What I don't get is who they're posturing for now.
They showed the developers that the game was fixed and there was no plan to negotiate in good faith.
They've shown the userbase they aren't responsive to strongly held concerns.
They've shown a potential IPO audience that they're capable of burning down the platform in record time and not even waiting until after they cashed out to do so.
They've shown everyone they don't even have the most basic understanding of corporate bullshit speak. It's not hard to put together "We hear your concerns and will assemble a committee of top minds who will proceed to ignore these concerns."
I guess they just want to say they didn't back down. That and $12.50 gets you a cup of coffee.
It's not that you're charging for API access; it's that you're charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
I'm so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
This kind of protest is meaningless, going back online after 48 hours? It's just a way for communities to feel good about themselves. The best way to protest is to delete the account / subreddit going offline indefinitely (although I doubt the effectiveness of this)
Agreed, but it's 48 hours later, and it seems like more and more subreddits have decided to continue protesting indefinitely, which I'm really happy to see. I too have no clue how effective it'll be, but it's showing a much clearer message.
From how I understood it (I could be wrong), the initial blackout was planned for june 30th when the API changes come into effect, and the current (previous?) protest was due to Spez's AskReddit responses. Basically, this was the warning, the 30th is the big one.
The blackout is a way to engage in a way that makes things inconvenient for people not informed about the issue so that awareness is generated. Like picketting the mayor's office or blocking a public intersection.
Say whatever you want about spez, he is the best thing that ever happened to Lemmy.
EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!
Funny how Reddit's peak happened to be during the time their two "co-founders" had nothing to do with the site itself.
WE should blackout for longer, i own a very small subreddit, but 2 days is not enough!! im not backing down tomorrow, i ask over subs do the same. lets stick it to reddit
We should move. Even if we did a longer blackout, the admins can just replace the mods of the bigger subs and ignore the smaller ones. Even if the blackout is effective, they will pull something like this again.
I've lost trust in them. I'm not going back except maybe for information if I really need to.
I've decided I'm done. A complete and utter about face doesn't feel like it would be enough at this point. At some point a relationship/reputation becomes damaged beyond repair.
I won't go back, with all the changes in the last few years. Reddit isn't moving in a direction I like.
It should have been indefinitely.
Is anyone surprised? The "blackout" seems to have been a total flop most subs don't give a shit.
The blackout helped me to leave.
It's difficult to rewire a dopamine pathway you've been traveling for 14 years.
Knowing that other people care enough to abstain for two days is useful in that process.
I never expected Reddit to change their policy. I have been surprised at how petulant, dishonest and unprofessional they've been. I would have expected a bland corporate response.
Anyway, onward and upward.
onward, and onto the next dopamine pathway.
Same. Not sure I would have ever heard of Lemmy otherwise.
100% same.
I wouldn't say it was a flop. A massive number of subs and users are participating at the moment (some forced due to the blackouts). But I do agree that reddit executives definitely don't give a shit, and will eventually just start booting mods to bring the subs back if they don't fall in line.
Not surprised, still disappointed. Will discuss with other mods the idea of nuking our community as a "fuck you" to Reddit.
Do it. For the lulz. For great justice. Move every zig.
I think it's more important to bring the subs over here to convince people to migrate
7750/8300 subreddits are blacked out. Plus the server issues caused by the blackout yesterday. I’d be interested to see if an indefinite strike could be powerful enough to reverse this plan
Wow, that’s way higher than I expected. I hope just as many people transfer over to nee platforms so we can get those communities restarted.
Reddit has MANY more than 8300 subreddits. That 8300 is the number of subreddits who SAID they would shutdown.
It was never going to do more than get people talking, the number of subreddits isn't as important as what the long term impact to users and quality will be.
They have signaled their interests are not user centric, it wont be the last outrage I'm sure but they'll keep getting away with it if there isn't a clear alternative and people keep going back.
That's true. The changes don't really effect me in any immediate way, but the blackout gave me a reason to uninstall Reddit for a few days and try Lemmy.
Thanks Satan.
My Google searches are in SHAMBLES rn
Blocking mobile web access and ending old reddit is going to bring more people here over time.
What absolutely bends my mind is there's still confused people wandering into the blackout threads with absolutely no clue what's going on. How is this info not reaching these people?
Yeah if they were serious, they'd go dark for good
8479/8838 subreddits are private as of this comment.
The number on the page is a bit misleading. If you comb through the website's code on GitHub, you'll see that the 8,838 is actually the number of subreddits that agreed to participate in the blackout.
Calling it a flop isn't accurate either, though.
Sure, most subreddits don't care, but the largest and most active subreddits are overwhelmingly in support of the blackout, but they are also much more affected by Reddit's changes than smaller subreddits.
EDIT: Some words for clarity.
Reddit has more than 100k active subreddits lol. Also, this number doesn't mean much because community sizes vary a LOT
simplify so they can lay off mods and let ai go on autopilot. like an automatic cow milker.
This will be funny how bad it'll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.
Then come the AI bots who comment...
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
Unfortunately they aren't since the ones who cared couldn't be bothered for more than two days.
The death of Reddit will be a slow bleeding process. Expect waves. Not floods.
I think it will be more like the tide moving out slowly ... no one will really notice and the CEO and owners will keep telling everyone everything will be fine even as their ship sits beached on a sandbar and the water will never return.
It started out great at the times of Aaron Swartz, but just as with people, cancer sometimes hits. Anyway, it influenced projects like lemmy for which I'm thankful.
Yes I'm aware of the history. The only way to kill cancer is excise it. Lemmy realistically can't take a full migration from Reddit but that needs to change. I too am super grateful. Part of me wonders if this platform could end the same way but given it's decentralised nature, I highly doubt it. Reddit was open source once. I really want this to succeed. Seize the means of communication.
Open source and decentralized are two different things, as long as it's just a bunch of independent server instances which are small enough each to handle the traffic load you can't really buy that out.
I don't need reddit. Reddit doesn't generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
Yeah its weird that people keep talking about "Reddit's content" when they haven't created shit. At least Slashdot has always said "These comments are owned by whoever wrote them"
Not that slashdot hasn't become crap, but it's something.
At least Slashdot has always said “These comments are owned by whoever wrote them”
The same sort of thing is in the Reddit terms of service. They don't want to own the possibly-offensive, maybe-even-illegal speech that people post there. They just require as a term of service that they receive a perpetual license to do whatever they want with it.
Free Reddit silver and a kick in the nuts.
And some ugly-ass NFT snoo abomination
I find it funny that a 3rd party app can be "profitable" but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase.
Reddit has increasingly become a cesspit of racism and bigotry anyways, and I find Im going there less and less.
I need to get used to how lemmy works and find my 3d printing people here.
but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase
Do those API prices make Reddit profitable? I highly doubt it.
