Reddit: Don't like us anymore? Pay us $50/year!

Cinner@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 911 points –

I'm not sure if this is new, but when I clicked on the /r/pics protest post link from the frontpage here, I was redirected to this: https://old.reddit.com/premium

I'm not sure if this is well-known or not that they're pushing it now, but it's the first time I've seen it, especially on old.reddit.

255

The irony is that I was mentally prepared to have to pay for Premium to keep BaconReader. All they had to do was add an "API access" badge to that screen and none of this would have happened, plus they would have gotten a bunch more new sign-ups. I am at a loss to explain what Steve is thinking, nor why his decisions are better for profitability.

Yeah, I'd gladly pay the sub for Apollo if reddit had decided to charge a modest price for the API and Christian could make a buck off it and reddit could also make a few bucks off me.

Reddit could've probably 5x'd or 10x'd the money they make off me that way, but now they 0x'd it.

Same here. If they'd have just framed it differently and put the onus of paying for api access on the users (at a modest fee), almost none of the backlash would have happened.

Then I'd still be oblivious.

I prefer the world the way it was before all the consolidation. I like the ideals of the fediverse and want it to succeed.

Then I'd still be oblivious.

I prefer the world the way it was before all the consolidation. I like the ideals of the fediverse and want it to succeed.

Exactly, this is better overall I think, at least when it comes to the health of the internet as a whole.

2 more...
2 more...

You underestimate the power of addiction.

The official app isn't a bad thing because it's buggy and has ads, that sucks but I've used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though

It's bad because it's built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let's throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We'll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven't used the app in a few hours? Here's some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there

I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn't really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.

For those of us who aren't going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It's a strong reminder that corporations not only don't care about us, they can't - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn't hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits

Thats an interesting point, all that shit just turns me off and makes me disengage. I avoid Facebook for precisely this reason.

I have to interact with LinkedIn for professional reasons, but always do it from a PC and don't install their app. When I get a LinkedIn message, LinkedIn helpfully emails me to let me know it's there, but doesn't tell me what's in it. Then after I check on it, I get another email reminding me that LinkedIn is better on the app. They are constantly trying to get that app on my phone, which makes me wonder exactly what extra data these phone apps send that is worth so much.

It's worse than that, because the official app spams your phone with tracking requests. I know most apps do some tracking, but users with apps that track the trackers have reported as many as 500k requests in 24 hours.

This is not only an invasive breach of privacy from a link aggregator forum, but also straight up murders your battery life.

I just got a brand new Pixel 7a before this nonsense started. I installed the reddit app because Baconreader is like twelve years old and I'd figured I'd see if their official app had gotten any better since I last used it. It hadn't, of course, but I also noticed my brand new phone wasn't holding a charge at all. Like, 20% battery left at 5pm while I'm still at work and barely using it.

Reddit was using over 40% of my battery while fucking IDLE. I brought this up over there and a few other people looked at it. Someone reported it was using 60% of their iPhone's battery in the last week. It's repugnant.

I paid for premium every month for at least 5 years. I would have probably even paid a little more to keep using Apollo. Just pure greed running the ship over there.

Why did you pay for premium?

I wanted to support something I liked. They are a business and I figured if I paid the way they were asking to be paid I’d be free to use the service as I pleased (via Apollo).

Yes. I was paying for reddit gold just to avoid seeing ads. I don't understand why they couldn't just have passed this kind of thing on to the end users.

Yep, I would have happily paid for the ability to keep using Sync, just like I happily paid for Sync Ultra. I'm probably not in the majority though

2 more...

Premium’s been a thing for a long time, it used to be Reddit Gold several years ago. It also used to be cheaper, $3.99/mo but it went up multiple years ago.

They might be pushing it hard right now, though. Not sure. Maybe they’re trying to entice the people who were paying for 3PA features to pay Reddit instead or something.

I currently have premium, ad free is the only way Reddit is palatable even before all this went down and I bought it ages ago when I wanted to support a thing I used every day and also have had a couple awards that extended it, it expires in August. I won’t be renewing.

It’s funny because if they did something like require Reddit premium to use 3rd party apps I would understand and honestly just pay it. Now I’m here.

