of the subs were going to go private
There's 3.5 million subs.
Less than 8000 are participating in the 'blackout'
That's 87% of ~8000, not the whole of Reddit.
reply
cactusplant7374 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Reddit has gone downhill. My notifications are filled with only fans spam accounts that are now following me.
Is reddit even safe for younger folks or folks at the office?
reply
honksillet 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Let’s hope Reddit consumes itself in this peer struggle.
reply
temporallobe 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Yet another heavy-handed action taken by out-of-touch leadership who doesn’t seem to grasp their very reason for existing - their customers.
reply
dubeye 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I've never used a reddit 3rd party app or mod. Do they make up a large percentage of users? What leverage do users have here, any?
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | parent | next [–]
> Do they make up a large percentage of users?
About 3%
> What leverage do users have here
None
reply
fho 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Honestly ... If it would not be for the campaign and media coverage ... I would not have noticed that anything has changed.
reply
barelysapient 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
If these protestors wanted to really impact Reddit, they’d also boycott all Reddit advertisers after a certain date.
reply
ZachSaucier 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
It'd be nice if there was a count of the total # of subscribers across all of the subreddits that have gone dark
reply
stOneskull 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
if the site loads for you, the number is there. last i looked it was over 2 billion.
reply
liberty-DNBWM 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This is ridiculous. I couldn't speak for all subreddits. But for some of the subreddits I loved, it just shows how ignorant, arrogant and dictatorial they are. Those moderators didn't contribute to the value of the subreddits. They don't provide any valuable content at all. How can they move subreddits to private without approval from creators? This is fucking ridiculous.
reply
john-radio 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
That's exactly the question that all of the rest of us have about the reddit admins demanding millions of dollars from the app developers with a month's worth of notice. Why on earth are you criticizing the moderators? Have you never heard of the concept of a strike?
reply
jimbob45 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
A strike hurts the company's owners primarily - much less so the company's consumers. This primarily hurts the company's users and does virtually nothing to the owners. Even worse, it highlights the dictatorial power reddit mods wield to be able to unilaterally decide to shut down their boards.
Don't hurt the people you want on your side.
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
> Why on earth are you criticizing the moderators?
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'
reply
paulpauper 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This is why strikes are not that effective unless everyone does it. A handful of subs striking for a few days out of hundreds of big subs is not going to change anything. But sub-level Reddit censorship has gotten so bad over the past 5 years I find it hard to muster much sympathy, tbh . I try to share links or make posts and half to 3/4 of them are removed even when trying to follow the guidelines perfectly.
reply
gamesbrainiac 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
What is a good alternative to reddit?
reply
jshen 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
The strikers need to turn to the fediverse, open protocol systems, otherwise what’s the end game?
reply
stevenwliao 5 days ago | parent | next [–]
Is the fediverse ready for 9 digit MAU?
reply
jshen 2 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I have two different answers to this, one technical and the other about power and leverage.
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.
reply
stevenwliao 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–]
If we imagine, say, /r/funny as a Fediserver, it'll need to be ready for 8 figure MAU, if not 9.
You make a good point about leverage.
reply
jshen 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–]
It's really interesting. A bunch of news came out today about Reddit doubling down on their position which is what I expected. I was thinking about the MAU problem, and I think the problem is not so much the ability to handle that scale from a tech perspective, but the cost of doing it. It really isn't hard these days to handle that kind of scale, but it comes with a big cloud bill.
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.
reply
CodeWriter23 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
[shrugs] the mods will be deleted and replaced with a Mechanical Turk style outsourcing system.
reply
internetguy 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
We're making HISTORY here. Massive kudos to all the redditors that are participating.
reply
graiz 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Remember IRC? /alt/? We just needed IRC clients but instead we got Digg and Reddit.
reply
darkstar999 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
Apples to oranges. I’m not interested in live chat.
reply
endisneigh 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Doubt anything will come of this, but Reddit will probably not miss these folks.
I’ll see them on the new site
reply
rany_ 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Oh no, gone for 48-hours... That will show 'em! (meanwhile the Reddit IPO is in a few months..)
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.
reply
xwdv 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
What is the point of making a subreddit private for 48 hours?
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.
reply
fritobugger 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I am here for the first time because of the reddit strike.
reply
fayazara 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I wonder how Aaron woupd have reacted to this descision.
reply
golemotron 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Wouldn't boycott be a better word than strike?
reply
coufu 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
I think boycott is more passive. Like I’m not gonna use or support their product.
This strike includes moderators actively locking down subreddits (whether making them private or read only) thus making Reddit less usable during the strike.
reply
ForOldHack 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Logged on, down voted everything I could find, left quickly. Lets see what it looks like next Monday.
reply
cprecioso 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I saw r/kpop in the list. You better not anger the most powerful collective in the internet.
reply
ryukoposting 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This is an atrocious experience on mobile, but a fantastic website regardless.
reply
sourcecodeplz 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
My website, my rules, my API prices. Don't like go somewhere else. Ez pez.
reply
seydor 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
My subs are up though
reply
nunez 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
hell yeah. burn baby burn. i fucking love reddit but i'd rather it die by implosion than see it live long enough to become slashdot
reply
paulddraper 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
Hug of death
reply
bardfinn 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I also keep coming back to the metaphor that Reddit is a great deal like Gormenghast: an ancient, stony fortification of cobbled-together structures, housing a gaggle of idiosyncratic personas whose lives are filled with the performances of abstruse rituals and obligations, the mandatory detritus of a former glory — insular and in a state of glacial decadence, and which nevertheless has a secondary community plastered on its boundary, with which it perfunctorily yet regularly interacts AND YET all of which exists within a much wider world that has largely diverged from it.