I'd never repeat their claims as if they were true. It's just bullshit reasoning. Mismanagement.
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
r/Canada was taken over by alt-right a long time ago. r/OnGuardForThee had to be made in response to that. I feel like Reddit in general is going that direction. The sheer volume of bot activity on most major subreddits is insane.
Yes I went there for a peek and it's so angry. Compared to the positive vibe here, reddit felt oppressive. I'm not going back. Let it simmer and boil. I love this place.
It's so refreshing at lemmy. Such a positive vibe. Like the internet was before it all became centralised. Lemmy is the real Web 3.
So its like Twitter?
Well, that demographic is always great for their advertiser acquisition goal
Right? Nothing like a festering pile of bigotry & ignorance to get the advertisers signing up.
You joke but it’s not exactly wrong.
People like that love to buy dumb shit. After a time Reddit will be nothing but my pillow, t shirt companies, colonial penn life insurance, and reverse mortgage ads.
True, but they're not exactly swimming in disposable income, usually. Trump's base is mostly non-college-educated whites. Not exactly a rich vein to mine.
True, but that’s the same base for the mega churches, and those fucks aren’t hurting for private jets.
Trump raises a few million bucks every time he tells his supporters to donate. A LOT of companies want in on that
"Money rules everything around me" -The CEO of Reddit
Except according to him his website isnt even making any.... after like 20 years online.
Too bad higher prices doesn't necessarily mean more money.
M.R.E.A.M. get the money!
"we're going dark for two days!" isn't going to change anything. reddit mods live for reddit. Why would they leave?
"Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded."
Really, though. What's the point of contributing to a thread that already has hundreds of top level posts. Something new and fresh is worth a try.
It changed something for me. Sure I might have changed sooner or later anyway but the 48 hours created awareness and provided a moment of time in which to look into alternatives.
Well Steve, it's not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you'll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that'll be leaving.
Yeap. I'm also not working for free anymore.
I stopped modding seriously long ago the moment I realized the community was getting too big and that the it is basically unpaid labour.
This means nothing to that lost CEO I started my sub over here but didn't come closer to the numbers on Reddit. I really don't know what to do now
You'll have to wait. Reddit took a long time to get to where it is now. Lemmy can get there too, but it won't be overnight.
Yea. I'm getting some good engagement right now in my community but. Yea we gotta wait!
They're too cheap. I'm sure they'll just replace you guys with less effective and active mods while the site just slowly smolders into a shadow of its former self.
Besides being too cheap, it's honestly not even practical. There are about 21,000 active mods on any given day. Replacing even half of that number would increase their current staffing of ~700 by 15 fold which doesn't seem likely given they just laid off 90 of them. That doesn't even touch on the fact that those moderators would know nothing about the subs they're now supposed to be taking care of.
Nah, you're totally right, this is the beginning of the end. The blackout might not do anything short term but they're certainly going to shed enough mods that quality will slip. Once that happens people will be looking for alternatives and Reddit will end up on the scrap heap of "used to be great" like so many that came before.
That fuck talks about the data as if he was responsible in creating any of it. It's the users and users should seriously leave reddit and delete their data en masse.
He used to mod jailbait maybe he made some of that content
Probably still does and worse on a hard drive somewhere
Exactly what I did. I’ll find other sources as they pop up. Too much time wasted filtering the bickering away from the few reliables
Yes, this made me to seriously work on switching to Lemmy.
The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
Yeah okay
Kill other apps before yours is on par (will it ever happen) isn't improving the product.
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Been for for 10 minutes. Really like it so far. Really gives me the vibe of the early 2000s internet (in a good way)
This right here.
Of course they aren't going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.
My expectation... Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a "we did everything we could" and then go back, business as usual.
I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.
I think you're probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don't see another viable alternative.
But I'm hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.
Perfectly valid reason to do so, everyone needs a place to recover. Those who need reddit as a lifeline shouldn't lose that. Be well friend!
I relate to this, I am in a number of support groups on Reddit. I ended up just making the knitting community here because I didn't know what I was doing and now I'm a mod. I really want to set up a c/stopdrinking community here but that's a mod role I am not willing to take on.
I think there is a huge difference from going to a specific sub that doesn't have equivalents and just browsing aimlessly. The aimlessly browsing is where they get the real juicy user data on what people engage with.
Fuck em.
This is me. If I can’t use Apollo or Narehal, Reddit is dead to me except when web search sends me to a Reddit thread.
I’m team Apollo. When Apollo goes I’ll go.
It’s Lemmy for me from now on!
It’s been a good 10 years with Reddit but it’s time to be the bigger person and step away from toxicity.
I feel so bad for Christian. He's been an absolute role model in handling this—calm demeanor, transparent communication and willingness to compromise (which Reddit obviously doesn't have).
He's put so much work into Apollo and stayed composed so far during the shutdown process. What scares me for him is the risk of refunds now: whoever subscribed to a premium tier can have the purchase refunded since he won't be able to provide the service. I hope not too many will go the refund route.
A lot of people claim that they bought the premium tier even after the announcement in API changes to support him, despite 3P apps shutting down in 3 weeks. I feel like most users will be supportive and not refund, myself included (Sync pro)
I second that. Poor Christian. What an absolute chad!
And that's why this is my first comment on lemmy! Just in case Reddit eats itself.
Aye, welcome! I’m still figuring things out myself. Mostly hoping the iOS client Mlem can find its footing because the whole Lemmy experience feels incomplete at the moment, but this all still feels like I’m on the ground floor of something potentially great.
Huffman says the blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”
lol it's hard to do that when you aren't making any money, Steve.
Glad to know we're just 'noise', lol.
One minute our content (through the API) is "very valuable" and "needs to be monetized". The next we're just "noise".
If you can't be monetized, you're just noise. They don't see their community as people, they see them as data to be harvested and eyes to be advertised to.
This is the exact message that was sent, and it's sickening
Dam this makes my blood boil. My sub went dark for no reason!!
There's a stupid question I have (c/NoStupidQuestions?)
What do mods gain from reopening the subs after two days, even if demands are not met? Are they gaining money or something? Perhaps the bigger ones.
Its hard to abandon a community that you’ve spent years cultivating. No money involved at all, just emotional baggage really.
Always be willing to walk away, or you are working for free for somebody else's profit. If it isn't fun, quit.
Mostly I think it started as a show of how much reddit relies on the free labor while giving reddit an out, but as time goes on I'm inclined to believe it's also because mods know that if they "abandon" the subreddit, the admins will just open the subreddit up to new moderators a la r/redditrequest
There are already subs that have had users request being put on as mod despite barely becoming inactive.
Power is addictive. At least for some people.