This would have been such a good idea, quite literally a win/win for both reddit and 3rd party apps however that would require Spez to actually be clever and willing to work with others instead of role playing a dollar store version of Logan Roy.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a win for 3rd party apps because it still raises the cost to use them. $9 for Reddit is quite the ask already. 3rd party devs would need payment too and frankly social media ain’t worth anything over $5 to me

This would have been such a good idea, quite literally a win/win for both reddit and 3rd party apps however that would require Spez to actually be clever and willing to work with others instead of roll playing a dollar store version of Logan Roy.

Yeah, I was an original buyer on reddit gold. Then I got 2 years free because of the Alien Blue shutdown, and I never reupped afterward, because it didn’t really add anything to the experience.

And by the looks of it “avatar upgrades” and “Custom app icons” ain’t really providing anything else of value still.

What about using old + an ad blocker?

I just use Firefox with the standard ad blocking extensions and I've never seen an ad on new Reddit.

Yep, except after two or three "pages" of scroll, the new Reddit UI becomes infuriatingly laggy.

The other problem with Reddit premium, have multiple accounts because you want to keep something’s separate? Well you have to pay $50 a year for each account.

Just put it all in one account and take a gamble when you're browsing in public

Which is crap because Reddit knows which accounts are alts because of having the same IP address, device/app ID, etc.

What's so great about r/lounge?

ngl I always assumed that was a placeholder sub without any content, just to sustain the meme that /r/lounge was a thing

Not much that I could tell, I got gold a couple times and it seemed like people there were just the same except "oh it's exclusive" but the memes werent any better.

I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It's mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.

I mean, if they say "you have to pay 3 bucks a month to use 3rd party client" I would be annoyed but I would understand, and I would still be on reddit.

I would have paid $3 a month to use a third party client. I don't want to pay $50 for bulk shit.

Exactly. But they dropped exhorbitant cost on those apps and provided no runway for them to adapt their business model. So instead - I’m here on kbin and likely going to dive into an open source project to try to help get a mobile app for this out soon.

I would have gladly paid for a premium reddit experience, had it provided useful features. 3rd party app access is something I would have totally understood and paid for. RES features integrated, various styles such as old.reddit enshrined and protected, the option to opt in/out of various features, premium access to mod/admin subs that actually get a response, etc.

Instead they offered awards to give out. No value, no purchase.

exactly! so fucked and insidious and greedy that they're trying to weed out competition as well

"The suckers we talked into giving us money for our crazy salaries over the past decade+ want a return on their investment so cough up"

Man, I signed up reddit premium in like April because I wanted to support the site that I'd been using for 13 years. Just two months later, I've got so much regret lol

Reddit got greedy and arrogant. They forgot where their money came from.

I actually -was- paying for premium for over 6 years… canceled now

Same - well, 3 years, but still. I never thought I would long for bland corporate speak, but better than narcissistic incompetence.

I wonder how many Premium subscriptions they lost over this, and whether it's material to their business at all. If so, it could put Steve in hot water. Between losing ad revenue and losing paying members, he seems to be making awful decisions if his goal is to be profitable.

At what point does Reddit's board step in and make Steve go away? I know he is using Elon Musk as his spirit guide, but it's a poor move to suck all the value out of your company before you sell it to investors....

"Pay us and we'll give you all this junk you never wanted in the first place"

I don't want more stuff - I want less of it. That's why I used RiF and that's why I'm now leaving.

Honestly. Avatars? Coins? Awards? I just wanted to stay up to date with the world and have conversations with people about it every once in a while.

Exactly. They have zero awareness of their own product, I doubt they even use it anymore

I tried to look at a reddit link via mobile web browser and it said something really stupid like.. we can't show you this on the web you need to use the app.

Dafuq? Hell no. I guess I'm not looking at it then. Jumped the shark, well and truly.

I've used reddit for a decade and never once did I feel that paying for it would benefit me.

Every time I think they can't go lower, they exceed expectations.

I canceled my premium a few days ago, I guess if they are charging apps millions for API access, why do I need to pay for premium to help Reddit.

