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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 &q...
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thing is, Twitter was profitable in 2019. Then the venture capitalists decided "Now is the time to increase your workforce by a factor of two. You need to start losing money again or you aren't trying hard enough!"
You'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.
So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.
It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.
> When you call the police
In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.
> people 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did not get fired by Elon, so that's a swing and a miss. Any other straw men you wanted to try?
You're wrong about the "average user" enjoying "free speech", of course. That's the view Twitter started out on, "the free speech wing of the free speech party". But they learned that certain kinds of speech drove away users and made it hard to sell ads, so for very good business reasons, they decided to take away the "free speech" of people to, say, shout the n-word at black people. [1]
I believe you enjoy it more, of course. But other people enjoy it less. You and Musk are making the same mistake in thinking a thing that you like is a thing that everybody will like. Running a social network means you have to create something that is liked by a very wide variety of people. And a lot of people who wave the "free speech" banner just turn out to want no constraints on their own speech, while having much less concern about creating a place where a wide variety of people can safely speak up and be heard.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
We are talking about being capitalists. Not getting a car or a personal house…no less those people likely aren’t capitalists. It is okay if nuances of economics aren’t understood by normal people but my comment being downvoted while posts lacking foundational political knowledge are fine. Of course it makes sense. Liberals lack self awareness.
TBC: you thought the throughline was money when it was nothing. You were talking about investing money that can be used to exploit workers and turn a higher profit by paying workers less than they benefit the stakeholders. Exploiting people is an obvious immoral action.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes and: examples of modest success like craigslist, metafilter, ravelry, etc. Like you wrote elsethread, paraphrasing, avoid the trap of unicorn or bust.
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.
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.
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.
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
Glad you liked it. 13 years ago reddit had an absolutely atrocious mobile experience, and was unusable on my (then new) Motorola Droid (milestone). So it was mostly a labor of "what do I need to browse reddit".
KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The old reddit user interface was/is remarkably good. Threaded, collapsible discussions with markdown for comments in a non-distracting (i.e. sparse) layout.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is such a bad comment. For all of HN loving themselves on such a good platform. This sort of sock puppet temp account attacking the most vulnerable group of people in the world right now while asking others to be fair minded.
Some of us have work related to politics and don’t need an ignorant explanation of the propaganda video called what is a woman (a title and question that is silly in and of itself…people know what a woman is).
—-
You don’t understand right or wrong. The person being incorrect about minor un important stuff bout some kids sometimes rarely getting more serious stuff happen doesn’t mean anything. We are still talking super rare stuff.
At no point do you, someone who is pretending watching a propaganda video gives them evidence for their side. A video can say anything haha. The amt of shady shit the porpoganda was doing was unhinged.
Stop repeating what your ilk does. Again the person being technically wrong does not matter. Any one who reconsiders positions based on only technically being wrong is by definition not fair minded enough. They are reactionaries without enough theory or knowledge to back up any convictions they have that are focused on unhinged things like focusing on oppressed people.
At no point do you understand what ideology means. To act like people who don’t want to see fascism as ideologues is unhinged.
What are you talking about? I said Reddit and HN and YC are classic liberal capitalist stuff. Then I jokingly brought up left ideology. You somehow took me making a transparent joke seriously. Leftism and liberalism have little relation.
Also. Did you know leftists get banned all the time. Leftist subreddits get banned In whole (Chapo Trap House).
Stop living in a fantasy world where you’re the moral victim.
See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.
There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. You could have some kind of community influence over moderator selection for subreddits over a certain size. StackExchange has (had?) elections for moderators.
2. You could have rules preventing anyone from having moderator powers on more than a certain percentage of the site.
3. The best change would one that prevented moderators from sitting in IRC/Discord talking about reddit 24/7. Having so much meta-discussion happen "behind the scenes" is not good. The problem is that normal people who think "lol imagine having drama over an internet forum what a load of nerds" would be the best moderators but are the least interested in doing it.
I 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> moderators are supposed to be the people who actually take actions to steward a community, not people who claim a title and never take action, not people who abuse the privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that aren’t in the interest of the communities they serve. Not absentee founders.
I'm not the OP but that context makes it pretty obvious the OP is being figurative.
Well, this may be true for many of the big subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits and their communities are about conversation and original content more than link aggregation.
Nonsense. The API had clear terms of service that allowed for third party clients, and Reddit explicitly promoted and supported them in the past. The current Reddit app was even built on one such app (Alien Blue) that Reddit acquired.
For a platform hosting user generated content and with volunteer moderation having third party clients is usually a net positive despite the small loss in advertising revenue, purely because they have a very positive impact on content creation and curation. That keeps passive users coming to the site so they can be advertised to.
At some point after a platform matures there needs to be some additional monetisation of third party clients, especially as they begin to capture a larger share of users. It doesn’t have to result in the clients being killed off entirely.
Reddit is nothing without people voluntarily adding content to the site and good moderators voluntarily running subreddits. That’s especially true for special interest and high quality subs like AskHistorians.
If Reddit actually wanted to make money on users of third party clients they would have handled this completely differently.
I suspect at first they didn't really care about the 3P clients in coming up with pricing, they were looking at the bulk of API usage which is elsewhere (not sure where, but based on numbers provided by Reddit Apollo would be at most 1.4% of API usage and likely much less; other clients likely significantly lower given how Apollo was singled out) and looking at preparing to get paid for user content by VC-backed AI startups.
Once the pricing was announced and the 3P app developers started complaining, there was probably a Cartman moment in the executive offices and things just went downstairs from there.
Because of their hamfisted handling of this they're going to lose a significant number of long-term users, a fair amount of content as a noticeable chunk of those users delete their content on the way out the door, an absurd amount of community and unpaid volunteer moderator goodwill, etc.
Reddit is likely to keep most of the users for now, but the reaction is also driving a lot of people to suddenly explore alternatives that would have been completely ignored before - and at some point it's quite possible that those popular clients that don't even have Reddit in the name will shift to providing mature and familiar interfaces to those alternatives and that may be enough to push growth. Remember that no social platform started out big.
If Reddit actually wanted to make money from the third party app users it would have been almost trivial to do - require a paid account for API usage, introduce new paid account tiers ($18-24/year, $3-4/mo, the current Premium, a couple of more expensive 'family'/multiuser tiers). Have them variable in how much monthly API usage was allowed and other perks (e.g. multiple IDs with either split or pooled API usage). Run it through the payment system Reddit already uses which means they get almost all the money instead of 30% off the top for app store fees plus a chunk going to the app developers so they're safe from getting screwed by mis-estimating usage. Edit: heck, just converting a chunk of users to paid accounts would likely have been huge for them because it gives potential for converting even more in the future, plus the chances of upsells.
But no, 'You have 30 days to change your business model, prepare to handle $millions/year in cash flow, and rewrite chunks of your software to be subscription-based.' Hell, the only 2 that I know of that even used subscriptions are Apollo and Sync, they might have had a chance. Instead, Reddit went for plausible deniability, 'we didn't kill the apps, they had a path to work with us but they all just gave up!'
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?
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.
I usually prefer to be polite but I just had a moment of remembering all of the times that I got censored on Reddit even when I was polite, but had an unpopular opinion.
Its community knowledge, just like wikipedia right now. Infact someone mentioned in another thread that maybe thats the ownership structure Reddit should have had.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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The other problem that social media needs to solve is that of anonymity and content presentation. Here I think Reddit fails by having a global karma count instead of one that's localized to the 'state' and subreddit you're on. If they did that then users could actually gain reputation and credibility within the context of a space.
They also should offer identity services that allow the verification of information like employment, citizenship, education, etc. that some subreddits have their own haphazard mechanisms for verifying. This would allow moderators to leverage this type of credential more easily and users to have more trust in sharing them (because they're sharing with Reddit proper not some random subreddit moderator).
Finally, they should have some sort of verification system that lets users tie their accounts to their real identity. Obviously anonymous accounts should still be allowed but this type of verification system tamps down on many of the problems that social media platforms face.
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If anyone wants to fund the development of a platform like this let me know lol
This 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You want to take over already existing communities instead of building your own? Who is the extremist here?
Stop being lazy and put in the work, then whine about your situation. As it is you just sound like someone annoyed because things don't work the way you like but you don't want to do anything but complain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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==)
> 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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can this really be called censorship? of course, you can take a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that as well.
Reddit is heavily moderated too, but there you can get into an argument, and it depends on the subreddit.
Here the tone policing is far, far stricter. Also the homepage is incredibly tightly controlled, politically and pro-YC. I've seen many articles on YC companies or associated people changed, removed, etc despite being highly relevant.
Titles are changed to suit the mods tastes here. There was a good recent example where a very negative article on OpenAI skyrocketed the the top of the homepage, fastest rising post ever with a few hundred upvotes within like an hour - first the title was completely neutered, then the post was removed entirely.
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No need to worry, any mention of HN is being mostly censored in all the "Reddit blackout" propoganda Discords now there's actual real discussion happening here about how the strike is stupid and just a vocal minority of mods taking the users for a ride and they can't downvoted those comments into non existence.
I 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.
> 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.
A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like this could be iterated on. The challenges are around infrastructure and funding to function at scale.
I would personally rather see something that improves on the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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…)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> /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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 $$$.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 458 ms ] threadEdit: 1 minute later already 658.
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The fun has begun ;)
“These subreddits are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after. ”
UTC would be reasonable standard meaning 6 and half hours still to go.
Remember, when you wake up on June 11th in the USA, June 11th is almost over for most of the world.
I think about the Tower of Flints.
Also, have a nice day.
"Watch the Reddit strike unfold live"?
The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
The app they’re burning down Reddit over is already charging $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but we usually don’t give out API keys to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our data for free.
Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content it actually is.
Of course, given the edit, one must wonder who's data they think it is given who they're collecting it from...
You are free though to access the referenced content on your own if you can find out about it on your own.
Not Reddit. They're just the landlord here.
You’re free to setup your own, or rent somewhere else. Regardless it costs money.
Now they want to charge for some aspect that was free and you decide not hang around anymore.
You say reddit is throwing it away when you are the one who is throwing it away because you have to pay if you want api access.
People here should understand this more than anyone else. It is one thing to have site as hobby, but something with number of users is expensive to run.
Perhaps if Reddit the company had been more disciplined over the last ten years, it wouldn't have come to that.
API hosting is a drop in the bucket, even if their own accounts are to be believed wholesale.
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
Lmao. Do you even realize what all these are about...? Reddit's pricing API policy is making ALL the apps unsustaniable. It's not "the app".
> Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US.
Yeah so? Only users and mods in the US matter and fuck the rest of the world?
Plus Reddit is, surprisingly, not Facebook. I don't even understand why you're comparing them. Actually I believe many people use Reddit because it's not like Facebook.
For my apps that rely on UGC, I take it a step further and remove myself from UGC liabilities somewhat by having users self host in various ways, appified for simplicity. I definitely don’t paywall license access to UGC - this allows me to operate much more leanly by not having full custody of UGC. Win-win
Obviously UGC hazards are still important to build against but these models offer interesting ways to do that as well
If you're a community leader in charge of some subreddit... would you continue to let Reddit host the data if they continuously make it more expensive to access the data?
Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.
Which is all the big players btw. And most small players too. It’s not just a big n corrupt edge case.
I struggle with pitching the value of it in my products and would like to help peers
^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png
You mean... like Reddit, which's reproducing and selling users' data...? (play canned laughter)
To answer your question, I'd charge them to cover the bandwidth cost.