Valid question. Hate to say this, but if most subs reopen after 2 days, we're essentially handing reddit bosses an easy win. It's like protesting with no terms, and instead merely creating a brief storm that'll pass and quickly be forgotten. Might as well throw eggs at a tank with that thinking.
The only way this protest works, is if subs stay dark with no deadline, and terms that must be met to end the standoff. That's how these things work. That's how it's always worked.
Some subs have already decided to go indefinite. They are coordinating in r/ModCoord.
It'll be interesting to see how it goes, I know one of the subs that I visit has opened it up to a vote on their community on whether to go indefinite or not (or just restrict). For effectiveness it needs the big subs and the bulk of subs to keep it up I reckon.
They absolutely detest their userbase :(
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It's their own fault. They didn't have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn't have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I'm really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There's this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can't just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren't. The scale of the two businesses is not the same... none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn't need these thousands of employees, they're already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that's way too open and won't turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
they are doing things like launching Avatars, NFT's, and other ways to try and cash in for a quick buck.
As someone who's 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there's definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there's too many people who don't seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I'm getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
I would have accepted it.. Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.
THIS!
Here's your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
What a jerk
Yeah, at this point. All these big tech companies are succumbing to their greed.
Good that FOSS are being made to be the shelter for this wasteland that is big tech.
I'll be interested to see if they try to keep the money happy by trying to kill porn on reddit.
If they try that reddit would be in worse shape than Trump.
Worked out so great for Tumblr. But apparently the plan is to take all the worst ideas from the past couple years and speedrun 'em, so I wouldn't be surprised.
I really can't wait to see what's the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
The real fallout will be seeing what the numbers look like after July 1st. When all the third party users are given the unavoidable choice to switch to the official app or not. If engagement goes down then and stay lower, it’s ogre for Reddit.
Yeah it's gonna be quite an interesting event. Most of reddit's newer userbase doesn't seem to care, but then again the mods of major subreddits do.
Mods can be replaced. Remember r/TheDonald? Not that I have -any- sympathy at all for those trogs, but the admin dealt with them by deleting all the mods and appointing new ones that would toe the line. There's nothing to stop them from using that playbook again. A lot of people will leave, but a lot of people will shrug and go back to posting cat pictures.
Really curious to see how long the more popular subreddits will remain private. Surely the admin won't just turn them public again without having any mods, right? I kinda would love to see that dumpster fire.
They will try to recruit new mods from the subscribers or find them elsewhere. I agree it's going to be ugly and prolonged and will likely lead to a painful death of the communities.
Yeah, this sounds like the reddit I've come to know 😒
Reddit & Twitter going crazy only few months appart, and with this attitude they deserve to vanish in trashbin of internet history
I just want to point out that the article is dated 9 June, so before the actual blackout. Maybe they have changed their mind seeing the actual data
Yeah this is taken from the AMA, which was a waste of time for everyone
I was so repulsed by that AMA, what a joke. It really solidified my decision to look elsewhere. Reddit just is not Reddit anymore. Gone is that entity that lives on only in my memories. As with many things past, present and future, money tends to ruin it all for us.
somebody else pointed this out, but it's honestly bizarre he's going in on the "we aren't making any money" ploy in preparation for the ipo
what's the pitch to the investors? "please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase"?
"We're not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds."
Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.
This is exactly why I don’t like traditional social media. Doom scrolling + validation fishing + content designed to illicit a response (good or bad), is a no for me fam. Reddit desperately wants to be one of those, and it’s clear as day, and for that reason, I’m out.
In Reddit's defense (I'm team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable.
It's weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he's had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it's clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.
Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would've made more off those users than if they'd moved to the official app.
Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.
The reason Reddit doesn't want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.
Well at least they'll be more "profitable" with so many less users coming to the site and using third party apps.
Glad I've found Lemmy.
What a clown show. Glad I'm gone.
Shame they killed it like this, but fuck 'm! First comment on Lemmy 👌
"We are not profitable"
Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.
Also not a great thing for the CEO to say right before their IPO.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, "yeah, this is fine."
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It's still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we're going black for two days. They should've just says "were going black until you cange the rules again".
Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.
Reddit's traffic might not recover for a while.
Of course it's up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it's any other day. If I wouldn't have known subreddits went private (and they didn't sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I'll just see posts from subreddits who don't participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.
The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It's not easy and I think Reddit knows it.
Is this for real? I wonder if different people's r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There's like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I've never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.
I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there's indeed not much going on.
Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what's going on.
Loading full web pages takes more server processing power than API access.
This is browser and RIF just seems weird because blackout should mean less user load.
There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.
Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that's currently dark so I can't give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.
This makes sense to me. I was wondering how many were active, engaged communities and how many were shells or ghost towns.
I never expected them to change their mind, they know what they want and they know what sort of people they want on their platform and frankly it is not us.
Plenty of people including me are very glad about being pushed in a more fedi direction, and genuinely enjoy it here. Probably most of those people are older like me and feel very much at home with a bit of jank, with Mastodon's topic-based following system, etc etc. Because that's what the internet was like when we were first exploring it. We will 100% stick around.
For younger or less techy people though, the only thing that really gets them to use services is how easy it is. And that's fine too. We can have our own corner of the internet here to be dorks in, and they can have their own corner over there, and we can all still be friends just...you know...from a distance.
I'm really enjoying Lemmy's forum-focused platform, since it does feel like the old internet again, where I would actually want to engage in topics, rather than scroll through a hundred images and immediately forget most of it
I never really knew how much existed on the internet until around 2014, so I never got to experience things like IRC and small, engaging, and enthusiastic communities in their prime. I really hope Lemmy and the whole of fediverse takes off, cause I'm really enjoying it here.
And even then back in 2014 the discussions were so much more organic, I still remember a specially niche forum back then brimming with activity. It is alive and well but the userbase is reduced to a tenth of what it used to be. Fediverse platforms seem to be a return to form since corporate influence has been stripped away from them.
the discussions were so much more organic
Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I really just lurked on reddit and never commented. For every post that showed up in top/hot sorting, I already knew what the top 10 comments would be before I even clicked. And it's not even like echo chamber type comments, but more just the same old reddit-isms that would get used over and over again. Like every "discussion" is basically a race to see who can be the first to say the thing, and somehow those comments always end up getting the most upvotes. I've already seen a few getting used here on Lemmy. Hopefully the community will learn to stop encouraging that kind of behavior.
And the pun threads, ugh. I don't hate all puns, but reddit users weaponized them.
As an “older” person, not afraid of the jank, I LOVE this view and subscribe to it whole heartedly!
Those of us with a few years behind us have made countless social media transitions already, it's a bit jarring at first but it's not the end of the world.
It's going to be an uphill battle and maybe even a siege. It's going to mean these sub-reddits are going to have to be dark for the foreseeable future if they want to make it painful for Spez and team.