I thought they were introducing something new among all this other bullshit but as soon as I saw it I realized that yeah, thats been around awhile.
As a fellow old.reddit user, none of this does me any good. My adblockers are sufficient, half the time I completely forget I have an avatar, and....i have no idea what the rest of that is. So thanks, but no.

As a fellow old.reddit user, you probably also remember when buying/being gifted reddit gold was a big deal. One stupid little gesture, very few actual perks (beyond an "exclusive" subreddit no one used), but the money went straight to reddit and it was so popular it was a staple of reddit's early culture. Being gilded was a massive honor.

Now it's just one of a handful of paid reaction trophies you can give, and it's not worth paying attention to at all. Reddit was so money hungry it cannibalized the process through which people gave money to reddit for basically free

this just reminded me you could also send a post card to get a month of reddit gold too
I think I got gilded twice.
I barely remember that exclusive sub.

Someone gilded one or two of my comments (shitposts), and I felt so grateful to them and so proud of myself that someone thought it was worth spending money to reward a dumb joke I'd made. That stuff makes an impression. But I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a gilded post because it literally doesn't mean anything now

What I hate about those award crap is they basically gave you a paid way to highlight the fuck out of posts with changing the background, making it shoot rockets, or whatever else.

I'm not paying for social media. Unless it's a donation to my server.

Id rather pay for a subscription for a forum site or something. I know echo chambers are dangerous, but sometimes you just need a gated community. Money makes it really easy to keep the lunatics out.

You can't stay anonymous if you use a credit card to pay for social media.

The very same anonymity people use to get away with terrible behavior on free sites. I don't see the downside here.

You can't hurt anyone by saying things online. But you can be hurt if the government does not like what you are saying.

Lunatics also have money.

A site you pay for has incentive to keep you on their site for ads and data collection. One way to do that is to keep serving data you engage with. So, keeping you in a bubble.

Diversity your sources.

I don't really understand this sentiment, I'd rather pay a subscription for a service like fb / insta / reddit than have ads and my identity sold to the highest bidder.

Social networks are expensive to run, the idea they should be "free" is half the problem.

Though of course the enterprises behind them make far more money through advertising and mining user data than they would through a subscription model.

Delusional to think a paid subscription would keep them from selling your identity to the highest bidder. Even if you sued them on GDPR bases they'd gladly take that loss if you somehow won so they could keep abusing you.

It's just another revenue stream to make people feel better about their poor financial decisions.

You will pay a subscription and have ads and your identity sold to the highest bidder.

YouTube has been shown recently to be sliding ads into premium user feeds so I can only expect the same, if not worse, especially from a company so blatantly caught lying.

In the case of Reddit, apparently yes. By which they also spit in the face of their most loyal (paying) customers.

The problem is that selling your data + targeted advertising is always going to be more lucrative than a subscription model. So even if you are willing to pay a subscription, it's usually only a matter of time before the social media company in question changes tack. Especially if they have shareholders and/or venture capital investors breathing down their necks. If you run it like Wikipedia is run, I'm pretty sure you can operate a social media company on subscriptions/donations, but as a business model that doesn't make sense as it is not the least effort way to make the most money.

Yup, agree totally. Only way it can work is if the org running it is a not for profit with great transparency, which hopefully is what we will see with the likes of Lemmy etc.

There is an argument to make that things like reddit or even Facebook (original fb, not what it is now) should be publicly owned services. They CAN provide value to society, similar to how a town hall can.

I have no problem paying an app developer to remove ads.

But I'm not going to pay an organisation that has just hiked it's API prices which means it's now going to be earning a fortune from the likes of Google/Microsoft.

Fuck u/spez

Paying for social media forces you to doxx yourself. It's impossible to pay anonymously.

According to that logic, I'm doxxing myself every time I go to the supermarket.

I doubt you discuss your political opinions in the supermarket.

Paying for social media would allow companies and governments to associate every opinion on the internet with a credit card.

And even if you did discuss those opinions, the only person who would see that discussion are security guards monitoring the camera.

you have grown up in a broken age

I actually -was- paying for premium for over 6 years… canceled now

Who the fuck cares about avatar gear and app icons?!