The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of users who are not paying their fair share which in turn means more ads for everyone else to make up for free loaders.
In the case of Reddit and Wikipedia, it's also an important part of how the volunteer moderators/contributors run the site. On Reddit there are a huge selection of community-owned moderation bots that monitor subreddits for posts matching rules.
If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that nothing is left of their business when those communities have moved elsewhere. To even create this war against your own users is complete folly.
You also get from it the good feeling when people ‘upvote’ your content. It’s a pretty good deal in that you only pay for it by seeing some ads.
You’re free to setup your own blog and send emails to your friends about the links you like.
We'll see who ultimately comes out ahead. I figure it will be Reddit, but that doesn't mean anything about this is difficult to understand. This is how being a consumer works when you're upset with a provider and can't vote with your wallet.
And we are just talking about links, which in most cases the submitter does not own the referenced content anyways.
Where are they gonna move to?
I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know - where on earth are all these moderators going to start up their new groups on?
If there was a viable alternative they would've found it by now and there wouldn't be a strike, there'd be a desertion. The fact is that even if the moderators want to move, the userbase isn't necessarily going to follow them.
Maybe they will, but there's nothing to move to today.
With nothing to move to, the users aren't going to move. Having a viable place next week might be pointless.
Did you really think there was nothing else? Services like reddit are big because of their network effects, not because they have so special sauce that no one has been able to replicate.
I think the pricing model is per API call, and Reddit was claiming that a typical user, with the app using the data the way Reddit envisions, would use that quantity of API calls.
This, of course, assumes that every app is designed similar to the way Reddit expects, i.e., Reddit is assuming that nobody will do anything to add any value on top of Reddit's own design. But isn't that value-add part of the reason these apps exist in the first place?
And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without causing a shitstorm.
Reddit, by which I mean its vast user community, does not give a shit about ARPU as long as the site stays up and things get modestly better over time. And I've seen no evidence that Reddit needs a massive bump in revenue to meet those goals.
Wouldn't have got nearly as much backlash.
One way to look at it is that Apollo, the app you're referencing that was able to charge $10 a year, would have to charge 2.5 times as much just to cover the access fees, and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit.
The issue here is that the ARPU calculation and assumptions are wrong. Is reddit losing out on that entirely if someone comes to them from a separate interface but still is served through them? Also, it's just too optimistic. Reddit has revenue of less than a dollar per site user (or maybe slightly more than a dollar now?). Most references I'm seeing showed reddit with an ARPU of well under $1 in 2021, closer to half a dollar. Are we expected to believe there's been a 40x increase in a year, or that after all the years reddit has functioned they'll be able to achieve that in the near future?
Is it fair for a third party app to be profitable before the service itself is?
Reddit has to cover the access fees, its own overhead, and try to make a profit itself too.
Third party apps benefit the platform, especially in the early days. They result in more content from power users and easier moderation, so they contribute to revenue and aren’t only a cost.
They generally have extremely low overheads though, with nearly all being the work of just one or two developers. The profit they bring in is minuscule compared to what Reddit is looking to achieve. Apollo’s profit from annual subscribers, once accounting for taxes and the App Store fee, appears to be just a couple hundred thousand dollars based on the numbers Selig has provided.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
> Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.
That's half of what the subscription costs... though he could update the subscription.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252
> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.
> If the subscription price increase is above the thresholds, exceeds the annual limit, or occurs within territories where the law requires it, you must opt in before the price increase is applied. If you don't opt in to the new price, the subscription will not renew at the next billing period. You can subscribe again within the app or on the Manage Subscriptions page.
He could have limited free use and turned off push notifications or drastically cut down on the polling rate ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... "The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user") and increased the price.
The full passage is:
> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.
Note that the claim of the average user 344 requests per day and the polling rate of 600 requests per hour per user do not seem to be in agreement and may significantly contribute to the API pricing quote.
I don't think the app is making those 600 requests 24/7.
[1] https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/
I don't think a person using a third party app necessarily implies they are a power user or better at moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even have a mobile app and the only options were third party apps.
> They generally have extremely low overheads though, with nearly all being the work of just one or two developers
Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is subsidizing the majority of the value the third party apps are capturing.
Its entirely within reason for Reddit to want to capture that value instead of giving it away to free to third party apps.
Reddit has also expanded its staff count (and therefore costs) dramatically to chase new product areas and has seen big jumps in revenue. They’ve clearly been chasing growth in revenue and user numbers over profit. It doesn’t meant they couldn’t be profitable based on what they have.
> I don't think a person using a third party app necessarily implies they are a power user or better at moderation. Hell, in the beginning reddit didn't even have a mobile app and the only options were third party apps.
Not every user of a third party app is a power user, but power users and mods are almost certainly using third party apps & tools. The shutdown statements made by so many sub moderators back that up.
> Hmm, I wonder how they can provide that with such low developer counts - maybe because Reddit as a service is subsidizing the majority of the value the third party apps are capturing.
That doesn’t make any sense. They’re not replacing the platform, they’re just an interface to it. The better point of comparison is to the official Reddit apps, which are much worse in almost every way than the third party equivalents despite being built by teams of engineers. They don’t even have proper accessibility.
> It’s entirely within reason for Reddit to want to capture that value instead of giving it away to free to third party apps.
Not if it results in a drop in engagement from power users and moderators, which would in turn result in less content, a worse experience for users, fewer users returning or joining up because of that, and thus less revenue over time.
If nobody can make your pricing work and offer a product, then you're losing out on that revenue. I'm not saying they should be allowing API access at a loss, but if they've priced every API user out of the market and they aren't pricing at cost or at their actual expected revenue per user internally then that means they're taking actions that are net negative with regard to profit.
I, like many others, think that their pricing is nowhere near the actual per user expected revenue, so either they're doing something incredibly stupid and shutting out a source of profit, or the goal of this was never really to monetize the API, and instead to kill third party apps while attempting to give themselves some cover from the negative publicity of those actions by reframing it as asking for the third party apps pay for the cost of their previously free access.
I think the latter is more likely, but you know what they say about attributing malice...
There is a notably large group of app developers who all say they have been completely ghosted by Reddit when it comes to any kind of private communication.
Not to mention this comes out of the blue immediately before their IPO after years of status quo, without consulting devs, moderators, or literally anyone outside of reddit HQ. They are also well aware of the cost it would have on 3rd party devs and how unreasonable they are given the extremely-similar level of activity inside the first-party app.
Should a company be allowed to try to make a profit? Of course, no one is arguing against that. The issue is context.
And the way your question is worded implies third party app devs are greedy and unreasonable for wanting to continue to exist while reddit is too mishandled to make a profit. It's a childish "well why can they have anything when I have nothing" take. If the issue is actually profit, why does it only come up without warning just before the IPO? After over 10 years of never coming up before, never even being a discussion point before.
Also, can you name any of the things Reddit has added over the last 5 years that you care about? A single one? They took on both image and video hosting, at I'm sure an insane cost - why? They added NFT avatars - a transparent attempt to cash in on NFTs. A new layout that all the old users hate, removal of the ability to log in on the mobile site. Does anyone remember when they fired Victoria for no god damn reason? Pretty sure that was the last content-related contribution they've made to the platform. Administration is dead set on extracting any kind of profit they can out of something they give no fucks about outside of their ability to profit off of it. They handicap and ruin their own platform for the sake of attempting to make a bit more money.
Context matters. Don't blind yourself by ignoring context.
And the goal of this is to attempt to further monetize the platform on the backs of other people's content by forcing them to see as many ads and upsell opportunities as possible.
And the goal of this is to appear more appealing to current and future investors in order to drive up the IPO price and build demand.
And the goal of this is to make those with significant equity stake filthy rich.
The issue is that the changes they're trying to make are inherently hostile to the community whose free content and moderation has made the platform what it is today. And if the community decides to leave the platform and not come back, then regardless of potential for extra ad revenue, the inherent value of the platform will disappear because ads will be shown to less and less users. This is assuming people leave and actually don't come back, which remains to be seen.
The whole "front page of the internet" idea was pretty neat, and is a stark contrast to the days where each internet community had their own niche forum somewhere. Maybe we'll see some other platform overtake Reddit as the new front page of the internet, or maybe an old platform like Digg will make a resurgence. But that's a tall ask when Reddit is now so entrenched in that space.
Edit: technology -> platform, in the last paragraph above.
Unless you have some alternative that has Reddit functionality, but can somehow operate without revenue, I'm just going to assume there isn't and Reddit will continue operating as normal.
Just doing the math $2.50 seems reasonable if you're going to redistribute the data to users while bypassing the ads.
As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated content in an attempt to extract maximum dollars from it while intentionally excluding third parties.
What incentive is there for the API users to add in ads that reddit serves for the 3rd party client users? Can reddit be guaranteed get a share of the revenue for the IAP of "block all ads?" Is it worth it for reddit to do it when they can't control the price of said IAP ($0.49 for "block all of Reddit's ads")
The Reddit that the loud minority wants is never, ever coming back. These protests are just a blip -- if you don't like what Reddit has become, your only recourse is to leave.
Because if it isn't then reddit can simply revoke their access.
How can reddit know if the ads are being stripped out or not? Simple - download the app, run it and see.
The API license can always force things like:
1. Only for apps, whether mobile, desktop or web (i.e. forget about training your LLM on the data) 2. License revoked if content is modified in any way (i.e. no stripping out ads)
It's not that difficult, honestly. I've signed more strict agreements with companies (NDAs, and so forth) to access their system, their data, etc.
And then we are right back at the complaints that reddit is killing 3P clients.
A headless program that does moderation actions (changing flares, approving or deleting posts, updating wiki) uses the same API that a mobile app would use - and ads would only get in the way of those tools.
If the app is poorly behaved or you have a very heavy hitting backend service, then you pay more. If you (the app owner) wants to put advertisements in the user's view - that's up to you. If you want to do offer the app advertisement free out of the generosity of your heart, that's up to you.
The API calls cost the same no matter how they're made - the API doesn't care where it's called from. Be it polling backend service, moderation tool, or mobile app - it's all billed the same with the exception of it being free for certain exceptional cases.
That's much easier to work with for all parties involved.
For Reddit Inc, it's bad because they'll under-charge for things where they could capture more money, and over-charge for things that are helpful to their platform but not directly profitable, like moderator tools.
It's bad for developers because it forces them to deal with having a revenue model well before they're ready to. A lot of people just like building things, and only worry about revenue once it's successful enough to matter.
It's bad for users because all sorts of tools that would be free now have to charge them. Instead of somebody just hacking together a moderation tool suddenly has to find a way to pay for it.
The headless case is easy enough; in each content blob you include an "is_ad" field. Tools that are user agents display that content. Tools that aren't are free to ignore it under the TOS.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial
> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.
Otherwise your app (for all users) would fall under:
> Your use of the Imgur API is also limited by the number of POST requests your IP can make across all endpoints. This limit is 1,250 POST requests per hour. Commercial Usage is not impacted by this limit. Each POST request will contain the following headers.
The pricing is https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing (note that this is quite different than the pricing that Apollo claims to have)
$500/month for 7.5M calls/month and $10k for 150M calls/month
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/reddits-new-api-pric...
> Selig says Reddit wants $12,000 for 50 million API requests, while Imgur, a similar social media photo site, charges $166 for 50 million API calls. Selig says even if users were willing to pay out of pocket for the API costs, Reddit announced the new billing plan one month before it would take effect, and Selig says that's just not feasible for developers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
> Our pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls
That puts it at about 3x more than Imgur's published rates.