I have officially migrated here from reddit, after nearly 15 years over there. This is my 1st comment and the 1st post I've viewed.
For me, it's irrelevant whether or not my decision makes a discernable impact; I simply won't support them with my traffic and won't settle for the default app. No 3rd party apps simply equates to no reddit for me.
And even if they walked back their decision regarding their API, I still wouldn't return unless there was a change in management.
I don't think reddit will walk back their decision, and I don't think they'll be going anywhere either. But I think this is a tipping point in reddit's quality as a site/community. Analogously to russia's brain drain, I believe we will see that the core of the redditors who are leaving are made up of redditors who promote a healthy functioning site/communities.
I was a very core member of several subreddits and did some moderation, but also contributed to reporting content, etc. that most users neglect, but are integral to limiting spam, trolls, and hate. It's not the users shitposting on r/funny or r/gaming that are going to leave. It's the long-time users who have been propping up this paper tiger.
If enough mods and healthy community members leave, reddit is going to devolve into a cesspool. Reddit will be hard off if they lose the free labor of mods that have propped up their site for years.
It will be more like a downhill slide for them. Without third party apps how are mods going to moderate? There will be so much more spam, trolls, and scams, the already tenuous experience will become even worse.
If they stick with these changes they're already dead, they're just living on borrowed time.
Good, I hope it crashes and burns. They forgot their origins.
Had the subs gone off for longer (2 weeks) or indefinitely, the risk of Google bots dropping links may have shaken things up more. Personally, I don’t see Reddit going anywhere. There frankly is not enough backing for a sustained enough period of time. Reddit knows tomorrow subs who joined for 2 days will re-open.
Once I got Lemmy working on mobile I just deleted my reddit account straight up, a two day protest was always a stupid move. The only way to get their attention is permanently stopping the use of the platform.
Unfortunately in order to actually make a dent in anything under capitalism you simply can't partake of it at all.
I deleted my Reddit account as well. People deleting 10-year-plus accounts will make a larger statement than a couple of days of silent subs.
Reddit has control over granting mod access to new people for rebellious subs. It doesn't have control over my use or non-use of the platform.
Hopefully if there is no reaction from spez, a more severe protest will follow.
Also, I think the people who stay after the blackouts are the ones Reddit wants: the ones least likely to care about being subjected to ads and hostile UI. The ones least likely to leave or protest. The ones with least critical thinking. The ones consuming the most trivial content and guerrilla marketing. The holy grail of any money-hungry social network.
That's true, they're filtering out the people they can't bully around. Smaller population of users but you can be relatively certain about their behavior.
It's like when a scammer intentionally misspells things so that people who are more aware are filtered out off the bat.
no wonder since most of the subs are only going offline for 2 days
I couldn't be the only one who found 2 days to be a ridiculously low time as well.
It's long enough to show impact and short enough that reddit will catch flak for replacing the mod teams.
It also lines up with the media attention span. On day 5 "reddit lost users during the blackout" will be a better headline than "blackout still going on fyi".
Yeah its weird that it's only two days, but also many are going private forever (though reddit will just replace the mods unfortunately)
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn't some money better than no money?
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.
This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they're working on.
they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.
Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.
You gotta respect the dedication on some level
The thing is I don't, though. Besides, what's to respect? He's just a corporate front-man and the board and the money-men have his balls in a vice. He'll say what they tell him to or they'll take turns on the handle.
I respect him doing what’s really best for our society and killing the animal Reddit has become
Critical support for comrade spez in his struggle against Reddit!
spez was a hero...I just couldn't see it
I'm sticking with lemmy then
Spez personally banned me for harasent because I reported a child porn seller
Well, Spez was a mod of /r/jailbait before advertisers made them take it down....
Wait, really? Not that I'm actually surprised but it's almost to perfect...
So it turns out the only sources of the claim I've found are memes, so it might not actually be true (though sources are a lot harder to find with 95% of Reddit down).
Even if the claim is fake, I'd prefere to live in blissful ignorance :D
I can see subs being dark becoming a permanent thing, hopefully coders update reddit to html updater or similar tools to pull from archived zsv files.
Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.
The irony is reddit was that alternative to Digg.
You'd think Huffman would have the wherewithal to realize that no king rules forever.
He's too into himself to think people would leave... Yet here we are... Over here and not there
wow, what a crazy way to see it, but at the end of the day it's true.
There is literally no new information in this article and the title implies that it is in response to the acutal blackout, and not the threat of one. Bad article.
Thanks for saving my time
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let's gooooo lemmy!
I think for me it was just the one last thing that pushed me over the edge. The content was starting to get meh and the bots were 👎
Like I said a few other places, even if Lemmy only grows to be 1% of the size, I honestly like the small community vibe of it more than Reddit. More direct interactions.
Captain of the Titanic: "we're sticking to our course, despite the iceberg being dead ahead"
Funny thing if they had done that and the iceberg hit frontally like the engineers planned for it would probably not have sunken the ship.
What the engineers didn't foresee was an iceberg strafing the side and cutting open too many sections for the ship to stay afloat.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Oh, I fucking hate CEO's.
I'm so glad they're unwavering in their commitment to foster growth of the fediverse!
Just shows how much reddit cares about it's users.
First comment here. Sad to Reddit go but also it's their own fault for pushing me away
Already having a fantastic time on the fediverse. Fuck em!
I'm literally so excited to be here. Feels like we're a part of a big shift in the future of social media.
It is actually kind of exciting. A lot of people have already jumped ship, and this has a good user experience.
I wonder if advice posts will start appearing in search results.
The disrespect that the average person gets from corporations these days is fucking unbelievable. This current thing with reddit is something especially BS. ALL of the work in the various subreddits were done by the community, supported by third-party apps ALSO built by the community.
Then the next thing to so is mass delete your posts and comments and then the account. Scorched earth and all that jazz
I think at this point Reddit just wings all their decisions. They’re too deep into the embarrassment, they could never redeem themselves.
Because they know that ultimately the layuser will stay on reddit. Super sad to see, but maybe if subreddits like r/movies stay dark indefinitely it may push them to make at least some changes to their current stance.
If not and they just swap moderators, the outcry might be pretty bad.
The people using third-party apps won't be able to stay on Reddit. Not without substantially changing their habits. We're not fighting against the status quo here; the status quo is already dead and it's just a question of what emerges in its place.
Hey Lemmy gang. Just signed up after seeing this.
What I don't get is who they're posturing for now.
They showed the developers that the game was fixed and there was no plan to negotiate in good faith.
They've shown the userbase they aren't responsive to strongly held concerns.
They've shown a potential IPO audience that they're capable of burning down the platform in record time and not even waiting until after they cashed out to do so.
They've shown everyone they don't even have the most basic understanding of corporate bullshit speak. It's not hard to put together "We hear your concerns and will assemble a committee of top minds who will proceed to ignore these concerns."