App icons were a big thing on Apollo. They were however designed by the users and added to the app as a quirky tribute to the community. The difference was that the users were glad to give their money to the dev, because the app you got for free was perfectly usable and awesome.

"exclusive avatar gear" I didn't even know there are avatars on Reddit. I've been using Sync for so long I never knew they added them.

That was the best part of Sync, all the terrible new stuff they tried to push out wasn't visible

One of the reason why they are killing the api's. They cannot push you this shit through them.

That exclusive avatar gear it probably NFT-based, so it can be traded independently of Reddit. (Alhough if you think navigating the Fediverse is hard, try navigating how to transfer and sell those NFTs on a marketplace).

There are certain subs where they have crypto-based community points, like r/cryptocurrency, based on participation. I have posted there, and have been give some of their token, which is inexplicably worth something.

Reddit's foray into crypto has been interesting to watch, and puts me in the position that if I decide to leave Reddit for good, they have given me a severance package. I will be sure to sell every bit of it before leaving, except for one token , which I will carefully monitor to see what Reddit does with community points from deleted accounts.

I think the avatars were somewhat of a cool idea, if it was just a character creator. Not a fucking NFT marketplace

Paying an optional subscription fee is a great idea. It helps pay for servers and personal.

Paying to give special rewards is a horrible idea. The wealthiest can now decide which opinion is best. Everyone wants to reply to the rewarded comments to be more visible for upvotes. It's terrible.

I opened jerboa and this was the top of my feed. I was extremely confused for much longer than I'd like to admit.

I was similarly confused when I saw a screenshot somebody had posted of another post in Jerboa. It was hard to tell where the screenshot ended and the app UI began again.

I think I ought to file a bug report/feature request that a thin border be added around images so they don't take up the whole screen width and you can distinguish them as images better.

I had add free browsing on RIF u mother fuckers.

I kind of understand reddits problem with that part though, if they would have allowed third party apps with Premium, or added a "premium lite" API access tier for like $2 I think this would have gone over better

Charging for the API makes sense. Charging as much as Reddit wants to per API call is ridiculous.

100%. Third party app access requiring premium seems like a fairly reasonable solution of money is the real issue.

Nice idea, but you have forgotten about CORPORATE GREED

Imagin paying for the privilege of generating free content for others to monetize.

What are the devs even doing at reddit, do they even do actual work? The offical app is so shit.

I feel like any software change reddit has made is the last decade just made it a worse experience. It succeeded despite their changes, not because of them imo.

Obviously just speculation, the past week demonstrated that Spez is disorganized and probably contributing to a hostile working environment. Does his recent AMA or interviews give an impression of a leader that would be easy to excel and create with?

He's like a stubborn kid who does what he wants, not what is required to be done.

"He tells it like it is"

Our lead-poisoned parents may have bought into that crap. But we know all that is is stubborn arrogance. And solving problems requires open-minded thinking and chasing the problem, not the messenger/customer/employee.

I think reddit will turn into a authoritarian website, until and unless someone removes these stubborn idiots. But the question is who will remove them?

That's not new, they add this a few years ago after changing "gilded" to multi-tier award, which cost spez-buck, which you can get from either buying it like pay2win game or get this premium, and they will give you some spez-buck each month.

What infuriate me more is they didn't have regional pricing, so reddit premium cost more than youtube premium in my country, which provide better content and all of what i subbed is OG content.

I can't find myself paying monthly for internet regurgitator.

This is the way.

Reddit is so much an American business - screw that. But it's not even doing a proper business model - screwing the stupid Yanks and giving a better deal to people who don't feel the need to 'pay more for quality'.

You know, I bought a HP printer which takes HP cartridges which print out (officially) 1500 pages each, and they cost the equivalent of $8 - but only outside the USA... as an answer (I think) to well organised resistance to the 'maybe 300 pages or less' leading to people buying modified ink-tank cartridges locally made (in Thailand).

My last cartridge (not heavily used) lasted for 5 years before being replaced... so HP gets my money with a smile.

Reddit can go whistle.

I would have happily paid $50 p/year for Apollo. I won’t pay $0.05c for Reddit.