For someone hacking together a moderation tool, I have done this (wiki updates) It means that my run to get data on a few hundred subs would cost me about a quarter. When I was in testing, I was only doing about 5-10 calls though on a sub that I managed so that it wouldn't go haywire somewhere else.
---
Consider the outrage where an API key is yanked (for whatever reason) with Twitter. Yanking an API key gets even more problematic if there is an existing business relationship.
You're also proposing that someone periodically audits the different reddit clients to see if they are displaying enough / all the ads and that there aren't any uber style shenanigans where if it is found to be coming from the IP block that Reddit owns it shows ads while certain users (who subscribed with a private non-apple subscription) aren't getting ads.
It is just easier to charge for an API.
And for an app that already has a monthly subscription ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 shows $5.99) available to it, to increase that rate to match the number of calls. If the average user is making 350 requests per day that's $10/month for the user, so update the subscription to $15/month ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252 ). If the push notification server ( https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... ) is making an additional 600 requests per hour per user... that might need some scaling...
No, just the big ones. Which they will know, because they'll know the API usage. Below some level, it doesn't matter if somebody's doing it wrong.
> It is just easier to charge for an API.
Easier in the sense of less labor for a few people at Reddit? Sure. But who cares? The goal isn't making it easier for a few low-level employees. The first goal is to create maximum value. The second goal is to extract enough cash to cover the costs of the value generation, plus a bit extra. If something is not easy but is profitable, that's a-ok in business-land.
That makes sure that applications are incentivized to write code well that doesn't take advantage of a free resource.
The Apollo push notification part of the server is hitting 600 requests per hour per user - 10 requests per minute per user. That has a cost to it for Reddit even if not a single page is rendered for a mobile app.
It doesn't matter if it's a headless moderation tool or the push notification server or an exceptionally poorly behaving front end. API requests have a cost that up until now have been free.
If Apollo turned off the notification server, he'd be down to pennies per user per day for the app. If it was scaled back to a request every minute it would be $1/day/user. Scale it back to a check every 10 minutes and you're back to pennies per day per user.
As it is, it was designed with a free and nearly unlimited rate limit available.
Trying to do an audit of advertisements being displayed (again, easy to defeat so that the auditor sees the ads while others don't) this doesn't fix the problem that apps are taking advantage of free resources that aren't free to the host.
If the cost of the API is too high for the load that it (and any backend) puts on the host, then it should be up to the app designer to find a way to monetize it - it is their responsibility to write the code within the limits that it can afford.
The marginal cost of a single API call is approximately zero. Reddit, like most SaaS businesses, is much more about fixed costs than variable costs. I think they are much better off following the standard freemium approach, where they give away what's basically free, and then use value-based pricing to get a fair share of the possible revenues. The sort of cost-based pricing you suggest a) doesn't match their cost model, b) overcharges for valuable things that may not produce direct revenue, and c) undercharges for things that are especially valuable to users.
Plus $2.5 to Reddit, means that apps need to charge $3.60 before 30% App-Store fees. But the app developer also needs new infrastructure to handle the billing, payment, and tracking, between end-users & Reddit along with their existing overhead. So the current $1/month aka $0.70/month after fees they're operating on likely isn't sustainable.
So now we're looking at $3.60 to Reddit + the existing $1/month = $4.6, but also all this new payment/billing infrastructure. Could easily exceed $5/month which frankly nobody is going to pay, and then get all this done in just 30-days even though that date is completely arbitrary from Reddit's end.
It's actually hard to believe people are throwing this big a fit over something they don't deem worthy of $5 a month.
Had it been something like "starting next year only Premium users will get to auth to the API" (which is analogous to the $5/mo. of Discord Nitro) the lead time would have been greater and the users would have been able to solve the problem of access on their own.
I imagine this being less desirable when individuals have multiple accounts.
If you have 10,000 users that Reddit in 30 days is going to charge you $250,000 per month to continue allowing your third party app to operate and you only had 5-10% of your users paying for a premium version you could see how that becomes somewhat unreasonable.
A bit more of a heads up is all the Apollo developer wanted. He understood that the API no longer being free is reasonable. The timing is what he objects. No assistance in allowing premium Reddit accounts that use Third Party Apps to cover API costs, etc.
He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million. What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with much less friction.
The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipulative (unrealistically short period for apps to adapt, API prices far above what other services charge) indicates that the $20 million number is a lie made to make themselves seem less scummy.
As it stands, Reddit hasn't even tried even simpler solutions like returning ads in the API requests and requiring that the 3rd parties include those for free usage.
But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.
Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people.
I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.
What does Reddit's core functionality cost? They have annual revenue of half a billion dollars. Tell me that you can't use that money to run a text distribution infrastructure.
I doubt Slashdot in its day cost half a million dollars to run.
I wish there was Usenet servers to back that up - which didn't carry the binaries or unsavory newsgroups.
The fact that I subscribe to r/woodworking, r/diy, etc, is really useful for targeting but I never see relevant ads.
I’ve literally given Reddit a big list of my interests and the asked to be served content, and the ads are almost completely unrelated.
Good thing nobody is asking for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2
[2] https://www.h2g2.com/
However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any changes.
Such a freq complaint it's a cliché.
Certainly been true for every software product and service I've worked.
The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got attacked and censored.
In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia calling for the deletion of his page.
After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor, it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Watching this whole experience play out in real time was utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since become captured.
Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership did not clamp down on this behavior when it was happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks from the far right and eventually people with a lot of exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half the country not trusting the site at all and their minds being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.
Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later after the election was over but the lasting damage has been done. I presume that in the next election it will be targeted again.
We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit during election season and you can be sure that Musk is whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place of refuge. I guess not.
Back in the day (2006-2010ish, I think) I was a pretty active member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians. I was kind of on a crusade against people who would put up their own pages to try to promote themselves, in violation of the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy. Mainly, I was worried that it would be untenable to keep WP accurate if we had too many pages. I also went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of. There was a well-established consensus at the time that most individual pokemon did not meet the notability threshold (I don't remember the exact criteria, but it had to do with multiple sources of the information being available) and therefore their pages should be deleted. Looking back, that was kinda silly... The Wikipedia is not Paper policy probably outweighs the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy when it comes to Pokemon.
Anyway, I don't doubt that there is a political element in the case of this Kyle guy, but it's probable that I would have voted to have him deleted on completely apolitical grounds. (I haven't heard of him and haven't read enough to form a political or notability opinion on him at this point)
I find it amusing that pokemons get pages, but real people don't.
Yeah, notability, I get it. Still.
This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by "intangible as well as tangible things" which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which at the same time are recognized as the tangible par excellence.
"""
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
And of course, giving back to Debord, we can say that the society of the spectacle is one of infinite supply of manufactured social objects.
"sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".
Anyway, the problem is there's a lot of valuable content on wikipedia that is essentially borderline according to the rules, but also delivers a lot of value, and this content exists at the suffrage of whether or not they have some greasy nerd as patron or whether another one gets a bee up their ass about it.
"Lists" policy is a great example, and I've seen quite a few important lists go through cycles where despite being a de-facto resource for 10 or 15 years, all of a sudden some editor will get a bee up their ass and just delete it all, because WP:Lists. But of course having been the resource for 15 years, nobody external has bothered to collate a list that already exists on wikipedia, but if you point that out then you get the WP:OriginalResearch response. If you revert the changes, they'll lock it for "vandalism", etc. So we just lose that resource that's existed for 10-15 years, unless some other sufficiently greasy nerd pushes back on it.
The wikipedia editor cadre sucks, it's the definitive answer to the question of "what's the absolute least power that can go to someone's head". It's a real problem with the public trying to interact with wikipedia, much like stackoverflow answers everyone just knows it's not worth the time and does their damndest not to interact with it if they have any other alternatives.
And yes, "anyone can do it" in principle but it's not the public's job to push uphill to try and chase out bad actors in the organization. People won't do it and they'll just go do better things and you'll be left with only the toxic people - it's the "dead sea effect" in action. A sufficient concentration of poison will kill any life that might have any chance of remediating the poison.
https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9
Much like stackoverflow and the "come to jesus" moment a couple years ago when they tried to get SO members to stop being so fucking toxic to newcomers and people trying to ask the questions that let SO create content (to which the community basically shrugged and said they wouldn't "compromise community standards" by not shitting on people/pressing their mod buttons to suppress stuff for arbitrary reasons/etc), the cancer is so ingrown at this point that you can't save the organization without putting policies in that those greasies are going to hate, and that will kill the host organism. So it's terminal. Wikipedia editing is the same as StackOverflow commenting and has been for years. It's not that they're going to go under, but they're not everything they could be either, and there are often distinct points where the quality of the product has gone down over the years rather than up due to these problem children.
(I found a comment from myself 5 years ago saying this exact same thing in fact, lol)
Powermods on reddit are sort of another case of this too... it's not a great system to have some random greasy nerd from 2008 squatting on some common keyword/brand name while moderating poorly. But now it's entrenched and if you change the policy they're all going to shut down their subs in solidarity, so you have to essentially be willing to hammer down on the whole mod class and come in and replace all of them. It's the old "10% of the employees are real shitasses but they're protected by the union so we can't really do anything about it" problem.
Just in case anyone here is taking paulmd too literally, it's not possible for "some editor" or any one person to cause an article or list on WP to be deleted. If I remember correctly (and if it hasn't changed) speedy deletion requires at least 3 people, and if it's contested then there's a whole voting procedure. Speaking as a (former?) greasy nerd, I've actually always been impressed with the democracy and consensus systems on Wikipedia; it strikes me as pretty effective, especially compared to most governments.
You're probably right that self-aggrandizement and gatekeeping is a problem among wikipedians.
I'm sorry to hear the diagnosis is terminal... but since you say you've been complaining for at least 5 years, maybe WP has a few more years to live?
(anybody curious about how deletion works, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction_to_dele... )
Well, that's the point of the stackoverflow comparison. Nobody actually goes to stackoverflow to ask questions anymore. The culture is rotten and there are better places to ask. It's become "read-only" for most of its potential userbase, people actively avoid using it. But is there still a site called stackoverflow? Yes. It's just lingering in agony, like many cancer patients. Doesn't mean without some turn in fortunes (or leadership) that it's ever going to come back though.
> Did you try proposing a policy change
That's the thing I said though... why would I voluntarily choose to spend more time working with a toxic organization in a fruitless attempt to solve its organizational culture for them? Not only is that not actually going to change anything but it's a huge drain on me personally for little direct benefit. Why is it my responsibility to tilt at windmills to try and fix your organizational culture?
That's the whole point about StackOverflow and Wikipedia's culture problems in a nutshell: at a certain point you are just so toxic that nobody who's not interested in the game-playing itself is going to tolerate the game-playing. And at that point you have the "dead-sea effect" going, because the game-players will always stay around.
Is this a little unreasonable in the abstract? Sure, I am not engaging with the organization and then complaining when it doesn't work the way I want it to. But this is the practical reality - the public isn't going to build a better Wikipedia organization just for the sake of it. If you have a viable organization then some of them will contribute content, maybe. And if your editors piss it all away because it didn't meet X rule or Y rule then you will simply have a worse product, and in the long term people will stop contributing content because they see it doesn't matter (which is where we are with wikipedia right now in general).