I guess they just want to say they didn't back down. That and $12.50 gets you a cup of coffee.
It's not that you're charging for API access; it's that you're charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
I'm so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
This kind of protest is meaningless, going back online after 48 hours? It's just a way for communities to feel good about themselves. The best way to protest is to delete the account / subreddit going offline indefinitely (although I doubt the effectiveness of this)
Agreed, but it's 48 hours later, and it seems like more and more subreddits have decided to continue protesting indefinitely, which I'm really happy to see. I too have no clue how effective it'll be, but it's showing a much clearer message.
From how I understood it (I could be wrong), the initial blackout was planned for june 30th when the API changes come into effect, and the current (previous?) protest was due to Spez's AskReddit responses. Basically, this was the warning, the 30th is the big one.
The blackout is a way to engage in a way that makes things inconvenient for people not informed about the issue so that awareness is generated. Like picketting the mayor's office or blocking a public intersection.
Say whatever you want about spez, he is the best thing that ever happened to Lemmy.
EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!
Funny how Reddit's peak happened to be during the time their two "co-founders" had nothing to do with the site itself.
WE should blackout for longer, i own a very small subreddit, but 2 days is not enough!! im not backing down tomorrow, i ask over subs do the same. lets stick it to reddit
We should move. Even if we did a longer blackout, the admins can just replace the mods of the bigger subs and ignore the smaller ones. Even if the blackout is effective, they will pull something like this again.
I've lost trust in them. I'm not going back except maybe for information if I really need to.
I've decided I'm done. A complete and utter about face doesn't feel like it would be enough at this point. At some point a relationship/reputation becomes damaged beyond repair.
I won't go back, with all the changes in the last few years. Reddit isn't moving in a direction I like.
It should have been indefinitely.
Is anyone surprised? The "blackout" seems to have been a total flop most subs don't give a shit.
The blackout helped me to leave.
It's difficult to rewire a dopamine pathway you've been traveling for 14 years.
Knowing that other people care enough to abstain for two days is useful in that process.
I never expected Reddit to change their policy. I have been surprised at how petulant, dishonest and unprofessional they've been. I would have expected a bland corporate response.
Anyway, onward and upward.
onward, and onto the next dopamine pathway.
Same. Not sure I would have ever heard of Lemmy otherwise.
100% same.
I wouldn't say it was a flop. A massive number of subs and users are participating at the moment (some forced due to the blackouts). But I do agree that reddit executives definitely don't give a shit, and will eventually just start booting mods to bring the subs back if they don't fall in line.
Not surprised, still disappointed. Will discuss with other mods the idea of nuking our community as a "fuck you" to Reddit.
Do it. For the lulz. For great justice. Move every zig.
I think it's more important to bring the subs over here to convince people to migrate
7750/8300 subreddits are blacked out. Plus the server issues caused by the blackout yesterday. I’d be interested to see if an indefinite strike could be powerful enough to reverse this plan
Wow, that’s way higher than I expected. I hope just as many people transfer over to nee platforms so we can get those communities restarted.
Reddit has MANY more than 8300 subreddits. That 8300 is the number of subreddits who SAID they would shutdown.
It was never going to do more than get people talking, the number of subreddits isn't as important as what the long term impact to users and quality will be. They have signaled their interests are not user centric, it wont be the last outrage I'm sure but they'll keep getting away with it if there isn't a clear alternative and people keep going back.
That's true. The changes don't really effect me in any immediate way, but the blackout gave me a reason to uninstall Reddit for a few days and try Lemmy.
Thanks Satan.
My Google searches are in SHAMBLES rn
Blocking mobile web access and ending old reddit is going to bring more people here over time.
What absolutely bends my mind is there's still confused people wandering into the blackout threads with absolutely no clue what's going on. How is this info not reaching these people?
Yeah if they were serious, they'd go dark for good
Do you have any numbers?
https://reddark.untone.uk/
8479/8838 subreddits are private as of this comment.
The number on the page is a bit misleading. If you comb through the website's code on GitHub, you'll see that the 8,838 is actually the number of subreddits that agreed to participate in the blackout.
Calling it a flop isn't accurate either, though.
Sure, most subreddits don't care, but the largest and most active subreddits are overwhelmingly in support of the blackout, but they are also much more affected by Reddit's changes than smaller subreddits.
EDIT: Some words for clarity.
Reddit has more than 100k active subreddits lol. Also, this number doesn't mean much because community sizes vary a LOT
simplify so they can lay off mods and let ai go on autopilot. like an automatic cow milker.
This will be funny how bad it'll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.
Then come the AI bots who comment...
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
Unfortunately they aren't since the ones who cared couldn't be bothered for more than two days.
The death of Reddit will be a slow bleeding process. Expect waves. Not floods.
I think it will be more like the tide moving out slowly ... no one will really notice and the CEO and owners will keep telling everyone everything will be fine even as their ship sits beached on a sandbar and the water will never return.
It started out great at the times of Aaron Swartz, but just as with people, cancer sometimes hits. Anyway, it influenced projects like lemmy for which I'm thankful.
Yes I'm aware of the history. The only way to kill cancer is excise it. Lemmy realistically can't take a full migration from Reddit but that needs to change. I too am super grateful. Part of me wonders if this platform could end the same way but given it's decentralised nature, I highly doubt it. Reddit was open source once. I really want this to succeed. Seize the means of communication.
Open source and decentralized are two different things, as long as it's just a bunch of independent server instances which are small enough each to handle the traffic load you can't really buy that out.
The question is if it'll take off, more or less.
It already has.
I don't need reddit. Reddit doesn't generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
Yeah its weird that people keep talking about "Reddit's content" when they haven't created shit. At least Slashdot has always said "These comments are owned by whoever wrote them"
Not that slashdot hasn't become crap, but it's something.
The same sort of thing is in the Reddit terms of service. They don't want to own the possibly-offensive, maybe-even-illegal speech that people post there. They just require as a term of service that they receive a perpetual license to do whatever they want with it.
Free Reddit silver and a kick in the nuts.
And some ugly-ass NFT snoo abomination
I find it funny that a 3rd party app can be "profitable" but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase.
Reddit has increasingly become a cesspit of racism and bigotry anyways, and I find Im going there less and less.
I need to get used to how lemmy works and find my 3d printing people here.
Do those API prices make Reddit profitable? I highly doubt it.
I'd never repeat their claims as if they were true. It's just bullshit reasoning. Mismanagement.
Heres a community for you https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
and here's a sh.itjust.works like to the same subreddit so you don't have to jump through hoops to subscribe to it.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
r/Canada was taken over by alt-right a long time ago. r/OnGuardForThee had to be made in response to that. I feel like Reddit in general is going that direction. The sheer volume of bot activity on most major subreddits is insane.