100% agree. It’s so fucked that they are stomping out 3P apps. Even with greed and profit as the only motivation, financially it would have made more sense to charge reasonable API fees than die on this hill. I would happily pay for Apollo if it was necessary to keep it running.

Before finding Lemmy and kbin, if 3P App devs had announced that they were gonna make a Reddit competitor I would have been the first to jump

I'm just shocked at how bad that offer is, 6 dollars a month just for ad free browsing? Damn. All the other "benefits" seem completely worthless to me.

For real. You can literally install UBlock Origin in just a minute or two. Why bother paying $6 for useless features AND to support a crappy company?

Also ReVanced on the official Android app

Yeah Revanced is great. It's the only way I watch YouTube on any android device

I used to be a Reddit premium subscriber, because I used Reddit a lot and I wanted to support them. Silly me.

If Reddit wasn't going downhill I wouldn't mind paying to not see ads - if it helps keep the site running. But 6$/mo is very excessive for what is essentially a forum + link aggregator.

Disney+ for comparison isn't much more expensive and I feel that I get a lot more value out of that, not to mention streaming isn't cheap.

Same although the ads were blocked, apparently a basic feature I use a lot, saving/bookmarking posts, was locked behind premium. That should have been a big red flag lmfao

Baconreader gave me the same functionality after a one time app purchase of like $3.

Wow, it was $29.95 a year. I canceled mine the other day and deleted my accounts today. Fuck Reddit.

I canceled by Premium subscription when they canceled my third party apps.

I didn't think anyone actually paid for that shit, like I thought it was a meme for the longest time.

I was a premium subscriber, simply because I used Reddit a lot, I could financially bear it, and I generally liked how the place was run so I wanted to support them. Now I feel betrayed and my trust is violated, like when your friend borrows money off you and then never pays it back and just laughs in your face for being so naive. So I went from 'I love Reddit' to 'fuck Reddit' in about a month. Impressive achievement.

Same here. On reddit for 17 years, signed on to Premium as soon as they offered it because I believe in supporting good services. I, too, feel betrayed.

Believe it or not there was once a lot of good will towards Reddit.

That's the amazing thing. In about a month Reddit went from a well liked company to hated. I would love see the cross section of premium users used third party clients. Reddit just torched all good will for nothing.

I had a premium subscription for years. For as much as I used to use the site, it felt good to give a little back. Now they'll never see another cent from me.

There's literally nothing enticing in that package.

If they wanted people to pay for API access, why not include that in premium? Though not sure that would have gone much better.

Have been in r/lounge many times. Its crap.

That's always the issue with whales right? They don't make your service any better, they just consume it. So you don't get the network effect that comes from having tons of people making your service great, where a lower barrier of entry is important.

$50/yr and you get... Nothing i care about.

Avatars, coins, app icon im not interested at all. No ads isn't necessary as none ever appear on my feed. Literally zero need for premium. But but you have access to r/lounge! < Wanking gesture>

I don't think coins/gold ever really made money.

Reddit gave a shit ton out to mods to give to inflate the appearance people were buying them to give out. And when you'd receive gold, you got coins to give others gold.

It's like a Ponzi scheme but without money...

I never paid a cent for gold, but had it at least 50% of the time on Reddit.

it's so evident that they're going to pump and dump the hell out of reddit, while some unknowledgeable investors are going to be left holding the bag. every move they make is a superficial show with no teeth. they're trashing reddit while dressing it up in designer clothes. it's blaring.

I don't think the street is that dumb in current year. This isn't 1999 where you could scream OMG LINUX and get a few hundred million. The VC purse strings are tight, the brand has been in decline for a decade, and all the political horse-picking won't help them.

Could they be any more shameless? I know this has been a thing for a while but god they’re desperate. Granted I haven’t seen this yet since I’m riding Apollo for as long as I can

Their social media ads trying to convince advertisers to pay for Reddit ads have grown exponentially. Our company tried running ads on Reddit but the ROAS was so shit we abandoned after a month and reallocated budget back to decent platforms.

I had a premium account on there for many years, often through being awarded "gold" on posts and the rest of the time through just paying for premium because it was worth it to me to remove the ads (without having to use my ad-blocker) and have the other usability tweaks. I cancelled the recurring payment at the start of this API debacle, because I don't need to be supporting a company which does that.