I am not being prescriptive here - merely remarking on a phenomenon that is observable. Nobody likes interacting with career StackOverflowers or Wikipedians. They're, on the whole, kinda tedious and unpleasant people, and the product is worse as a result of this public disengagement. And this is not an uncommon opinion, you will not find a single person on Reddit who speaks positively of StackOverflow or Wikipedia's organizational culture, everyone (including their CEOs) knows they suck to interact with. The culture is toxic and rotten and the organizations cannot change it because a subset of the members relish in it being toxic and rotten, and over time the projects lose steam and falter due to public disengagement. You'll always have the greasies but the public is not beating down SO's door in 2023 to enlarge the community or to edit wikipedia and create content they know will be reverted by some basement-dweller.
Anything beyond fixing a minor typo or awkward sentence is kind of a waste of time on wikipedia, and that's really more than most people will even do to begin with. Just not interested in the social-game-playing aspects of it, and the content you create will be reverted and removed without you there being an advocate for it. The gameplaying matters more than the content, and that's what's killing SO too.
https://medium.com/@jayhanlon/welcome-wagon-dd57cbdd54d9
The problem for SO and Wikipedia is - those tedious, unpleasant people still generate a lot of short-term value even if they're a long-term problem. And just like the powermods of reddit, they wield a lot of internal power and can cause a lot of problems if you overtly (or even subtly) show them the door or put &q...
If it were just me, I'd keep my mouth shut (ok maybe not). Everyone knows SO and Wikipedia have culture problems, almost nobody has good experiences with their interactions on those sites, when that's the uniform experience you have an org problem.
But yeah, it's the paradox of intolerance in action. Being tolerant of shitty people leads to a shitty org culture or a shitty society/world. If they get too entrenched, you end up being unable to pry them off the levers of power and the dead-sea effect begins.
There's just also not really a way for them to move past them because the people causing those problems are powerful internal stakeholders. There's no easy solution to a rotten organizational culture and it leads to bad outcomes. It's a shame to see it happen but again, there's no magic wands to fix any of it. Whatcha gonna do.
I've had projects fail because of org culture problems (may have taken down the whole company at this point). But when the boss and the boss's boss are part of the problem, what can you realistically do? Not interact with that org anymore, that's about it.
Was it probably? I took a quick look at the deletions, the deletion reviews, and some of the older versions of the article. The article seemed to be very thin on actual citations, with way more text for a living-persons biography than I'd think reasonable for that level of sourcing. The deletion discussions were a hot mess, but my main takeway is what somebody else wrote there: "There's still not a single keep !voter here who has discussed which sources actually show notability."
Looking at the current article, my take is similar. I only skimmed, but I'm not seeing a lot of WP:RS compliant sources listed that would persuade me of notability even now; it's an awful lot of citation to his own works.
No need for such verbal contortion.
You're describing the far-right (Republican Party) and center-right (Democratic Party).
Left parties in the USA include Green Party, DSA, CPUSA, etc. They are largely irrelevant.
However, it doesn't have to be limited to legislations passed, but rather what is widely being discussed and pushed forward by the Democratic factions, the biggest example is the "Green New Deal"; more government intervention, increased spendings, massive expansion of state power.
US Senate and the solid blue core? Still firmly center-right.
For instance, Republicans are very unlikely to be elected in my city. So competitive candidates call themselves Democrats. And to establish their bonafidas, they might even hold a few select leftish positions to brag about. But when it comes to legislating and appropriations, the boring stuff that no one pays attention to, they're just as nimby, reactionary, regressive as any generic Republican.
Who are the likes? How many of them are there? AOC is a house representative; is there a progressive senator?
Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism? Reddit is pining to go public and Twitter just LBO'd. Neither is having its chain yanked by venture capital.
Took. Past tense. Limited need to take more. Look at Reddit's Board: it's ten people, only one of whom (Mike Seibel) is a VC.
No, they can ignore the venture capitalists' shares. Reddit's Series F was led by a mutual fund. Most of Reddit's shares are non-voting common stock, under a voting-rights agreement or held by non-VC investors.
The difference is meaningful when tracing incentives. Venture capital, almost by definition, involves a high-loss high-reward portfolio. Most bets are expected to bust. That makes a middling bet that doesn't return the fund essentially worthless, which in turn encourages shooting for the moon. Late-stage private portfolios cannot sustain heavy losses. They are looking at preservation of capital in addition to returns, which makes them fundamentally different from VCs.
Shorthanding all investors in tech companies to VCs denies you visibility into a rich spectrum of actors, incentives and alignments.
Most of Reddit's shares were issued in the era of founder-friendly voting rights agreements. The fact that those investors don't have anyone on the Board means they don't have the right to elect one to it. Private-company Board rules are Byzantine. But they're not thoughtless.
No. It's a term specific for those investors working with: I don't expect you to survive, but if you don't get at least 10000% of return, you could as well be dead.
Almost all of capitalism works differently.
Well, not anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
Thing is, Twitter was profitable in 2019. Then the venture capitalists decided "Now is the time to increase your workforce by a factor of two. You need to start losing money again or you aren't trying hard enough!"
You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot.
Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same.
You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.
Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine?
As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million.
I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear.
The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.
If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.
Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
Heck, if you hire people because you might need them, give them nothing to do (as many people claimed happened to them) and then fire them it is the easiest of all.
If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.
You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact.
People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize.
It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact.
Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".
So they got investment and scaled up to everyday users. Terrible redesign but at least the site doesn't look nerdy anymore, right? There are now actual advertisers on board. People are paying for badges and hats. They are tracking the shit out of people and pushing the app. They're on the way to profitability, and the next step is to cut out the old guard - who they couldn't monetize anyway - by removing third party apps.
Their costs are almost certainly ridiculous but their plan is either to become the next TikTok or crash and burn.
Cynically, nobody is going to donate to a full or nearly full "donations requested" bar, so nobody is going to specify a bar that gets full.
I'd rather contribute to something that is actually going to be successful.
If you say you need £1000000 to go to space, and ask for £10 sponsorship, if you tell me you've so far raised nothing, what chance is there of my money going to use as intended? If on the other hand you've raised £999000 I can be more confident you are actually going to reach your goal.
Also personally, it seems to me that if you have a goal, then that's a minimum. If you don't reach it, the thing doesn't happen. A website never reaching its funding goals is one that seems more likely to shut down, and what's the point of supporting something that could shut down tomorrow because it can't pay it's way. I know that's self reinforcing but there it is.
Income is the same as profit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260066/reddit-advertisi...
Shareholders care not for employee happiness, in so far as said employee is working and producing. Ditto with user happiness - if they're not happy they can leave. By not leaving, they must be happy to stay.
I think these proposals to "change" the metrics is as flawed as the current system.
The only way to avoid that I know is to address a specific target audience and scale up to dominate that. Tumblr has achieved this. A rival then can't dislodge you because you already own the relevant network. It's still risky though, because if a rival builds a product that covers the general audience and also servers that subset well, then the subset might decamp. Hence Tumblr trying to break out of it's niche. G+ addressed a lot of niches very well, but Google just wasn't interested in that kind of network.
Facebook is astoundingly profitable, and is the canonical example of network effects. Almost everyone I've ever known is or was on Facebook.
So I don't consider Network Effect Businesses to be terrible as for-profits in and of themselves.
The issue perhaps is that there is an expectation that they can become Google or Facebook.
Now we have a generation raised on social media that doesn't require your real name, maybe we will see a new platform reach Facebook levels.
TikTok and YouTube are obviously huge, but slightly different again to Facebook.
As an aside, people talk about how amazing Tik Tok is, but in the end, it's really just the creators uploading content that make it work.
Facebook captured Advertising dollars, in part, by investing in Ad infrastructure and building tools that companies could use to create targeted Ads. Every other platform, apart from AdWords, felt unfinished, especially Twitter!
Unfortunately any platform that draws >10 million daily users will reliably have people calling and offering billions of dollars to adopt that strategy and chase after revenue growth. Eventually the owner breaks down and agrees to take a huge personal payoff in order for the company to adopt a "Double or nothing" policy. Over, and over again.
There's too many enormous piles of money out there seeking a return for this to be a sensible self-regulating system with stable provision of goods & services.
Holdouts are few and far between, like Craigslist.
All of the BigTech companies are built on network effects and two sided markets
I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.
I know that is a minefield of issues regarding access and moderation and it would make it a frequent election day financial harassment target but it would be nice to have something that is publicly funded, ad free, and not vulnerable to deep pockets stealing the entire system from the people.
Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud with Google means they may soon lose significant trust and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.
And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it; he's been covering it pretty well.
Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs, are still around (despite being compositionally a different population, mostly).
It's not illegal either.
And then someone gave a valid response.
And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."
This response is a non sequitur.
Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.
And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.
The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.
As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.
The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.
So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.
It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.
> When you call the police
In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.
People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.
To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.
It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.
There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.
Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.
After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.
Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.
Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.
That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.
But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.
You're wrong about the "average user" enjoying "free speech", of course. That's the view Twitter started out on, "the free speech wing of the free speech party". But they learned that certain kinds of speech drove away users and made it hard to sell ads, so for very good business reasons, they decided to take away the "free speech" of people to, say, shout the n-word at black people. [1]
I believe you enjoy it more, of course. But other people enjoy it less. You and Musk are making the same mistake in thinking a thing that you like is a thing that everybody will like. Running a social network means you have to create something that is liked by a very wide variety of people. And a lot of people who wave the "free speech" banner just turn out to want no constraints on their own speech, while having much less concern about creating a place where a wide variety of people can safely speak up and be heard.
[1] Something that surged under Musk's new "free speech" regime. e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/tech/twitter-hate-speech/inde...
I don't recall it being truly necessary before, though there were annoying banners sometimes.
But right now "age restricted" tweets require a login, and the thing that makes tweets age restricted is the presence of images plus a very buggy per-account setting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...
Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.
There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%20Cats&src=typed_query
> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.
I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.
She can search YouTube for cats and not get that stuff.
But I frequently think of my kids even for situations they don't directly risk. Call it an empathy gauge.
We also didn't have the massive amount of statistical evidence in mental health that came to light just recently about teenage social media use, especially in girls. Several times these studies have made it to the top of HN.
https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...
Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?
Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.
Anecdotally, due to Musk's support of extreme-right views (for example re-inviting Trump [2], supporting DeSantis [3], or protecting bullying [4]), many people have left in protest and so these views are over-represented on the site.
The word "decay" seems appropriate.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-trump-r... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitte...
As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.
Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)
Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.
Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.
Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution to that isn't to remove the feature. There are many other ways to deal with that, including banning the people who enjoy fomenting mob abuse campaigns.
I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.
The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is a solid case study from recent times.
https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-business-f...
Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.
Good for you and Musk! So proud of people who can put money into something and lord over it because of capitalism.
TBC: you thought the throughline was money when it was nothing. You were talking about investing money that can be used to exploit workers and turn a higher profit by paying workers less than they benefit the stakeholders. Exploiting people is an obvious immoral action.
One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/275835
And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable.
A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable.
Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.
As a small business owner myself, I can very much assure you that we're not thinking of that at all; we're thinking of ways to get back into the black!
Once we're in the black, we'll start thinking of ways to get an early retirement.
For nearly 20 years I helped run Bandwagon, a co-op of nerds who toward the end of the dot-com bubble needed a place to put their personal web projects. We clubbed together to rent a full colo rack and we each put our servers in.