Yes I went there for a peek and it's so angry. Compared to the positive vibe here, reddit felt oppressive. I'm not going back. Let it simmer and boil. I love this place. It's so refreshing at lemmy. Such a positive vibe. Like the internet was before it all became centralised. Lemmy is the real Web 3.
So its like Twitter?
Well, that demographic is always great for their advertiser acquisition goal
Right? Nothing like a festering pile of bigotry & ignorance to get the advertisers signing up.
You joke but it’s not exactly wrong.
People like that love to buy dumb shit. After a time Reddit will be nothing but my pillow, t shirt companies, colonial penn life insurance, and reverse mortgage ads.
True, but they're not exactly swimming in disposable income, usually. Trump's base is mostly non-college-educated whites. Not exactly a rich vein to mine.
True, but that’s the same base for the mega churches, and those fucks aren’t hurting for private jets.
Trump raises a few million bucks every time he tells his supporters to donate. A LOT of companies want in on that
"Money rules everything around me" -The CEO of Reddit
Except according to him his website isnt even making any.... after like 20 years online.
Too bad higher prices doesn't necessarily mean more money.
M.R.E.A.M. get the money!
"we're going dark for two days!" isn't going to change anything. reddit mods live for reddit. Why would they leave?
"Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded."
Really, though. What's the point of contributing to a thread that already has hundreds of top level posts. Something new and fresh is worth a try.
It changed something for me. Sure I might have changed sooner or later anyway but the 48 hours created awareness and provided a moment of time in which to look into alternatives.
Well Steve, it's not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you'll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that'll be leaving.
Yeap. I'm also not working for free anymore.
I stopped modding seriously long ago the moment I realized the community was getting too big and that the it is basically unpaid labour.
This means nothing to that lost CEO I started my sub over here but didn't come closer to the numbers on Reddit. I really don't know what to do now
You'll have to wait. Reddit took a long time to get to where it is now. Lemmy can get there too, but it won't be overnight.
Yea. I'm getting some good engagement right now in my community but. Yea we gotta wait!
They're too cheap. I'm sure they'll just replace you guys with less effective and active mods while the site just slowly smolders into a shadow of its former self.
Besides being too cheap, it's honestly not even practical. There are about 21,000 active mods on any given day. Replacing even half of that number would increase their current staffing of ~700 by 15 fold which doesn't seem likely given they just laid off 90 of them. That doesn't even touch on the fact that those moderators would know nothing about the subs they're now supposed to be taking care of.
Nah, you're totally right, this is the beginning of the end. The blackout might not do anything short term but they're certainly going to shed enough mods that quality will slip. Once that happens people will be looking for alternatives and Reddit will end up on the scrap heap of "used to be great" like so many that came before.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
That fuck talks about the data as if he was responsible in creating any of it. It's the users and users should seriously leave reddit and delete their data en masse.
He used to mod jailbait maybe he made some of that content
Probably still does and worse on a hard drive somewhere
Exactly what I did. I’ll find other sources as they pop up. Too much time wasted filtering the bickering away from the few reliables
Yes, this made me to seriously work on switching to Lemmy.
Yeah okay
Kill other apps before yours is on par (will it ever happen) isn't improving the product.
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Been for for 10 minutes. Really like it so far. Really gives me the vibe of the early 2000s internet (in a good way)
This right here.
Of course they aren't going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.
My expectation... Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a "we did everything we could" and then go back, business as usual.
I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.
I think you're probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don't see another viable alternative.
But I'm hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.
Perfectly valid reason to do so, everyone needs a place to recover. Those who need reddit as a lifeline shouldn't lose that. Be well friend!
I relate to this, I am in a number of support groups on Reddit. I ended up just making the knitting community here because I didn't know what I was doing and now I'm a mod. I really want to set up a c/stopdrinking community here but that's a mod role I am not willing to take on.
I think there is a huge difference from going to a specific sub that doesn't have equivalents and just browsing aimlessly. The aimlessly browsing is where they get the real juicy user data on what people engage with.
Fuck em.
This is me. If I can’t use Apollo or Narehal, Reddit is dead to me except when web search sends me to a Reddit thread.
I’m team Apollo. When Apollo goes I’ll go.
It’s Lemmy for me from now on!
It’s been a good 10 years with Reddit but it’s time to be the bigger person and step away from toxicity.
I feel so bad for Christian. He's been an absolute role model in handling this—calm demeanor, transparent communication and willingness to compromise (which Reddit obviously doesn't have).
He's put so much work into Apollo and stayed composed so far during the shutdown process. What scares me for him is the risk of refunds now: whoever subscribed to a premium tier can have the purchase refunded since he won't be able to provide the service. I hope not too many will go the refund route.
A lot of people claim that they bought the premium tier even after the announcement in API changes to support him, despite 3P apps shutting down in 3 weeks. I feel like most users will be supportive and not refund, myself included (Sync pro)
I second that. Poor Christian. What an absolute chad!
And that's why this is my first comment on lemmy! Just in case Reddit eats itself.
Aye, welcome! I’m still figuring things out myself. Mostly hoping the iOS client Mlem can find its footing because the whole Lemmy experience feels incomplete at the moment, but this all still feels like I’m on the ground floor of something potentially great.
Fuck spez!
Since I don't see a link to it in the discussion, here's an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
lol it's hard to do that when you aren't making any money, Steve.
Glad to know we're just 'noise', lol.
One minute our content (through the API) is "very valuable" and "needs to be monetized". The next we're just "noise".
If you can't be monetized, you're just noise. They don't see their community as people, they see them as data to be harvested and eyes to be advertised to.
This is the exact message that was sent, and it's sickening
Dam this makes my blood boil. My sub went dark for no reason!!
There's a stupid question I have (c/NoStupidQuestions?)
What do mods gain from reopening the subs after two days, even if demands are not met? Are they gaining money or something? Perhaps the bigger ones.
Its hard to abandon a community that you’ve spent years cultivating. No money involved at all, just emotional baggage really.
Always be willing to walk away, or you are working for free for somebody else's profit. If it isn't fun, quit.
Mostly I think it started as a show of how much reddit relies on the free labor while giving reddit an out, but as time goes on I'm inclined to believe it's also because mods know that if they "abandon" the subreddit, the admins will just open the subreddit up to new moderators a la r/redditrequest
There are already subs that have had users request being put on as mod despite barely becoming inactive.
Power is addictive. At least for some people.
Valid question. Hate to say this, but if most subs reopen after 2 days, we're essentially handing reddit bosses an easy win. It's like protesting with no terms, and instead merely creating a brief storm that'll pass and quickly be forgotten. Might as well throw eggs at a tank with that thinking.
The only way this protest works, is if subs stay dark with no deadline, and terms that must be met to end the standoff. That's how these things work. That's how it's always worked.