I'm terribly curious how the money which would be brought in by a user maintaining a premium subscription measures up against the money they'd be making forcing the crappy malware official client on that user and showing them ads.

I was listening to the interview with the dev of Apollo on John Gruber’s podcast and they brought up the idea that if Reddit wanted to monetize 3PA users, then force them to get a premium subscription. If all I needed to do was pay $50/year to surf reddit comfortably, I would probably do it in a heartbeat tbh

I would pay $50/year to use Apollo. No question. I wouldn't take $50/year to use their first party App. I would rather just not use Reddit.

Once upon a time, I thought Reddit had the best, least intrusive way of doing ads, since they are essentially just pinned post and you can upvote/downvote and comment on them like any other posts, so the advertiser had to actually try to make good content like anybody else.

But the advertisers don't want even a remotely level playing field, they just want to throw money at reddit to get eyeball on their product, and reddit obliged, thinking the most valuable about reddit to advertisers is the amount of info they can scrape from your profile to personalize your ads, not realizing the most valuable aspect of ads on reddit IS the human aspect of direct community engagement.

Which is one of the reason why TikTok started off so well, because they FORCED companies to make good content for their ads to be seen and engaged with. But now by having the companies close the comments on their ads they are slowing going down the same path as well.

This is a pretty shit deal tbh. Ooohh ad free browsing and some free pngs you can tack onto your avatar or comments.

It sure is convenient that the second they kill third party apps they push a subscription model for ad free service on their ad riddled, barely functioning app...

I canceled my premium a few days ago, I guess if they are charging apps millions for API access, why do I need to pay for premium to help Reddit.

I'm ashamed to admit I'm a former reddit premium member. I canceled my subscription after being a paying member for a number of years the day Spez started his bullshit. I just can't see myself going back. I just need to find an instance for my country that's actually active.

I was a premium member a while ago because I love reddit and wanted to support it + get rid of adds on the mobile app (I use their app) but I cancelled it during the last blackout (I think it was the 2021 one about hate speech).

Meh, why be ashamed? Reddit was well liked until this bullshit started. I am only judging those that are still premium members.

I loved Reddit, and I still love Reddit. I love so many little communities. And although I am persuaded that the fediverse is the future, I would go back in a heartbeat if it managed to regrow a soul. I happily paid for premium back in the day.

what the FUCK are "monthly coins"

Don't answer that, I actually prefer not knowing.

Could they be any more shameless? I know this has been a thing for a while but god they’re desperate. Granted I haven’t seen this yet since I’m riding Apollo for as long as I can

Haha. This is where the Fediverse can take over if people don't take the piss.

Some years ago, my favourite tracker (The Box) went kaput - and I've known many others go down due to various issues - one of which is usually financial strains.

So people can donate - for someone earning 300 a week, it'd be trivial to throw 30 in the pot just one time in a year...

So sure, To be valued by Reddit, you must pay $50 per year - and if you don't, then you're not a customer, you're a commodity. Creators do so because they feel compelled to create and share, Mods do so because they have a personal need to contribute whether they get paid or not.

So the ONLY answer is to say 'Sure, we'll carry on - but it's clear we aren't valued by Reddit - so we'll do it outside'.

Mods don't contribute financially to Reddit, or at least they don't have to. (I'd be less likely to trust a mod who did, actually, but that's me.) Mods are used and abused by Reddit. They provide value/work for which they are not compensated.

1 more...

I'd probably pay the $50/year if it included an API key so I could read with any client I wanted to.

This is disrespectful to mods. I work for free, and Reddit makes money from gfs product? That’s not how capitalism works (anymore/yet).

It is actually capitalism’s favorite way to work

Yeah I have a feeling the capitalism house of cards would tumble if unpaid work was taken off the table completely

Fiduciary responsibility means maximum exploitation in all cases, all of the time.

Capitalism would look really different if it were ever satisfied with some of something, rather than all of it.

You've paid rent to every employer you've ever had in the form of surplus value. Surplus value is just the name for the difference between what your paid, and the actual value of your work.

Businesses call it "profit".