There were many opportunities to try to turn this into a business. It might have been lucrative, might have been a failure. We kept it as a small co-op, and it was fine.
And right now I'm looking at starting something that I might eventually get a salary from, but if it has surplus revenues beyond that, I'd rather use it to improve the thing and its impact in the world.
I understand that a lot of people want a zillion dollars so they can live a life of luxury. To each their own, but I feel kinda bad for people who organize their lives around that. They rarely succeed, are usually quite unhappy, and frequently create a trail of pain and misery behind them.
Trying to make a massive profit is another activity altogether, and the quest to do so can easily destroy a sustainable business. As Reddit may learn.
> Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability.
The head count increased ten fold since Spez took over. This is because VCs want billion dollar companies, not some moderately profitable ones. They want to deliver more (so more employees) and increase monetization, including by charging for the API.
If they stayed smaller it would have been more sustainable and wouldn't have to charge for the API.
He’s chasing new markets, not doubling down on current ones. to the detriment of everyone including his companies profitability.
Congratulations Reddit! You pulled in users with no good way to cover the costs of those users.
[0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.
KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC
Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit).
Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.
If they tell you to implement a banner or dark pattern you do it.
This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who view themselves as painter artists. He explained the fundamental difference between his work and the work of a painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive landscape.
A stable environment can also allow people to build other art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.
In order for this to be Reddit's "Digg moment", there needs to be a viable candidate to switch to.
There isn't, as far as I can tell.
Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in.
The social media as a prison operating model.
https://youtu.be/0ZM9-ZbBoAc
That's probably NSFW.
HN and RSS remain in the mix. Also using my mobile browser's option to create a shortcut/browserApp for a few news sites. There really is an awful lot out there - I'm just beginning to look (again).
Interestingly... last year - with no effort on my part - reddit became an also-ran when I dived into TikTok. When I left TikTok, reddit re-entered the picture.
Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
The reason the trans people are an issue is that conservatives lost big on trying to suppress homosexuals, which in turn is just a distraction from the economic inequality and general disempowerment that regular Americans face. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy that wants to keep the conversation around culture war issues instead of, you know, making sure all people have food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, and education regardless of their economic value to the market.
Claiming authoritarian censorship displays a kind of persecution complex, especially considering you're able to claim censorship and I, a rando, am able to read it. The top articles shared on Facebook feature mostly conservative voices. Reddit is different in that it has a downvote option, available to users without HN's karma threshold. You're not getting censored, you're just espousing unpopular views.
Just like with abortion, for trans kids, the doctor's office is not big enough for the kid, the doctor, and the government. People know themselves better than we think. Kara Swisher, the tech reporter, has said she knew she was a lesbian when she was 4 (or 5). Guess what, she's still a lesbian. No kid is going to choose the difficult, scary prospect of surgery or invasive meds without a strong motivation. And kids are not getting surgery that often - it's mostly puberty blockers which are not permanent. And to be clear, I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done. These are folks just about to leave minority age.
Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.
But deeper than that, I know that conservatives don't actually care about children because so many of them won't have a conversation around guns which actually kill children, often mutilating their bodies so much an open casket funeral is out of the question unless it's for shock value. It is the leading cause of death for kids in the US. The Utah law against trans athletes applied to 4 people. Malnutrition deaths in Utah were 1,044 for 2022. WTF.
What gets me, though, is some of the factually false claims you make here, and it would seem fair to dispute them. For example:
> puberty blockers which are not permanent
That's not true. Such chemicals have lasting effects on the body, and are the same chemicals used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
> I couldn't find any story about a person younger than 17 getting a surgery done.
Such stories are readily available. And if you, for example, watch the documentary, "What is a woman?", which was recently seen by millions of people on Twitter, you'll find interviews with doctors who have conducted voluntary mastectomies and phalloplasties on children younger than 17.
> Also, no child is getting this without parental or guardian's consent. The idea that some liberal parent is twiddling their fingers, Mr. Burn's style, to get their child to believe they are trans is ludicrous. You have to believe there's a large group of parents who are cartoon villains attacking their own kids for clout.
In the same documentary, a man from Canada is interviewed. His daughter went to a hospital and the hospital informed him that his daughter would be given testosterone injections against his wishes. When he filed a lawsuit, a judge jailed him for referring to his daughter as "she." He is now out on bail, unable to legally leave the province he resides in, and his daughter is receiving the injections anyway.
So, given how much effort you put into your comment, I hope you will be fair-minded enough to do some more research, find out what you're factually wrong about, and then reconsider your positions. Otherwise, it's just more ideological warfare, unconcerned with the truth.
Some of us have work related to politics and don’t need an ignorant explanation of the propaganda video called what is a woman (a title and question that is silly in and of itself…people know what a woman is).
—-
You don’t understand right or wrong. The person being incorrect about minor un important stuff bout some kids sometimes rarely getting more serious stuff happen doesn’t mean anything. We are still talking super rare stuff.
At no point do you, someone who is pretending watching a propaganda video gives them evidence for their side. A video can say anything haha. The amt of shady shit the porpoganda was doing was unhinged.
Stop repeating what your ilk does. Again the person being technically wrong does not matter. Any one who reconsiders positions based on only technically being wrong is by definition not fair minded enough. They are reactionaries without enough theory or knowledge to back up any convictions they have that are focused on unhinged things like focusing on oppressed people.
At no point do you understand what ideology means. To act like people who don’t want to see fascism as ideologues is unhinged.
Also. Did you know leftists get banned all the time. Leftist subreddits get banned In whole (Chapo Trap House).
Stop living in a fantasy world where you’re the moral victim.
See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.
There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence.
Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle)
If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.
You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable.
Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.
But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the passive way it is used.
I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit will have shrunk by that time
The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of that is labor I value.
The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times.
So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
I mean, if you're going to Reddit to marvel at the sidebar rules or CSS stylings, then I guess you're going there for the mods qua mods. But I would assume that this represents a relatively rare user psychographic. Beyond this, my point is that it's unfair to give the mods credit for indirectly cultivating communities but refuse to extend this same consideration to the admins or platform.
>The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top.
Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created. Treating this protest as being about the basic question of whether Reddit should have moderation or not is disingenuous.
>But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
Well, the powermods aren't having it. We'll see what "Reddit-the-community" thinks when the dust settles. A bunch of activists can't claim to speak for it, though obviously they'd like to pretend that they can.
For smaller communities mods keep away trolls and spambots. They enforce custom rules that sub will have.
> Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created
Are you forgetting about Reddit Enhancement Suite? There is no mod that just uses the built-in reddit moderation. There hasn't been since the days when Reddit was a website only known to tech related college students.
It's a weird comparison to make, too. You're comparing a default subreddit that is mostly for memes with one of the subreddits held in highest regard. Lots of highly-moderated subreddits are just awful. Why not compare /r/AskHistorians with the large number of highly- but poorly-moderated subreddits? There are many (I won't name names) that you would expect to be reasonably neutral places but because of who picked the name originally have become politically extreme over time. Or just as a result of the effect of the upvote/downvote mechanism. The high influence that early votes have on submissions means that if a small group of people make it their life's work to watch /new (and they do exist!) they can control the narrative very successfully.
The idea that reddit mods are some great asset to the site is just strange, IMO. To me, they're one of the worst things about the website. Most of the big subreddits are dominated by the same group of power moderators who have some questionable conflicts of interests with outside forces. Smaller subreddits tend to be dominated by high-school-style cliques.
Truer words have never been written about reddit. It is a cesspit of censorship with tiny islands of insights.
The funny part is occasionally I've come across subs without mods (someone started the sub, then stopped using Reddit), and they've mostly been great. But Reddit tries to crack down on them, and they also have ways to push power mods into any sub that gets too big.
If you were the CEO of reddit what would you change? Replace the volunteer mods with paid mods?
1. You could have some kind of community influence over moderator selection for subreddits over a certain size. StackExchange has (had?) elections for moderators.
2. You could have rules preventing anyone from having moderator powers on more than a certain percentage of the site.
3. The best change would one that prevented moderators from sitting in IRC/Discord talking about reddit 24/7. Having so much meta-discussion happen "behind the scenes" is not good. The problem is that normal people who think "lol imagine having drama over an internet forum what a load of nerds" would be the best moderators but are the least interested in doing it.
I personally think this will last a few days and then all the default subs will either open by mod decisions or be forced open by Reddit admins. If it's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with Reddit admins. I also expect that usage of the official app will jump and there won't be any major disruptions to Reddit usage.
I'm not crossing the picket line, but I think that's a likely outcome, too. That's why I'm preparing to archive what little content I'm personally interested in and am leaving the platform permanently.
But the way the direction is going, and some experiences in some subs have made me take a decision, and my 12+ year account is no more.
It won't matter, and probably reddit will survive, be it as strong as it is now or in a diminished state. But I'm tired of this kind of directives in these kinds of companies.
I hope that leaving that, and not having Instagram or Facebook on the phone, might give me a little push on being more productive. Wish me luck.
Be it sms, WhatsApp, telegram, phone, etc.
People get really skewed perspectives of what being socially active means. Instagram/FB/etc is not really needed.
The real problem is Reddit mostly sucks at design and UX. https://new.Reddit.com shows it’s not getting better besides search.
The users don’t really give a shit about API pricing or understand/care about Reddits steep financial demands. IRL Reddit probably have bankers down their throats for the IPO and Sam Altman/PG/Steve’s VC friends are pushing the AI data goldmine angle. Only the execs know what is really happening behind the scenes but there’s some very clear motivations here they aren’t doing a good job of communicating (possibly out of fear of the super niche r/antiwork type audiences who in reality will whine regardless).
Reddit could do plenty to fix the mobile (and web) issues and buy good will by openly confronting them. Plenty of product and transparency failures here well beyond spez’s Apollo dev conflict taking up the bulk of discourse that mostly only powerusers care about.
Otherwise Reddit is known for having powerusers, mods, and a general anti-authority “we’re making a difference by shitposting on the internet” culture. Especially after their net neutrality protests. It’s only natural for such a thing to turn into a big deal when the poweruser minority gets upset and for the rest there’s a prime opportunity for outrage against [faceless big corporation]. Reddit’s favourite target.
Reddit could much, much more easily placate the regular non-hardcore users by simply being transparent about their very real business demands to make money (esp with LLM) and by very publicly doubling down on making a better mobile app - since clearly they view 3rd party apps as not feasible for their current business plans. So why not fix why people love the 3rd party ones?
But as always big business PR is awful, transparency is downplayed and intentions are obscure as if users are idiots. Etc. Typical big co mediocrity.
Reddit becomes harder and harder to actually post on. Subs are now ruled by mods and strict automods with ridiculous rules and posting requirements. You post something and it gets automatically removed and then you have to post a dozen more times changing this word or that word to try and figure out how to actually get something through.
In reality there are a few DOZEN mods that basically control all of reddit. Yes, dozens. It's the same mods over and over again.
Outside of a few (relatively speaking) small circles, the Reddit strike boils down to "Reddit is striking?" The revolt goes unnoticed. Lurkers are happily scrolling the front page right now.
Your strawman is just that.
You can't comprehend that not everyone is as casual like you and will happily take whatever they get like a good boy because, "you don't really care".
Some people do contribute and care and are a significant part, on aggregate, of what makes reddit special.
Your expectations about "reddit will win because it holds all the cards" are pretty obvious to make. You're not some Nostradamus, when there's no clear reddit alternative like last time around but it's still too early to tell if the users who are intended to be driven to the main app will actually go there instead of empowering other places and causing a slow but eventual migration.
