Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators
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qz.com
The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
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My assumption here is that Huffman may win the battle, but he might lose the war. Even if he manages to get the rampaging mods under control, how much damage will he do in the process?
r/pics will probably end up going NSFW, which gets another major sub to lose ad revenue. Can Reddit manage to get all these subs back on topic without pulling some fascist takeover of the mod teams? These malicious compliance subs aren't explicitly breaking any rules, and taking action against them will just fan community outrage more.
They can obviously ban NSFW material, but that'll force a migration far faster than any blackout ever could. Not to mention 3rd party apps going dark on July 1st, which might see a not insignificant drop off of mobile users.
Reddit has likely begun its slow descent, and u/spez's best long term strategy would be to reverse course and keep the public API. Of course, he'll never do that since that just communicates to any investors that you have no control over your community. Not sure how he digs his way out of this one.
Yeah, ask Tumblr how well banning NSFW went for them lol
Maybe his exit strategy is to give Elon an amazing handjob and hope he buys reddit for a stupid amount of money.
Sync for Lemmy is expected to have first public release in approx. 6 weeks. That will definitely increase adoption as Sync would make Lemmy look like something not made in a basement overnight.
What is sync for lemmy. I agree that the current version of lemmy is clunky and buggy.
Earlier today the Sync for Reddit app developer held a poll and decided that they would make Sync for Lemmy, presumably with the same general layout and design as Sync for Reddit.
It is perfectly reasonable to charge for API access. That's not the problem.
The problem is that Huffman seems to think he can do whatever he wants without consequences. It wasn't "Hey, we're going to start charging for API, here's a reasonable price, and a reasonable time frame, and we want to make sure everyone has a reasonable opportunity to continue providing applications that lots of users and mods use to access and shepherd the site."
It was, "We're going to start charging an exorbitant amount for API access, in an unviably short timeframe. If you have any complaints or disagreements, we're going to provably lie about our interactions with you to make you look bad, oh and we're also going to completely forget that there are people with accessibility needs and basically ignore them except as an afterthought. We're also going to threaten existing mods who don't play along, and replace them with people who do if we feel like it."
That's the problem.
Because the point was never to monetize the APIs. The point was to get rid of the third party apps. A minority of users are still using the not monetized versions of reddit. old.reddit.com, and the third party apps. The people using new reddit, and the reddit app, have a totally different, heavily monetized, modern social media experience full of ads and suggested posts. They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.
But they can't come out and say that, because it's a huge fuck you. A fuck you to their original members, a fuck you to the apps they used to fuel their growth for a decade. Now they want a controlled ecosystem like Facebook, but they can't say it directly. So instead it's surprise API costs, refusing to talk to app developers, lying about conversations with Apollo devs.
But just like everything else they do, reddit can't plan for shit. So they didn't at all consider the fallout for accessibility tools, mod tools, etc. Which is why all their messaging since then has essentially been "No, we weren't trying to kill accessibility and mod tools, just the third party apps for normal users!" But they can't say the second part directly.
There is another point you are missing. Reddit uses browser fingerprinting to doxx and identify it's user base so that they can bin your data properly when they sell it. Third party apps thwart this effort as they can't tie your account to somebody who logs into the web site or uses their app.
I'm happy to do what reddit wants then, given those two options.
I really wonder how much longer old.reddit.com will last. Surely that's "costing them millions of dollars" they could be saving as well, right?
Considering they've straight out said during this whole debacle that they had no plans to mess with old.reddit.com, just the same as they told the Apollo dev back in January they had no plans to mess with the API anytime in the near future - yeah, I have been wondering this, too.
It makes me sad for the future of troubleshooting older hardware and software problems. I have a lot of legacy equipment, and appending "site:reddit.com" to my search queries often gets me further faster than searching error messages alone. So many people are overwriting and deleting their old comments and posts while Reddit itself is fucking the accessibility of the information they steward, and it's going to punch a little gap into the collective knowledge of the internet. That sucks.
Hell, just coming out with a statement that you're delaying the paid API by six months would fizzle out most protests. But they have dollar signs in their eyes with ChatGPT using Reddit for data and they want that money now.
The primary thing with r/pics and its users is that they are creating/posting SFW quality content for free. They are an established platform with an audience, and the tradeoff is that the platform can be used for ads by its owner. This is all fair.
The main outrage against the blackout is now coming from people who usually scroll, upvote, and consume content. Not content creators. They cannot fathom that their source of entertainment is inaccessible and just want people to stop 'overreacting' and get back to scrolling.
What happens when the platform is no longer reliable, because the owner decided to upset the people making sure the quality remains as established? Sure, someone else will fill the gap, but with these actions I'm sure a lot content creators have flocked to other places. Which leaves the bots, and the lurkers. No content is worse than low quality content.
I'm curious for what the future brings for Reddit. It feels like it will have a different trajectory compared to Twitter, where anything is content and quality doesn't matter as much.
Good point about the difference between Twitter and reddit, hadn't thought about it that way.
Really interesting development and I have to say that I'm a bit surprised by the resilience the community has shown. On the other hand, this is reddit we're talking about and there is a reason some of us were there for 10, 15 years. Reddit could be so creative and fucking funny, it really was an awesome place at times.
I think you're on point about the content creators,only question is how many of the creators will leave reddit and go somewhere else. Absolutely fascinating stuff.
They should announce NSFW ban since that content isn't lucrative.
I have to say I find it hard to believe that it's easy to find new mods for all these subreddits. That's why they're focusing on threats. Otherwise I don't understand why they would allow these mods to continue this shit posting. Because they can make up an excuse for kicking them out. That wouldn't be hard.
They’ll make people apply to get their subs turned to NSFW. They’ll all be SFW by default and force people to give a reason as to why it’s NSFW. They’ll deny every application from the newly changed NSFW subs. Or they’ll charge people for the NSFW tag - and it’ll be based on traffic!