Every capitalist ever is trying to increase surplus value, both by increasing the value of your output, and also by paying you less. In the ideal form, you work for free making them, I don't know, solid gold diamonds or something.

I was actually ok with paying them $50 a year for ad-free before they started de-modding people for protesting. Now they can go fuck themselves. I am sympathetic to their need to be profitable. But effectively taking over subreddits is totally unacceptable and Reddit is no longer Reddit.

noidontthinkso.mp4

Tom. From MySpace. Sweet.

I wonder if Myspace would actually get users again if it became part of the fediverse. I guess it'd become a competitor to Friendica?

I'm not sure, but it's a whole different thing now. Some music profile website or something. All I know, is that my old logon stopped working suddenly, then the site became what it is now.

The funny thing to me is that when Reddit Gold first became a thing, I happily joined because I wanted to help support the platform and help pay for the servers. They used to have a little meter on the sidebar showing how far we've gone towards paying server costs.

Gone are the days when they had enough good will to get away with something like that.

can anybody please tell me why lemmy wont be regulated or commercialized like reddit in the future? which safety rules are installed in the lemmy ecosystem to guarante freedom and democratic rule changes?

Let's imagine you sign up for email service with GMail. You're happy for a while, but then Google announces that they'll be charging per email, or blocking emails sent to France, or displaying all your emails on a ticker in Times Square. You can just up sticks and move to another provider, because while Google owns GMail but they don't own e-mail in general.

Anyone can set up an email server and they don't need to ask Google's permission to do so and even with a home-spun email server you can send and receive message between jibs@whatever.eggs and someoneelse@gmail.com no issue. It probably never occurred to you that email between domains would ever be a problem.

This is because email - like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, BitTorrent and Matrix - is federated: no-one owns the network, because there is literally no network to own, it's just lots of servers that work on established standards. As long as your server, or the server you use, works to the established standards, it'll keep on working.

I would love to be able to move email addresses and usernames to another server, the way we do with phone numbers.

Remember there was a time when changing phone plans meant you have to get a different phone number?

Totes. You can actually do that with Mastodon accounts. It'd be really nice if you could do it with Lemmy accounts - and communities.

I thought mastodon was a fediverse app?

Brain fart. I put "Feddy" instead of Lemmy.

You can. For email, DNS serves a similar purpose to the telcos' mobile number portability databases. If you want to move your email domain to a new server, you just need to update its DNS MX record.

Good points, but we must not relax under the comfortable blanket of "standards", because the Big Boys™ are busily unraveling them.

A prime example is Google's "Chrome" browser, that's weaponized 'web-standards' in the most anti-competitive manner possible. Worse is their bullying of "web standards bodies". This is specifically aimed at neutering Mozilla and independent browser-extension developers who throw up obstacles to their dominance.

Google wants to eliminate the possibility of users avoiding their data-vacuuming, ad- spamming and universal tracking. That's what's behind their endless propaganda about 'speeding up your web experience'.

Once they "succeed", all 'unapproved' extensions, 'users' and browsers will just be "unable to connect" with what used to be the greatest communication and data-sharing system in human history.

Concerned users should become familiar with the politics of "international standards bodies" that affect our ability to use the internet.

Aren't they backing off a bit, getting rid of universal 3rd party ad tracking cookies?

But whatever, Mozilla is definitely more sustainable in the long run, and the degradation of web kit will drive away users in the long run, even casual ones. I switched to Firefox, and I am recommending others do the same.

If an instance of lemmy becomes commercialized, other instances will just defederate it, cutting it off from like 90 percent of users and content

It probably will, but there could be a good few years where it's growing and can get investment as it grows it's user base because it's good. The push for profit will turn into advertising trash eventually.

So they are gonna add blue verification ticks any day now, right?

I miss digg.

I miss Diggnation a little bit more than Digg, but yeah :(

It's back, but not in a particularly recognizable form. Daily digest type site. You can comment, but not submit (as far as I've seen.)

I once signed up for premium when old Reddit had no ads and thought it may keep the site unenshitified

I honestly would have been happy to start paying some money to reddit directly or via a sub to rif. lmfao RIP

This, they could have just said API access now requires premium. I'm sure some people would have been pissed, but not nearly as much as the current situation.