Internet is, many times, about power users and "what's cool" driving others there. Reddit is not Google or fb in that they can simply buy the competition when it appears.
But hey, there's always someone with an "the authorities are always right and will win" mindset.
Social media platforms are almost always generous in allowing for tools and third party clients that result in new content being created. What they restrict is the same sort of thing for the passive viewing side.
Reddit and Twitter were always unusual in that there’s such a 50/50 split between posting and consuming, and power users valued being able to curate their reading experience as well as the tools they had to post with. Most of Twitter’s core feature set came from power user features invented in third party apps, including retweeting. But as the apps became more popular they also took away a larger proportion of passive eyeballs for advertisers. A balance of some sort was needed, and I think both Twitter and Reddit have gone the wrong way.
Facebook is different to those two in that it always had the benefit of exploiting your existing in person social graph and growing outward from there, meaning it had different drivers and incentives for frequent posting.
Might not be a bad thing tbh
Moderator is most certainly a noun, and can be an adjective when placed in front of a "candidate". What are you even on, man.
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/moderator
I'm not the OP but that context makes it pretty obvious the OP is being figurative.
The rest of the comment describes things that did, in fact, happen. So what's the problem?
Except reddit is mostly just a link aggregator and host of other stolen content.
For a platform hosting user generated content and with volunteer moderation having third party clients is usually a net positive despite the small loss in advertising revenue, purely because they have a very positive impact on content creation and curation. That keeps passive users coming to the site so they can be advertised to.
At some point after a platform matures there needs to be some additional monetisation of third party clients, especially as they begin to capture a larger share of users. It doesn’t have to result in the clients being killed off entirely.
Reddit is nothing without people voluntarily adding content to the site and good moderators voluntarily running subreddits. That’s especially true for special interest and high quality subs like AskHistorians.
I suspect at first they didn't really care about the 3P clients in coming up with pricing, they were looking at the bulk of API usage which is elsewhere (not sure where, but based on numbers provided by Reddit Apollo would be at most 1.4% of API usage and likely much less; other clients likely significantly lower given how Apollo was singled out) and looking at preparing to get paid for user content by VC-backed AI startups.
Once the pricing was announced and the 3P app developers started complaining, there was probably a Cartman moment in the executive offices and things just went downstairs from there.
Because of their hamfisted handling of this they're going to lose a significant number of long-term users, a fair amount of content as a noticeable chunk of those users delete their content on the way out the door, an absurd amount of community and unpaid volunteer moderator goodwill, etc.
Reddit is likely to keep most of the users for now, but the reaction is also driving a lot of people to suddenly explore alternatives that would have been completely ignored before - and at some point it's quite possible that those popular clients that don't even have Reddit in the name will shift to providing mature and familiar interfaces to those alternatives and that may be enough to push growth. Remember that no social platform started out big.
If Reddit actually wanted to make money from the third party app users it would have been almost trivial to do - require a paid account for API usage, introduce new paid account tiers ($18-24/year, $3-4/mo, the current Premium, a couple of more expensive 'family'/multiuser tiers). Have them variable in how much monthly API usage was allowed and other perks (e.g. multiple IDs with either split or pooled API usage). Run it through the payment system Reddit already uses which means they get almost all the money instead of 30% off the top for app store fees plus a chunk going to the app developers so they're safe from getting screwed by mis-estimating usage. Edit: heck, just converting a chunk of users to paid accounts would likely have been huge for them because it gives potential for converting even more in the future, plus the chances of upsells.
But no, 'You have 30 days to change your business model, prepare to handle $millions/year in cash flow, and rewrite chunks of your software to be subscription-based.' Hell, the only 2 that I know of that even used subscriptions are Apollo and Sync, they might have had a chance. Instead, Reddit went for plausible deniability, 'we didn't kill the apps, they had a path to work with us but they all just gave up!'
Feh.
Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
Reddit was launched in 2005 (which I admit is a year or two earlier than I remember/would have guessed).
But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?
looks too tiny tbh.
There's more than 5000 subs. There are millions of them. These are big subs
As of now, six of the top ten subreddits have disabled posting. That doesn't seem tiny to me
I'm shutting down roughly 50 just before midnight CEST and I expect things to accelerate with the date change at GMT.
First, platforms are good to users to attract them. Then, they abuse users to attract advertisers. Then, once they think they have a moat, they abuse both sides to extract as much money as possible before it all crashes down.
I would say, as much as there is such a thing and it can be dated, Jun 9, 2023 was the end of Web 2.0 -- we found out reddit is not backing down and SE has disabled the backup job to archive.org. For SE the death march to enshittification has been much clearer, starting with the hiring of the new CEO, the firing of community managers to recently first completely ignoring and then going against the community on AI. Reddit just has been mostly wasting their time and money until they realized they need to make money and as Doctorow says, the siren song of enshittification is irresistible.
Why? It's right the header:
> No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
When people castigate the mere idea that Reddit should be trying to guarantee a return to its investors - and I can point you to examples of this if you wish - it's hard to interpret this as anything other than people saying that their interest to unfettered API access is more important than the interest that investors have in a positive ROI. I guess you could say that this isn't establishing a "right to Reddit" but that seems like hair-splitting to me - "we don't have a right to Reddit but anything that would take Reddit away from us would be evil."
Reddit is removing all api access to for-profit apps. Anyone willing to pay who contacted reddit has been ignored. By acting in bad-faith, they lost all moral ground at all.
Anything that would take functionality or access away isn't "evil" it merely decreases the value proposition potentially putting it below a threshold where its not worth bothering to provide the content that make's reddit worth visiting leaving the shell of reddit owned by its corporate overlords worth little.
The protest is demonstrating to Reddits CEO that it is in fact a negotiation because while they have no right to tell Reddit how to run its ship they don't have to join they voyage much less act as crew.
It's not their job to make Reddit profitable. If they wanted reddit to be profitable they could have not spent years adding negative value to the platform and wasting expensive developer hours. Alternatively they could have made third party app access a paid feature instead of asking developers to predict and then pay for usage.
Sure, this would make sense, but obviously there's a lot of moralized rhetoric being thrown around here which go beyond a dispassionate expression of "if you do this Reddit will no longer be personally valuable to me and I will leave." Uncharitably, people are trying to wrap up their ill-based moral indignation in these dispassionate expressions - "if you do this than I'll be so outraged that Reddit will no longer be personally valuable to me and I will leave." The moral indignation still lacks justification, though.
Governance is human problem and not a technical one. We have a few millennia of experience organizing and governing human effort, yet the control structure of every subreddit is akin to some kind of Oligarchy with unelected moderators wielding considerable power. These moderators in turn are at the mercy of the Oligarchical Reddit admins.
A better system would be to offer different governance types as a choice for organizing the subreddit. Have different types of built in voting mechanisms if people want to use them but still allow 'dictator' subreddits if people want to use them.
Set up a revenue sharing system where each subreddit gets the portion of money they generate for Reddit. Allow the governance structure the subreddit has decided on to dictate the way those funds are split between moderators and contributors.
Then set up some sort of governance structure that rolls up the Subreddits. As an American I'm biased towards the way the US does things but I'm sure there are other good ways to do this as well. You could have the equivalent to 'states' similar to the sections of a newspaper: Sports, Entertainment, Money, Technology, Travel, etc. with the equivalent of 'counties' within those (football, baseball, basketball or books, video games, movies, etc).
Replace the corporate Reddit structure with the equivalent of a federal government: have the 'states' hold a 'constitutional convention' and delimit powers that the corporation should have and reserve every other right to the individual 'states'. Then you can have some kind of election system that governs the corporation, CEO being equivalent to president, etc.
Then you have a system that broadly aligns the interests of the participants and provides mechanisms for information to be transmitted when needed for decision making.
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The other problem that social media needs to solve is that of anonymity and content presentation. Here I think Reddit fails by having a global karma count instead of one that's localized to the 'state' and subreddit you're on. If they did that then users could actually gain reputation and credibility within the context of a space.
They also should offer identity services that allow the verification of information like employment, citizenship, education, etc. that some subreddits have their own haphazard mechanisms for verifying. This would allow moderators to leverage this type of credential more easily and users to have more trust in sharing them (because they're sharing with Reddit proper not some random subreddit moderator).
Finally, they should have some sort of verification system that lets users tie their accounts to their real identity. Obviously anonymous accounts should still be allowed but this type of verification system tamps down on many of the problems that social media platforms face.
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If anyone wants to fund the development of a platform like this let me know lol
This information exists and is maintained on the backend.
Pull up your profile on old.reddit and click on "show karma breakdown by subreddit".
Note that this isn't publicly available (/u/johnsmith1234568 has 1k karma in /r/someIdeoligcalSub - they're banned from participating here).
Of course an independent judiciary system to keep the powers at be in check.
I'm going to be a virtual lawyer that specializes in subreddit law.
Seriously, do you have any clue how much just YouTube alone spends on content moderation? Or Facebook? These are absolutely massive investments.
It is like people who say 'those who cannot do, teach'. Hey, maybe teaching is hard work and most people suck at it?
The type of person who thinks mods are all power tripper do-badders who could be easily replaced is usually the type of person who doesn't bother reading the rules of the community before posting, or who resorts instantly to insults in disagreements, or who think it is funny to piss people off.
You bring up legitimate concerns and you're met with either stony silence, or you get called an asshole.
Have you ever worked a customer service job?
By thinking that people who deal with the public and their complaints and entitled attitude constantly are the ones who are unreasonable by default, you show a powerful ignorance about how many people act when they want something and can't immediately get it for any reason.
If a community bans you it’s the wrong community for you, it’s not a conspiracy at play, you just don’t belong.
Find the people who do share your views and go play in that sandbox.
Anyone can start a subbreddit. And in your subreddit, you can do all the work it takes to create a community, and then you can ban people for whatever reason you want and feel that tasty power that the mods love so much, and see how awesome it is to get cursed at, told how terrible you are and how much your community sucks, and how they are going to dox you and plant meth on you so that you lose custody of your children.
Stop being lazy and put in the work, then whine about your situation. As it is you just sound like someone annoyed because things don't work the way you like but you don't want to do anything but complain.
Reddit has indicated that it wants to pay for content moderation. So be it. Who are you to tell them how they run their company?
Maybe when we move away from "volunteers" then the "volunteers" can get real jobs that pay real money! It'll be good for them.
They are free to run the biz into the ground, won’t be the first or last to do so. Meanwhile YouTube will keep printing cash.
Personally I know of no other place where I can get discussions on such a wide range of topics (AskHistorians, biking, my local neighbourhood) presented to me in a simple format. I hope there will be but I’m not holding my breath.
And there’s also the “better moderation than YouTube comments” aspects. Whatever Reddit is or can be, it’s lot as toxic as YouTube. And better organized.
I think we want something more cooperative. Not Reddit centralization, not full fediverse. For some reason I’m thinking of the local farmer’s market, where sometimes the vendor has to run to the bathroom, and their neighbor keeps an eye on things, possibly even processing sales.
The thing with coops though is you need a way to tell if people are contributing fairly, and a process to deal with it, and I have no idea what that looks like. I don’t know if that’s because it could never work, or we still fully expect other things to work so no one has tried.