Some subs have already decided to go indefinite. They are coordinating in r/ModCoord.
It'll be interesting to see how it goes, I know one of the subs that I visit has opened it up to a vote on their community on whether to go indefinite or not (or just restrict). For effectiveness it needs the big subs and the bulk of subs to keep it up I reckon.
They absolutely detest their userbase :(
It's their own fault. They didn't have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn't have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I'm really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There's this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can't just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren't. The scale of the two businesses is not the same... none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn't need these thousands of employees, they're already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that's way too open and won't turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
they are doing things like launching Avatars, NFT's, and other ways to try and cash in for a quick buck.
As someone who's 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there's definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there's too many people who don't seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I'm getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
I would have accepted it.. Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
THIS!
Here's your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
What a jerk
Yeah, at this point. All these big tech companies are succumbing to their greed.
Good that FOSS are being made to be the shelter for this wasteland that is big tech.
I'll be interested to see if they try to keep the money happy by trying to kill porn on reddit. If they try that reddit would be in worse shape than Trump.
Worked out so great for Tumblr. But apparently the plan is to take all the worst ideas from the past couple years and speedrun 'em, so I wouldn't be surprised.
I really can't wait to see what's the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
The real fallout will be seeing what the numbers look like after July 1st. When all the third party users are given the unavoidable choice to switch to the official app or not. If engagement goes down then and stay lower, it’s ogre for Reddit.
Yeah it's gonna be quite an interesting event. Most of reddit's newer userbase doesn't seem to care, but then again the mods of major subreddits do.
Mods can be replaced. Remember r/TheDonald? Not that I have -any- sympathy at all for those trogs, but the admin dealt with them by deleting all the mods and appointing new ones that would toe the line. There's nothing to stop them from using that playbook again. A lot of people will leave, but a lot of people will shrug and go back to posting cat pictures.
just deleted my last account. fuck em lol
Yeah same here.
Really curious to see how long the more popular subreddits will remain private. Surely the admin won't just turn them public again without having any mods, right? I kinda would love to see that dumpster fire.
They will try to recruit new mods from the subscribers or find them elsewhere. I agree it's going to be ugly and prolonged and will likely lead to a painful death of the communities.
Fuck u/spez
Yeah, this sounds like the reddit I've come to know 😒
Reddit & Twitter going crazy only few months appart, and with this attitude they deserve to vanish in trashbin of internet history
I just want to point out that the article is dated 9 June, so before the actual blackout. Maybe they have changed their mind seeing the actual data
Yeah this is taken from the AMA, which was a waste of time for everyone
I was so repulsed by that AMA, what a joke. It really solidified my decision to look elsewhere. Reddit just is not Reddit anymore. Gone is that entity that lives on only in my memories. As with many things past, present and future, money tends to ruin it all for us.
Guess I'm sticking with Lemmy, then.
This is the way
This is the way
I guess Lemmy will be getting bigger then
somebody else pointed this out, but it's honestly bizarre he's going in on the "we aren't making any money" ploy in preparation for the ipo
what's the pitch to the investors? "please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase"?
"We're not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds."
Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.
Cats -> 🥰 News -> 🤔 Injustice -> 😡 Helping others -> 🤗 Cool gadgets -> 🤯
No thinking just liking
This is exactly why I don’t like traditional social media. Doom scrolling + validation fishing + content designed to illicit a response (good or bad), is a no for me fam. Reddit desperately wants to be one of those, and it’s clear as day, and for that reason, I’m out.
In Reddit's defense (I'm team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable. It's weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he's had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it's clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.
Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would've made more off those users than if they'd moved to the official app.
Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.
The reason Reddit doesn't want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.
Well at least they'll be more "profitable" with so many less users coming to the site and using third party apps.
Glad I've found Lemmy.
What a clown show. Glad I'm gone.
Shame they killed it like this, but fuck 'm! First comment on Lemmy 👌
"We are not profitable"
Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.
Also not a great thing for the CEO to say right before their IPO.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, "yeah, this is fine."
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It's still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we're going black for two days. They should've just says "were going black until you cange the rules again".
Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.
Reddit's traffic might not recover for a while.
Of course it's up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it's any other day. If I wouldn't have known subreddits went private (and they didn't sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I'll just see posts from subreddits who don't participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.
The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It's not easy and I think Reddit knows it.
Is this for real? I wonder if different people's r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There's like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I've never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.
I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there's indeed not much going on.
Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what's going on.
Loading full web pages takes more server processing power than API access.
This is browser and RIF just seems weird because blackout should mean less user load.
There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)
There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.
Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that's currently dark so I can't give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.
This makes sense to me. I was wondering how many were active, engaged communities and how many were shells or ghost towns.
Bye, bitch!
See you never
I never expected them to change their mind, they know what they want and they know what sort of people they want on their platform and frankly it is not us.
Plenty of people including me are very glad about being pushed in a more fedi direction, and genuinely enjoy it here. Probably most of those people are older like me and feel very much at home with a bit of jank, with Mastodon's topic-based following system, etc etc. Because that's what the internet was like when we were first exploring it. We will 100% stick around.
For younger or less techy people though, the only thing that really gets them to use services is how easy it is. And that's fine too. We can have our own corner of the internet here to be dorks in, and they can have their own corner over there, and we can all still be friends just...you know...from a distance.
I'm really enjoying Lemmy's forum-focused platform, since it does feel like the old internet again, where I would actually want to engage in topics, rather than scroll through a hundred images and immediately forget most of it
I never really knew how much existed on the internet until around 2014, so I never got to experience things like IRC and small, engaging, and enthusiastic communities in their prime. I really hope Lemmy and the whole of fediverse takes off, cause I'm really enjoying it here.
And even then back in 2014 the discussions were so much more organic, I still remember a specially niche forum back then brimming with activity. It is alive and well but the userbase is reduced to a tenth of what it used to be. Fediverse platforms seem to be a return to form since corporate influence has been stripped away from them.
Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I really just lurked on reddit and never commented. For every post that showed up in top/hot sorting, I already knew what the top 10 comments would be before I even clicked. And it's not even like echo chamber type comments, but more just the same old reddit-isms that would get used over and over again. Like every "discussion" is basically a race to see who can be the first to say the thing, and somehow those comments always end up getting the most upvotes. I've already seen a few getting used here on Lemmy. Hopefully the community will learn to stop encouraging that kind of behavior.
And the pun threads, ugh. I don't hate all puns, but reddit users weaponized them.
As an “older” person, not afraid of the jank, I LOVE this view and subscribe to it whole heartedly!
Those of us with a few years behind us have made countless social media transitions already, it's a bit jarring at first but it's not the end of the world.