I think about the Tower of Flints.
reply
technothrasher 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
That series literally depressed the heck out of me... as does Reddit at times.
reply
Quequau 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
lol, you're right but also with a good deal of 'minimum viable product' in the mix. I'm going to steal this to share with my friends (who mostly hate Reddit).
Also, have a nice day.
reply
dahwolf 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
This could be Spez's Stalin moment.
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.
reply
sealeck 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
The fact that you think a "Stalin moment" would be a good thing says a lot.
reply
dahwolf 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The fact that you can't read says even more.
reply
cute_boi 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
662/5279 = 0.12540253836
looks too tiny tbh.
reply
Timon3 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
The subreddits didn't organize around a single point in time across all timezones. It's generally the 12th and 13th, but it's not yet the 12th everywhere. Give it a couple of hours. In the last 8 minutes alone 14 new subs went private.
reply
unstatusthequo 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Why didn’t they? UTC all the things.
reply
klyrs 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
As of now, six of the top ten subreddits have disabled posting. That doesn't seem tiny to me
reply
Quequau 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
2 subreddits with more than 20 million subscribers, 1 subreddit with more than 10 million, 23 with more than 1 million subscribers, 18 with more than 500K, 32 with more than 250K... seems like it's beginning to add up to me and it's only 7:40 CEST.
I'm shutting down roughly 50 just before midnight CEST and I expect things to accelerate with the date change at GMT.
reply
cornedor 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
It was 662 for me too when I opened the site, i've been scrolling a bit trough the site and it is 668 already, and the site showed notifications for those extra reddits. They seem to be closing fast.
reply
yareally 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
12.5%? That's roughly 1 in 8 subreddits
reply
elliekelly 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Can someone clarify how they decided to feature these 5279 subreddits? Are these the subreddits whose mods decided to participate? Or are these the largest subreddits? Or is there some other factor?
reply
x86x87 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Is it? It's not about the size (lookup how many subs are in total). It's about sending a message
There's more than 5000 subs. There are millions of them. These are big subs
reply
ferngodfather 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
That's 12% - nothing to laugh at
reply
rvz 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Lets see how the strong Reddit's network effect is when tested.
reply
ChocMontePy 6 days ago | prev | next [–]
I have to hand it to those app devs. The way they managed to dupe millions of Redditors into protesting was masterful.
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.
reply
poisonborz 6 days ago | parent | next [–]
It has nothing to do with the amount of the price, the scheme (charge per request, not /user/month) makes third party apps impossible on purpose. Not to say that this abrupt and unannounced dumping of beloved community apps is just the latest misstep of a long string of anti-user moves from Reddit. They had it coming, but their estimation is that a large majority will keep silent. Let's see - Twitter had also not truly crashed yet on their grand way to profitability...
reply
ChocMontePy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
If it made 3rd party apps impossible, then all or most of them would have announced they were shutting down by now. In fact, only three have done so. The rest are still trying to work out the economics.
I expect that quite a few will survive, despite people saying it is "impossible."
reply
skilled 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
Do let us know about the math, once you are done with it.
reply
coufu 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Even if the API price was reasonable, Reddit only gave 3rd party apps 30 days to prepare. You can’t come up with a decent pricing model, billing infrastructure, and incorporate the logic in your app in that amount of time. It’s just overall very hostile and unreasonable from Reddit leadership. The biggest apps are forced to shut down because if they stay up, the millions of dollars in bills are going to start flooding in.
reply
ChocMontePy 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
I agree with you that the timeline is tight.
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.
reply
coufu 6 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
The doom and gloom honestly is mostly driven by Reddit’s leadership being incompetent. If Reddit leadership reached out and worked things out privately and in a productive manner with 3rd party app developers to create a plan and agree on reasonable timelines, none of this drama would have surfaced at this magnitude. Would people still be pissed at the API charges forcing apps to charge subscription fees? Probably. But you wouldn’t have peoples’ favorite Reddit apps shutting down and creating a much bigger stir as we have today. And I think everyone is in agreement at some level that Reddit deserves some compensation for API usage. But again, this has all been handled very poorly by Reddit leadership.
reply
unclekev 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
> If Reddit leadership reached out and worked things out privately and in a productive manner with 3rd party app developers to create a plan and agree on reasonable timelines,
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.
reply
coufu 5 days ago | root | parent | next [–]
This was Reddit's statement (proven to be false btw by audio recordings) before "the dev Apollo spat the dummy and turned it into a public mega drama":
> 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?
reply
Terretta 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Propaganda is gaslighting users that the apps make API requests.
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.
reply
jcpsimmons 6 days ago | prev [–]
Who cares? Redditors are really too much. Hoping that everything has a good resolution only because I don’t want Redditors fleeing to other sites that are (blissfully) free of their “culture”. Already have seen an unfortunate influx of them on this site.
reply
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment