"It's time we grow up," says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
I just commented on another similar article! His reasoning for this move contradicts itself! How can he claim that the overwhelming majority of users (97%) use the official Reddit app, but the use of 3rd party apps is destroying their bottom line? That means that that the lost profit from 3% of users are the reason for the API price change?
And… if there are only 4-5 big 3rd party apps (like Apollo, RIF), why force them out of the market? If only 3% of users use them, are they really that big of a deal? Why are the prices so astronomically high?
This is Reddit consolidating their empire. I hope that folks are prepared for future roll-outs of new subscriptions and reasons that Reddit users need to pay.
I'm honestly shocked the redditors are so blind to this. Do they actually think it'll just be plain sailing from here on out?
Maybe in just to old skool and remember a time when Reddit would have really stood up.
It absolutely will not be plain sailing - I think that the protest is an early warning sign. People that stick to Reddit are going to be bombarded with ads, Premium features, and new programs after Reddit goes public.
I am an Apollo user until the end - I think that after having such a good experience under Christian, I forgot how scummy a big corporation can be. Times are changing - we just saw some similar things with Musk taking over twitter.
Reddit felt like it was going downhill for a long time. I think I just started scrolling it out of habit, only participating in a few subs for hobbies and games. This shitshow was the kick in the ass I needed to shreddit and delete my account.
Also. I think more users need to do that. Make sure you shreddit your comments and posts so reddit can't keep your content.
It's been pretty bad for a while now.
I used to go to reddit to learn something new, to see the news for the day, to find a cool new hobby or interest, to read deep discussions about topics that I didn't know that much about.
But that was like 8 or 9 years ago.
Lately the entire front page is doom bait, vaguely disguised racism, political trolling, violence, memes, and reposts.
I used to browse /r/all about half of the time and my subscribed subs the other half.
I muted serial reposters / content farmers whenever I noticed them, but this past year I hit a breaking point and I changed my default feed to subs only and intentionally chose to avoid /r/all.
Sucks that I'm going to lose my niche communities on reddit, but I've been a lot happier here so far.
Thats a great word for it. Doom bait. I hated being surrounded by pessimism on that site
A switch flipped somewhere to whenever i logged onto reddit I would leave feeling worse. It’s for the best that I stopped using it i think
Reddit got so big it's now the default, the masses are always looking for the simple default option.
Yeah it's the convenience of use. Fediverse right now is not convenient to use IMO. Most of the people here are somewhat tech savvy and even then many people did face issue of creating an account and were confused about how the whole thing works. Now try explaining all that to a person that just uses Reddit like the company intends them to.
Trust me, I'm trying. I got one homie all setup so far, lol
It makes so little sense to me. They could have charged a reasonable amount and made some money off of the apps, but instead, they chose to kill them and lose their users. Some might migrate to the official app, but this uproar may have caused even more to leave the platform entirely.
I'm actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I'm sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn't been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There's a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
At this point this seems intentional. This has definitely pushed me away from Reddit and I’m already seeing a lot more meaningful conversations on Lemmy. All I ever saw on Reddit anyways is people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes. Took a lot of scrolling to even get to people actually talking about the topic.
Reddit OTOH was a good place to discover other things organically (not the enshittification attempt "other people liked that sub" interjections). But the only thing I miss is a way to group my subscriptions.
Currently Lemmy is getting up to speed, and the discussion quality has already started to drop; we'll see whether communities can police themselves.
Agree it's intentional. Normies don't care about any of this and will just follow the memes. Most of us here are the users that had ad blockers and probably didn't care about giving gold.
Giving and receiving gold was surprisingly, one of my least favourite things. Someone gave me gold once and i felt beholden to say thank you? I didnt ask for it, i didnt comment in hopes of getting given “gold”. I never gave anyone else gold. Why would i give a shit about getting it myself? Its a fucking forum.
Reactions are common in lots of forums though, gold is just a special reaction.
A special upvote if you will, its not really that deep.
Waste of money.
people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes.
Here, have an upvote on me =D
It's probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.
It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.
As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.
This is why the fediverse is so great. It really is really expensive to run a social media company. By spreading the cost over many actors and encouraging competition, this allows us to host content without being beholden to billionares.
Fine, let the people who apparently have no concept of foresight turn Reddit into a cesspool.
This is clearly about cashing in on machine learning at the expense of your users. Maybe you should self reflect a bit before your entire website is produced and consumed entirely by machine learning.
it's expensive to run a company
well, congratulations - its your lucky day, steve! lemmy is here to relieve you of that onerous obligation. now don't let the door hit you on the way out.
"But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members."
One way to find out right.
Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!
"It's expensive to run a company into the ground" - u/spez
he moderated WHAT? So not only is he an idiot, he's a pedo? What a great image.
It's expensive to run a company that constant wastes resources and is trying to grow beyond what it is.
I liked it better when they had one kind of Reddit Gold and displayed a progress bar on the homepage showing what percentage of daily operating costs were covered.
It's the same reason people don't show their pateron monthly incomes, they don't want people knowing how much money and potentially saying to themselves wow 3x daily cost? Seems I don't need to give money.
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.
Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site... Huffman acknowledged that if those users instead browsed with Reddit's own app, it would shore up the company's bottom line.
Ok how the hell does 3% of users shore up the bottom line of Reddit. Something is extremely fishy.
I don't have a MBA, but that seems... off.
I enjoy how he's still talking about this as if it's purely about having 3rd party apps pay a fee, not about his incredibly piss-poor handling of it.
I know right? I have no problem with a fee existing. It's the ridiculously high fee, and the complete BS he tried to feed everyone that really drive me away. It's only going to get worse. I hope lemmy gets big enough
I really hope July 1st destroys reddit as we know it.
It won't immediately, but it's clearly a sinking ship.
“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
See this is another thing, how is Reddit management not in prison and on the sex offenders list? They willfully and knowingly distributed child pornography for YEARS. And it's not like they're rich enough or have enough high up connections to get out of it. What the fuck?
From what I remember, jailbait getting taken down was either what they did right before or right after reddit got sold to whoever. And then, iirc, in 2018-ish they got bought by a Chinese company.
What are you talking about? There was no sale in 2018, much less to "a Chinese company". AFAIK the last company that owned Reddit was Condé Nast (the purchase in 2006). Since 2011 they have been independent of Condé Nast. Since then, they've been reliant on venture capital.
Edit to add: Anderson Cooper's calling out of Reddit for hosting the jailbait subreddit in 2011 is the impetus for it being taken down, not the sale of the company.
I think that's where the confusion lies, however it's currently owned by Advance Publications.
That's very interesting. Tencent is not even hinted at in Wikipedia's timeline of Reddit page. Also, when they say that Reddit was able to "operate independently of Condé Nast", they're being somewhat deceitful and implying they were independent. Advance Publications is only mentioned in the footnote/reference, and what they meant that Advance Publications is hands-off compared to Condé Nast.
I just commented on another similar article! His reasoning for this move contradicts itself! How can he claim that the overwhelming majority of users (97%) use the official Reddit app, but the use of 3rd party apps is destroying their bottom line? That means that that the lost profit from 3% of users are the reason for the API price change?
And… if there are only 4-5 big 3rd party apps (like Apollo, RIF), why force them out of the market? If only 3% of users use them, are they really that big of a deal? Why are the prices so astronomically high?
This is Reddit consolidating their empire. I hope that folks are prepared for future roll-outs of new subscriptions and reasons that Reddit users need to pay.
I'm honestly shocked the redditors are so blind to this. Do they actually think it'll just be plain sailing from here on out?
Maybe in just to old skool and remember a time when Reddit would have really stood up.
It absolutely will not be plain sailing - I think that the protest is an early warning sign. People that stick to Reddit are going to be bombarded with ads, Premium features, and new programs after Reddit goes public.
I am an Apollo user until the end - I think that after having such a good experience under Christian, I forgot how scummy a big corporation can be. Times are changing - we just saw some similar things with Musk taking over twitter.
Reddit felt like it was going downhill for a long time. I think I just started scrolling it out of habit, only participating in a few subs for hobbies and games. This shitshow was the kick in the ass I needed to shreddit and delete my account.
Also. I think more users need to do that. Make sure you shreddit your comments and posts so reddit can't keep your content.
It's been pretty bad for a while now.
I used to go to reddit to learn something new, to see the news for the day, to find a cool new hobby or interest, to read deep discussions about topics that I didn't know that much about.
But that was like 8 or 9 years ago.
Lately the entire front page is doom bait, vaguely disguised racism, political trolling, violence, memes, and reposts.
I used to browse /r/all about half of the time and my subscribed subs the other half.
I muted serial reposters / content farmers whenever I noticed them, but this past year I hit a breaking point and I changed my default feed to subs only and intentionally chose to avoid /r/all.
Sucks that I'm going to lose my niche communities on reddit, but I've been a lot happier here so far.
Thats a great word for it. Doom bait. I hated being surrounded by pessimism on that site
A switch flipped somewhere to whenever i logged onto reddit I would leave feeling worse. It’s for the best that I stopped using it i think
Reddit got so big it's now the default, the masses are always looking for the simple default option.