If it was just "Pay $50 per year and continue to use and enjoy any 3PA of your choice", I might have paid rather than jumping ship.

Agreed. RiF was my world. I literally took the news re: API changes worse than when my girlfriend broke up with me (shortly before). My stages of grief have centered more around reddit than her, lol.

Now Reddit have shown they are toxic. And I no longer wish to add value to their platform.

I miss some subs, but honestly this place is FUN. It's so old school! And it's great to see the activity increase daily.

If they'd handled it better, I'd definitely have considered it. Reddit has added a lot of value to my life. But now, after spez has personally insulted the 3pa devs and called the discussion "noise"? Now, you couldn't pay me $500 to make spez even $1 richer.

They did not even bother to center the buttons properly.

old.reddit.com will be the next spez target. Why run it when you can have everyone on the main site.

Look up, libreddit.

AFAIK it will also stop working as soon as the Api costs come into effect.

Wait so are they requiring payment for old Reddit or something?

No. He's redirecting from a protest to a promotion for premium. I'm still using old and haven't spent a dime.

@millions sounds like it. lol here's the shovel spez. lol keep digging buddy. not that reddit was especially great sometimes. but fuck me running I want slap the living shit out of both you motherfuckers. 10million or something socially inept assholes having a god dam meltdown because of a fucking app, get the fuck over yourselves, book a hotel room get shitfaced and stoned into next centery then go at it like a fucking rabbit. playing dumb, dumber, then car wreck with trucks and dick fucking over inocent users? thats the defination of immature ass fart.

@Cinner

No, old Reddit is still working for me. Might be something r/pics came up with as a protest move. Right now they've reopened but are only approving posts of sexy John Oliver.

Damn. must resist urge to return to r*ddit to see pics of sexy John Oliver.

At this point they will have to pry my money from my cold dead hands.

So what? I can open my sub and put Nancy Pelosi's ass on it.

It all depends on your sense of humor.

No one forces you to pay, ads are easily blocked.

Your acrimonious talk is happening because you realize that Steve Huffman is acting legitimately, but not the way you want him to.

And that no one is going to ask you in this argument.

Maybe 50% of the subs closed, but 50% stayed.

And you're left in a half-empty Lemmy and jerking off to the fall of Reddit.🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I like that you posted a John Oliver puppy for upvotes since this hot take was so heavily downvoted.

Seems someone wants to have their cake and eat it too.

Fuck off spez.

For what it's worth I really enjoyed Lemmy a lot more than reddit for the first 1-4 days. Now it's filled with a lot more people and the comments went from insightful paragraphs to meme-y 1-liners, but that's not something a magazine purge can't fix.

I'll be honest with you. I don't care about mass upvotes and mass downvotes. These are the weapons of pimply emo leftists, not adults.

good thing you are above all that.

No one forces you to pay, ads are easily blocked.

i love the no one forces you to ... argument, because you can always say it and it never means anything...

Your acrimonious talk is happening because you realize that Steve Huffman is acting legitimately, but not the way you want him to.

before you say it: no, he is also not forced to do anything, but maybe think about the difference between lawful, legitimate and the way someone wants someone else to act. nobody says he's not acting lawfully, legitimacy is dependant on your objectivity and i don't care if he acts the way someone wants him to.

And that no one is going to ask you in this argument.

this was no argument until you acted the way you did ;)

Maybe 50% of the subs closed, but 50% stayed.

that makes the price all the more ridiculous.

And you’re left in a half-empty Lemmy and jerking off to the fall of Reddit.🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

ya so what? you seem to be here to...

I won't even respond to your juggling with my words. I'm lazy. You'll start taking my phrases out of context again and the discussion will devolve into an empty argument. Surely your parents didn't let you use the internet (if you were born then) when Google turned off all third party apps from the popular Google Talk back then. You probably don't remember when Facebook and WhatsApp did the same thing. All social networks and messengers are going through this kind of production optimization and no one is making a big deal out of it. And in conclusion: I used fediverse when it was not yet mainstream. And now I have to admire the yelling of Reddit refugees.