That's actually one of the things that I dislike most about the site, and the reason I've stopped using it: there's no institutional memory. Subreddits can have two stickied posts. One of them is usually some sort of daily discussion thread and the other is some sort of announcement. Anything that isn't stickied will fall off eventually even if it would stay active otherwise. On traditional forums, replying to a post bumped it to the top. Most posts would be recent, but not all. Posts died when people stopped replying to them. And you could have as many stickies as you liked. Most forums had threads that were dozens or hundreds of pages long. For example, MTG the Source has a 399 page thread about the Merfolk legacy deck which was started in 2008. The most recent reply was on the 26th of March this year - it's still active. You just don't get that sort of thing on Reddit. So you get people asking really basic questions forever.
I think Reddit can be great for beginners to a hobby or a topic. It tends to cater to them relatively well. You can get lots of upvotes on your "Hey I made my first [X]" post, and the culture encourages people to hold the hands of people with basic questions. On traditional forums, the culture was usually "RTFM noob, read the sticky". Less kind? Yes. More productive? Yes. People get burnt out answering basic questions repeatedly pretty quickly. Subreddits have to invent all these new ways of maintaining information (subreddit wikis, sticky threads with links to other threads and external links, off-site information linked from the sidebar, etc).
I think Reddit has the same problem just over a longer timescale. Discord can't maintain a conversation for much more than an hour. Reddit can't maintain a conversation for much more than a day. On both, people try to work around it by having special channels or posts that have links to external resources, etc. But what those communities should actually use is phpBB.
I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting.
I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to. They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The reason they are not is because they have hired way too many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and investors make a profit.
There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't replaced.
A link based aggregator, you are correct. There's more of them out there than TODO app tutorials. What I do find hard to separate from is the communities that have constant ongoing daily conversations. Cooking, AskCulinary, all the science subreddits, some indie video game ones. Having one non-discord like hub for a community is great, and I do miss checking in on my daily AskCulinary questions and helping newbies out.
Really all I want from it is just a forum with the ability to upvote threads (rather than replies bumping them up) and the ability for anyone to be able to create their own sub-forum, but to heck if I can find something in that category that replaces reddit.
The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
From casual use alone this isn't clear to me can you explain?
Searching for that pejorative and Lemmy will find discussions about it with links (though not links to Lemmy itself since those sites are poorly indexed by Google).
This came most recently to visibility with the comments on an NPR article posted to Lemmy about China tightening access to Tiananmen square and Hong Kong detentions in /c/worldnews a week ago.
With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist.
Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc. I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem.
I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse". If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
This requires explanation. If they staff the moderation in-house, costs will rise significantly and there is no chance they can ever profit. The people with the time, expertise and patience necessary to mod will know of alternatives. Mods are niche niche.
But the bigger issue that you allude to for reddit here is that they aren't pulling off the band-aid in one go. Once the apps die, they still need to kill old reddit and RES, they still need to end NSFW. Each time they do this the federated clones will be stronger, and each time more and more will jump ship.
I was on Mastodon for the Great Twitter Migration of Nov. 2022, and yeah... it was pretty hard to watch. Never have used Twitter, but I saw a lot of Twits struggling with Mastodon. I don't think the migration went well. The Twitter experience didn't translate.
Reddit, I think is a more traditional forum. And that does translate well. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on Lemmy, and it's really the same experience as Reddit. Reddit users find Lemmy familiar in a way that Twitter users did not find on Mastodon.
The shiny things that keep "normal users" around.
Which isn't to say that it is plagued with problems or anything. I just think we have to remember that Federation and a FOSS development model alone will bring a large pile of challenges and confusion to the average user. As you said, we saw it with Mastodon. That friction is survivable if framed right, but any additional friction will be meaningful for normal users. Just my opinion of course, not making any factual statements here.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Voat immediately turned into a cesspool of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and harassment. If you think there is a place on the mainstream Internet these days where people can gleefully host "FatPeopleHate"-like forums and not capsize and sink, good luck.
edit: presumably, https://tildes.net/ with an s
Worked great for Google+!
At first glance it looks like a nice place. Most other alternatives seem to turn into a right-wing hell-hole quite fast. So I understand the need to let new people slowly trickle in.
Can drop it to vildravn@gmail.com, don't think HN has DMs.
Discord.
I know, I know—it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap, maybe permanently.
Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things I would think belong on a forum.
It just doesn't fulfill the same purpose. IME, I ignore discords from most subreddits because they do basically nothing for me unless it's a topic i'm extremely interested and engaged in.
Regardless of anything discord does, the lack of searchability will always be a core problem compared to reddit.
Improved fork: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit
Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python scripts.
Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board and you don't own a single word your users type.
You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here.
Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.
People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here.
The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform." It was explicitly stated on the reddit website.
The selling point of reddit back in the day was that it was not censored like HN! It's amazing how censorship created a pro-censorship mentality in just a few short years.
The prononents of internet censorship are canadians, brits, europeans, middle easterners, indians, chinese, etc. After all, the only place "hate speech" is protected is in the US. If you think about it, you have to protect "hate speech" if you are to have free speech. You can't have free speech without "hate speech". The idea of censoring "hate speech" is an alien concept in america. It was imported from abroad.
I don't think so. I would rather say Reddit made Trump president, so the US establishment got pissed off. Then Reddit appeases them.
But several times, mostly when the controversy got too hot, the admins have killed subreddits, like /r/The_Donald, /r/incels, and /r/FatPeopleHate.
The dominant view in society is stuff like ”jailbait” shouldn’t be tolerated. The reason it’s not outright illegal is in a non-prurient context a yearbook photo may just be a photo. It’s when you post it to a forum for gutter creeps that the qualitative nature changes.
The point of free speech is to protect against "the vast majority of people". The vast majority of people are against lgbt, atheism, etc. Do you think such content should be banned as well? What if the vast majority of people want huckleberry finn banned? The vast majority of people was once against women's rights, civil rights, freeing the slaves, etc. Rights exist to guard against the mob.
> And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.
That's fine. You can be pro-censorship. It's a valid opinion to hold. And certainly there is a lot of trash online. What I despise are people who are pro-censorship and yet claim to be for free speech.
Also, my point isn't whether I agree or disagree with the content on reddit. My point was there was a time when reddit prided itself on being a free speech platform. As long as it was legal, it was allowed. That changed. Not because the "vast majority" wanted it but because a select group of elites wanted to install a censorship regime on reddit. Reddit was never a democracy. And censorship came to reddit because the business and media elites demanded it.
This is a very common strawman that I see. Sure, not a lot of people are in favor of literally infinite amounts of free speech.
But nobody claimed that. Instead, people are claiming that there can be a wide range in support for free speech, and even if someone is OK with banning death threads and CSAM, that such a person could still be very much on the pro free speech side.
So yes, someone can be more in favor of free speech than you are, because they do not want legal speech to be banned on major platforms, even if you can nitpick their position and find some extreme outlyier hypothetical where they are not 1 million percent in favor of everything.
I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can this really be called censorship? of course, you can take a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that as well.
Reddit is heavily moderated too, but there you can get into an argument, and it depends on the subreddit.
Here the tone policing is far, far stricter. Also the homepage is incredibly tightly controlled, politically and pro-YC. I've seen many articles on YC companies or associated people changed, removed, etc despite being highly relevant.
Titles are changed to suit the mods tastes here. There was a good recent example where a very negative article on OpenAI skyrocketed the the top of the homepage, fastest rising post ever with a few hundred upvotes within like an hour - first the title was completely neutered, then the post was removed entirely.
The tone policing is far stricter, but the actual content policing is a lot less absurd. The result is that controversial topics and opinions don't result in as much of a toxic cesspool of name calling. On top of all that, here you can enable the display of deleted and flagged comments.
Example: The problem with “doing your own research” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334034
Yes, there is censorship on HN, but it's typically enacted by users instead of mods.
It's heavily censored but that's fine as it exists to serve a niche business community. And HN never claimed to be a free speech platform like reddit did.
> dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while
He does that for sure, but he also censors heavily to meet the corporate, social, etc agenda.
When the admins and power mods of reddit decided censor more, HN is one of the censorship models they looked to - the psychological tricks, front running, shadow banning, etc.
Two completely different platforms that were never in competition with each other. I think you dont know what youre talking about.
Then where would all the hn users go? I'm still mad I couldn't get a lobster.rs account 10 years ago, so I'm not going there. And I most definitely don't want to use a website that the average person has heard of.
No need to worry, any mention of HN is being mostly censored in all the "Reddit blackout" propoganda Discords now there's actual real discussion happening here about how the strike is stupid and just a vocal minority of mods taking the users for a ride and they can't downvoted those comments into non existence.
I really hope not. It would be the eternal September for HN.
People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It just stagnates and rots.
The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like this could be iterated on. The challenges are around infrastructure and funding to function at scale.
I would personally rather see something that improves on the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
Though developers vastly underestimate the difficulty in cloning something as well. As someone who thought it would be trivial to clone phpbb, it’s a lot of work to reach just feature parity. Your clone isn’t even going to have users to motivate you beyond the first 0.1% of the work.
Reddit has no real moat.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama, too.
Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.
Off topic, but giant lists of things are seriously underrated. I’d speculate that a large majority of the sites with a “Recommended for you” section would be much better served by a giant list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/reddark for a webclient
Not sure why. Maybe I'm missing something about what they chose to display.
edit: I see now, as it clearly says at the top of the page, it’s for subreddits that “are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after”
Communities can thrive or fail depending on who is in charge.
(What happened with regard to the mod banning an artist because they thought their art looked like it came from an AI? Last I heard the artist was able to show their workflow but the mod was unwilling to back down…)
Problem solved.
No one has left twitter, despite Elon's tantrums.
Do you really think CEOs care when their site has so much momentum and mods can be replaced in a snap?
TD was quarantined under false pretenses (ironic ones too, since a very pro police sub was accused of being anti police) and then basically killed while pretending it was alive.
KIA is alive but heavily muzzled by admins on some topics such as a prohibition to mention trans in any shape or form. The mod takeover was because the original founder who didn't use the site took over it once and destroyed it something.
There's been other cases where founders wreck havoc after years of not being active and were removed.
> Of those who are active, most just comment
You don't need the 'vast majority' or 'most'. You just need a few.
> It's a vanishingly small group who actually want to moderate
Not really, more people thank you seem to think are desperate for any sort of internet power.
But Reddit doesn't need shitty mods. They need good mods. Shitty mods kill communities.
There’s a lot of moderators out there moderating by hand and using bots to run some of the bigger subreddits, much like IRC. Without those bots having access to the APIs, that job gets harder and it’s less likely to be done well.
Personally I think Steve Huffman is the fall guy here and this is coming from the money people who have zero interest in where Reddit is beyond 6 months after the IPO. Reddit also has a history putting people in place to make controversial decisions only to fire them months later as appeasement to their community. Ellen Pao was the most recent example.
Personally, if I were in charge with Reddit I'd go for an approach that required 3rd party clients to show ads that come back from Reddit's APIs and allow users to opt-out of adds for a small monthly fee directly from the user or even from the app developers who choose to incorporate it into their fee structure. Apps who don't comply get banned.
The approach Reddit is going for is stupid and is burning goodwill earned over more than a decade.
That said, Huffman’s handling of this was bumbling at best.
It demonstrated a failure to understand his own users or the culture of the site.
For that alone, he should go.
But there are plenty of other reasons company leadership has failed its community, particularly it’s unpaid workers moderating content.
Also you have to think about the media coverage. This way you have two times the possible media coverage instead of just once and then everybody forgets about it.