Yeah it's the convenience of use. Fediverse right now is not convenient to use IMO. Most of the people here are somewhat tech savvy and even then many people did face issue of creating an account and were confused about how the whole thing works. Now try explaining all that to a person that just uses Reddit like the company intends them to.
Trust me, I'm trying. I got one homie all setup so far, lol
It makes so little sense to me. They could have charged a reasonable amount and made some money off of the apps, but instead, they chose to kill them and lose their users. Some might migrate to the official app, but this uproar may have caused even more to leave the platform entirely.
I'm actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I'm sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn't been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There's a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
At this point this seems intentional. This has definitely pushed me away from Reddit and I’m already seeing a lot more meaningful conversations on Lemmy. All I ever saw on Reddit anyways is people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes. Took a lot of scrolling to even get to people actually talking about the topic.
Reddit OTOH was a good place to discover other things organically (not the enshittification attempt "other people liked that sub" interjections). But the only thing I miss is a way to group my subscriptions.
Currently Lemmy is getting up to speed, and the discussion quality has already started to drop; we'll see whether communities can police themselves.
Agree it's intentional. Normies don't care about any of this and will just follow the memes. Most of us here are the users that had ad blockers and probably didn't care about giving gold.
Giving and receiving gold was surprisingly, one of my least favourite things. Someone gave me gold once and i felt beholden to say thank you? I didnt ask for it, i didnt comment in hopes of getting given “gold”. I never gave anyone else gold. Why would i give a shit about getting it myself? Its a fucking forum.
Reactions are common in lots of forums though, gold is just a special reaction.
A special upvote if you will, its not really that deep.
Waste of money.
Here, have an upvote on me =D
It's probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.
It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.
As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.
This is why the fediverse is so great. It really is really expensive to run a social media company. By spreading the cost over many actors and encouraging competition, this allows us to host content without being beholden to billionares.
*Chinese billionaires
Sentence 1: Really, only 3 percent of users are pissed about this; It's insignificant.
Sentence 2: These disruptions from 3rd party app supporters really hurt our bottom line. This is expensive!
😂 fuck u/spez
I like the Fediverse and I think I’ll stay.
Fine, let the people who apparently have no concept of foresight turn Reddit into a cesspool.
This is clearly about cashing in on machine learning at the expense of your users. Maybe you should self reflect a bit before your entire website is produced and consumed entirely by machine learning.
well, congratulations - its your lucky day, steve! lemmy is here to relieve you of that onerous obligation. now don't let the door hit you on the way out.
"But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members."
One way to find out right.
Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!
"It's expensive to run a company into the ground" - u/spez
he moderated WHAT? So not only is he an idiot, he's a pedo? What a great image.
It's expensive to run a company that constant wastes resources and is trying to grow beyond what it is.
I liked it better when they had one kind of Reddit Gold and displayed a progress bar on the homepage showing what percentage of daily operating costs were covered.
It's the same reason people don't show their pateron monthly incomes, they don't want people knowing how much money and potentially saying to themselves wow 3x daily cost? Seems I don't need to give money.
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.
Ok how the hell does 3% of users shore up the bottom line of Reddit. Something is extremely fishy.
I don't have a MBA, but that seems... off.
I enjoy how he's still talking about this as if it's purely about having 3rd party apps pay a fee, not about his incredibly piss-poor handling of it.
I know right? I have no problem with a fee existing. It's the ridiculously high fee, and the complete BS he tried to feed everyone that really drive me away. It's only going to get worse. I hope lemmy gets big enough
I really hope July 1st destroys reddit as we know it.
It won't immediately, but it's clearly a sinking ship.
See this is another thing, how is Reddit management not in prison and on the sex offenders list? They willfully and knowingly distributed child pornography for YEARS. And it's not like they're rich enough or have enough high up connections to get out of it. What the fuck?
From what I remember, jailbait getting taken down was either what they did right before or right after reddit got sold to whoever. And then, iirc, in 2018-ish they got bought by a Chinese company.
What are you talking about? There was no sale in 2018, much less to "a Chinese company". AFAIK the last company that owned Reddit was Condé Nast (the purchase in 2006). Since 2011 they have been independent of Condé Nast. Since then, they've been reliant on venture capital.
Edit to add: Anderson Cooper's calling out of Reddit for hosting the jailbait subreddit in 2011 is the impetus for it being taken down, not the sale of the company.
Not owned by, but heavily invested in by Tencent.
I think that's where the confusion lies, however it's currently owned by Advance Publications.
That's very interesting. Tencent is not even hinted at in Wikipedia's timeline of Reddit page. Also, when they say that Reddit was able to "operate independently of Condé Nast", they're being somewhat deceitful and implying they were independent. Advance Publications is only mentioned in the footnote/reference, and what they meant that Advance Publications is hands-off compared to Condé Nast.