It's going to be an uphill battle and maybe even a siege. It's going to mean these sub-reddits are going to have to be dark for the foreseeable future if they want to make it painful for Spez and team.
I have officially migrated here from reddit, after nearly 15 years over there. This is my 1st comment and the 1st post I've viewed.
For me, it's irrelevant whether or not my decision makes a discernable impact; I simply won't support them with my traffic and won't settle for the default app. No 3rd party apps simply equates to no reddit for me.
And even if they walked back their decision regarding their API, I still wouldn't return unless there was a change in management.
I don't think reddit will walk back their decision, and I don't think they'll be going anywhere either. But I think this is a tipping point in reddit's quality as a site/community. Analogously to russia's brain drain, I believe we will see that the core of the redditors who are leaving are made up of redditors who promote a healthy functioning site/communities.
I was a very core member of several subreddits and did some moderation, but also contributed to reporting content, etc. that most users neglect, but are integral to limiting spam, trolls, and hate. It's not the users shitposting on r/funny or r/gaming that are going to leave. It's the long-time users who have been propping up this paper tiger.
If enough mods and healthy community members leave, reddit is going to devolve into a cesspool. Reddit will be hard off if they lose the free labor of mods that have propped up their site for years.
Hear, hear! And welcome to your new home :)
Well written 👍
Take my upvote sir!
It will be more like a downhill slide for them. Without third party apps how are mods going to moderate? There will be so much more spam, trolls, and scams, the already tenuous experience will become even worse.
If they stick with these changes they're already dead, they're just living on borrowed time.
Good, I hope it crashes and burns. They forgot their origins.
Had the subs gone off for longer (2 weeks) or indefinitely, the risk of Google bots dropping links may have shaken things up more. Personally, I don’t see Reddit going anywhere. There frankly is not enough backing for a sustained enough period of time. Reddit knows tomorrow subs who joined for 2 days will re-open.
Once I got Lemmy working on mobile I just deleted my reddit account straight up, a two day protest was always a stupid move. The only way to get their attention is permanently stopping the use of the platform.
Unfortunately in order to actually make a dent in anything under capitalism you simply can't partake of it at all.
I deleted my Reddit account as well. People deleting 10-year-plus accounts will make a larger statement than a couple of days of silent subs.
Reddit has control over granting mod access to new people for rebellious subs. It doesn't have control over my use or non-use of the platform.
Hopefully if there is no reaction from spez, a more severe protest will follow.
Also, I think the people who stay after the blackouts are the ones Reddit wants: the ones least likely to care about being subjected to ads and hostile UI. The ones least likely to leave or protest. The ones with least critical thinking. The ones consuming the most trivial content and guerrilla marketing. The holy grail of any money-hungry social network.
That's true, they're filtering out the people they can't bully around. Smaller population of users but you can be relatively certain about their behavior.
It's like when a scammer intentionally misspells things so that people who are more aware are filtered out off the bat.
Here's a thread where mods are announcing that they're going indefinitely dark: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
no wonder since most of the subs are only going offline for 2 days
I couldn't be the only one who found 2 days to be a ridiculously low time as well.
It's long enough to show impact and short enough that reddit will catch flak for replacing the mod teams.
It also lines up with the media attention span. On day 5 "reddit lost users during the blackout" will be a better headline than "blackout still going on fyi".
Yeah its weird that it's only two days, but also many are going private forever (though reddit will just replace the mods unfortunately)
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn't some money better than no money?
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.
This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they're working on.
they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.
Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.
You gotta respect the dedication on some level
The thing is I don't, though. Besides, what's to respect? He's just a corporate front-man and the board and the money-men have his balls in a vice. He'll say what they tell him to or they'll take turns on the handle.
I respect him doing what’s really best for our society and killing the animal Reddit has become
Critical support for comrade spez in his struggle against Reddit!
spez was a hero...I just couldn't see it
I'm sticking with lemmy then
Spez personally banned me for harasent because I reported a child porn seller
Well, Spez was a mod of /r/jailbait before advertisers made them take it down....
Wait, really? Not that I'm actually surprised but it's almost to perfect...
So it turns out the only sources of the claim I've found are memes, so it might not actually be true (though sources are a lot harder to find with 95% of Reddit down).
Even if the claim is fake, I'd prefere to live in blissful ignorance :D
You probably outed his alt
Haha probably
Obligatory fuck /u/spez.
Be careful, you might be blocked by reddit \s
he is getting into Elon levels of denial
Denial of what though?
I can see subs being dark becoming a permanent thing, hopefully coders update reddit to html updater or similar tools to pull from archived zsv files.
Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.
The irony is reddit was that alternative to Digg.
You'd think Huffman would have the wherewithal to realize that no king rules forever.
He's too into himself to think people would leave... Yet here we are... Over here and not there
wow, what a crazy way to see it, but at the end of the day it's true.
There is literally no new information in this article and the title implies that it is in response to the acutal blackout, and not the threat of one. Bad article.
Thanks for saving my time
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let's gooooo lemmy!
I think for me it was just the one last thing that pushed me over the edge. The content was starting to get meh and the bots were 👎
Like I said a few other places, even if Lemmy only grows to be 1% of the size, I honestly like the small community vibe of it more than Reddit. More direct interactions.
Captain of the Titanic: "we're sticking to our course, despite the iceberg being dead ahead"
Funny thing if they had done that and the iceberg hit frontally like the engineers planned for it would probably not have sunken the ship.
What the engineers didn't foresee was an iceberg strafing the side and cutting open too many sections for the ship to stay afloat.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Oh, I fucking hate CEO's.
I'm so glad they're unwavering in their commitment to foster growth of the fediverse!
Just shows how much reddit cares about it's users.
First comment here. Sad to Reddit go but also it's their own fault for pushing me away
Already having a fantastic time on the fediverse. Fuck em!
I'm literally so excited to be here. Feels like we're a part of a big shift in the future of social media.
It is actually kind of exciting. A lot of people have already jumped ship, and this has a good user experience.
I wonder if advice posts will start appearing in search results.
The disrespect that the average person gets from corporations these days is fucking unbelievable. This current thing with reddit is something especially BS. ALL of the work in the various subreddits were done by the community, supported by third-party apps ALSO built by the community.
Then the next thing to so is mass delete your posts and comments and then the account. Scorched earth and all that jazz
I think at this point Reddit just wings all their decisions. They’re too deep into the embarrassment, they could never redeem themselves.
Ahhh, the Elon approach
Because they know that ultimately the layuser will stay on reddit. Super sad to see, but maybe if subreddits like r/movies stay dark indefinitely it may push them to make at least some changes to their current stance.
If not and they just swap moderators, the outcry might be pretty bad.
The people using third-party apps won't be able to stay on Reddit. Not without substantially changing their habits. We're not fighting against the status quo here; the status quo is already dead and it's just a question of what emerges in its place.