1. Reddit management gets their head out of their asses and negotiates a better change to API fees and structure. Throughout this whole ordeal everyone else (Apollo dev, mods, etc.) has made extremely reasonable points, but Reddit management seems to be gaslighting and arguing in bad faith at every turn.
2. If management doesn't change, Reddit should die. Why should all these mods donate huge amounts of time to a platform that disrespects them at every turn?
CEO and everyone that though this is the way to monetize need to go.
Please point out, specifically, where he has done this. Otherwise, STFU.
To be clear, it's not like I've been following every one of his posts, so it's quite possible he said things that aren't accurate. So far, though, I've seen nothing but vague accusations against Christian, and when he did call bullshit and brought the receipts to back it up, u/spez said he was "leaking a private call". Queen please, he libeled Christian and then when Christian brought evidence to prove him wrong he complained!! What an asshat.
2. Moderator actions are exempt from the API charges... But I think this decision was made after things had blown up.
The thing about "moderator actions being exempt from API changes" is just plain silly. If you're going to put time into making a third party app, you still have to shut down even if the mod parts of your app are free if the cost of other users is untenable.
Every single 3rd party app that I've even heard of is also shutting down, so how people can try to spin this as something specific that Apollo did is baffling to me.
Yeah, I don't believe it. Go back and read his posts from 5+ years ago when Imgur went from $25/mo to $250/mo for 7.5 million requests.
You are telling me he is still grandfathered on a plan from over 5 years ago? As one of their heaviest API users? (probably)
That was 5+ years ago, it's only gotten more expensive.
Also, he implemented a caching system that saved some 18 million requests (I think 90%, forget off the top of my head).
But he'll never talk about how even if he's being completely honest, he's getting an INSANE deal from Imgur.
The same plan today would cost $3.3K to Reddit's $12K. But he'd never tell you that.
But more importantly, it's patently obvious that Reddit's sole goal was to shutoff every 3rd party app, because that is exactly what happened. This isn't just about Christian, literally every other 3rd party app developer found the new API terms untenable as well. If it was just Christian being unreasonable, as you are suggesting, but some other app developer ran the numbers and thought "well, that's OK, I could still make a business off that", they would be thrilled to come in and fill the void with Apollo leaving.
None of them are doing that. Your point is totally moot.
Right now, admins will probably replace a few dozens of mods, and then the rest of the site will be back in 2 days, and nothing will change.
For example, /r/askhistorians is going private for 48h and reopens readonly indefinitely after. /r/pathofexile as far as I understand won't be going private but goes readonly once again indefinitely. etc
Wow, that'll really show them who's boss! /s
I think the real thing that Reddit has to worry about is that upset activists could directly start spamming the site in order to justify their warnings about what will happen without mods. "Nice subreddits you have here, would hate to see anything happen to them if you don't accede to our demands."
also ... nothing.
So while some subreddits are still planning on 2 days, a growing number of them are going dark indefinitely until reddit rolls back this plan.
For some niches, Reddit's comment history is basically like a knowledge base and it's slowly being torn apart. If the group of signal-noise contributors that nukes their whole history grows, it devalues Reddit in another way as well.
It does matter that people have identified a trend of corporate behavior, and are finding ways to take stands against it.
Do people forget that making a subreddit is free?
That said, Reddit should have built better mod tools before making their api change.
I think people complaining about not having 3rd party apps to browse reddit is "meh". But moderators need to be able to do their jobs.
And it’s why you have the strike; Reddit is not at risk of dying, it’s at risk of becoming even worse that it already is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Example, a mod at /r/music remarked last week that they’ve been paying a few bucks a month to host a server for some additional features for years. It’s common to use some automation to summon mods in a discord so someone near a computer can execute the moderating, since the mobile tools are so limited.
And ofc as other uses pointed out, that’s 3% of a sum including the vast number of auto moderator mod actions taken on the site, which are not really human originated at all.
All of this has left a sour taste in their mouths. They also see the writing on the wall; they'll shut down old.reddit.com, push more ads via the official app, and continue to milk as much money as possible.
The claim that it's not profitable seems kind of crazy to me. They have a huge amount of data on their users to target ads. It's mostly text content so the bandwidth shouldn't be horrible. Maybe I'm naive, but how can Facebook make so much money and yet they can't make a profit? It smells like poor management to me.
The rest of the ad inventory is more or less anonymous and gives very poor roi to spend ads against. That's why Reddit has a total revenue of like $100m vs $50b+ for facebook.
Maybe they're doing some sophisticated tracking of users by interest and showing relevant ads there but somehow I doubt it.
I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with disabilities and allow people who wouldn’t deal with their trash UX to still generate content for those who do.
The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.
What is this based on? All of the third party clients that I've used don't show reddit ads, so as long as I'm using the client, it's a cost sink for reddit. I don't contribute content.
The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money ruining their UI.
> it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is
On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use.
Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI? Am I looking at the wrong thing?
Also I found reading comments in new UI to be terrible, they load maybe one comment from 2-3 levels down, and everything else requires you to click to load more: https://i.imgur.com/C6DXttC.png.
And what are those posts on the right? I _just_ opened a post that I'm interested in, do I have to be shoved samples from completely irrelevant communities.
Also, try opening a post on new Reddit and then go back (in history) — for me the previous page loads from scratch, all the way on the top. Old reddit behaves as expected.
The list probably goes on, but I never spent more than 5 minutes I did now to find out all the issues. I'm pretty sure one of the issues Reddit has with 3rd party apps is that they let you browse Reddit with old.reddit philosophy — see lots of content, choose what you find interesting, and make it easy to dig into the discussion. As opposed to shoving the content in my face and pushing me to only read one top-upvoted comment on each level
[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
And when I went to log out of reddit, I got https://www.redditstatic.com/youbrokeit3.png
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.
Click uBlock Origin extension -> click gears -> click "My Filters" tab -> paste this line
||reddit.com^$all
i found myself unconsciously opening reddit.com and starting to scroll and consume content mindlessly ... only to realize after a few seconds that it happened... and then closing the browser
I suspected i had a habit ...but only realizing now the autopilot effect of it
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.
I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible
If they're not breaking even with revenue then that money starts to run out quite quickly.
Venture capital funds are for a limited time - e.g. five years. At the end of the time, the fund is liquidated - the companies are either sold, or closed down.
They can sell to another round of VC funding, sell to a competitor (who wants to "acquihire" the team), or by IPO.
But in this case: yeah it's bizarre. How the hell are their official apps and mobile site and new desktop website so fucking awful, when solo/small team app developers can actually provide a good experience working on the outside with a fraction of the resources?
I've tried to switch from old.reddit to new.reddit a handful of different times now, every time I go screaming back after my eyes feel like they want to vomit. I don't generally have a huge problem with modern web design, but their particular implementation just really sucks.
At my company, my small team ends up doing about 80% of the work, while four other teams, each with 10-plus members, seem to do absolutely nothing.
Then I immediately close it when I realize I clicked the wrong thing. I wonder how much that inflates their stats for it and what the real compared to accidental usage rates are. It's probably very telling.
Apparently the chat feature released in 2020 that nobody used is now “legacy” and was replaced by a new tab which people will continue to not use. Why they didn’t migrate old chats over when deprecating is beyond me.
No wonder they’re burning through money.
New chat is only available on the new site and the latest mobile apps, so it’s also likely a way to funnel people towards those. IIRC legacy chat was also available on old reddit and the older versions of the apps, but never the 3rd party ones, which only had PMs.
Whatever right? Pretty typical for an official app. But it’s slower and less efficient than all of the 3rd party apps now as they’ve continued to improve.
But to me the problem is not only all of that, but they’re publicly ridiculing other apps (especially Apollo) for their “inefficient” use of the API when they’re all better than the official app.
It’s all just insulting and tone-deaf and speaks to the narrative that they no longer care about a community and see users as $$$.
1. It loads content significantly more quickly than New Reddit (Reddit has done a lot to improve on this, but for a long time, the New Reddit™ was horrifically slow after scrolling through a few posts.)
2. It doesn't support any of the social media functions that the New Reddit provides, which, for me, is perfect because that's not what I browse Reddit for. (You can turn all of that off in the New Reddit, though.)
3. Way less busy than New Reddit, even if you use "Classic" view inside of "Card" view.
4. You can disable infinite scroll in Apollo, whereas you can't in New Reddit (and it's not even supported in Old Reddit unless you use RES)
5. The Apollo developer was insanely responsive to user feedback and was really, really good about incorporating as much as he could into the app (an iPad-native experience being the biggest exception).
I wouldn’t call all that “nothing”
There is no “past UX” for the iOS app. If anything, it’s a downgrade of Alien Blue, the 3rd party app they bought out then neutered.
Making the experience worse for mobile users for the sake of tracking engagement is certainly not “nothing”, you’re right about that. It’s worse than nothing.
The gist was that the function started out with a (fixed-size!) malloc, then copied the source key while applying the substitution cypher into the buffer, and then returned the result of calling a JNI function (NewStringUTF, IIRC) with the buffer, but did not actually free the buffer (which wasn't necessary in the first place). And this function apparently gets called quite often.
Yep, this is the great irony. When capitalist logic was being used to justify Reddit going after hate speech, powerusers loved it. When it's being used to justify closing API access, they hate it and the rhetoric shifts entirely. We'll see the same thing when Reddit starts tightening the screws further on NSFW content as well.
So, being anti-hate-speech is a bad thing, to you?
You seem to be very principled but from what you have written so far you don't seem to acknowledge or understand that some people operate in bad faith. This comes across particularly when you state that people should operate within reddit's rules but neglect to take into account that reddit is not adhering to the rules themselves and that this is a breach of any ability to have a civil relationship. This is also frequently the case with the loud 'free speech' cries by 'bad targets'. Many of them have no intention of ever giving anyone who disagrees with them the same offer. How do you deal with people like that except to disregard them entirely?
That is indeed the point of principles. If you drop your principles as soon as the going gets tough, then they weren't actually principles to begin with.
> Many of them have no intention of ever giving anyone who disagrees with them the same offer.
Letting your opponents define your own principles is another mistake that unprincipled people often make.
Principles are important not because they help you defeat your enemies. They matter in and of themselves.
Something that is used to fight your enemies is called a strategy or a tactic. Thats completely different from a principle.
If you want to say that you don't care about principles at all, and are willing to do anything and everything that is the most effective to defeat your enemies no matter what it is, just say that instead of talking about principles or morals or values.
That way at least we'd be on the same page as to what the conversation is about.
No idea matters exclusively 'for its own sake'. To think like that is to abandon utility and reason for dogma.
> If you want to say that you don't care about principles at all, and are willing to do anything and everything that is the most effective to defeat your enemies no matter what it is, just say that instead of talking about principles or morals or values.
When were you at all confused? I asked a specific leading question and gave a specific reason why the answer was what I lead it to be. Please let me know how I could have been more clear without being patronizing.
“Utility” is an idea, too, and now we know which idea you value for its own sake.
Utility: The quality or condition of being useful; usefulness. [0]
for its own sake: if something is done for its own sake, it is done for the value of the experience itself, not for any advantage it will bring [1]
If something is useful, it exists because of the advantage it will bring. The two things are antonyms.
Think a bit more next time you try and dismiss someone offhand with a clever sounding quip. Just because a quip sounds clever does not make it so.
[0] https://www.wordnik.com/words/utility
[1] https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/for-its-own-sake
Correction. Those who didn't love it were banned or left or were censored out of default views.
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.)