Reddit Ramps Up Its Threats To Protesting Mods, As Ad Buyers Leave
techdirt.com
The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
WE made the content. The community. No doubt the majority of level-headed folk would have accepted ad requirements in 3rd party apps. Hosting isn't free, something needs to be monetized.
But that's not what it's about. It's about locking down content from the new wave of AI models and charging for it. Charging for content we created freely to be shared.
Ads? No, I would not accept ads. What I would have accepted was a subscription payment. Hell, I went so far as to purchase Apollo lifetime ultimate.
I am more than willing to support things I use. I am not willing to deal with ads though. Especially when they sneak in like they are posts, and take up entire scroll widths.
I don’t get how people put up with that either. My wife said that we were being over dramatic about the 3rd Party Apps protests, but will agree that the ads are annoying. Hopefully she’ll convert over here before to long and get a taste for how a message board should be.
Stockholmed into thinking ads are acceptable. They're not. No social contract says that you have to put up with ads, they're simply unregulated in the USA and people have mostly given up.
Reddit ads are way too intrusive and irrelevant.
Yeah and it's not like you wouldn't understand that Reddit would 2-tier its API so that paying Reddit users can get served ad-less experiences while non-paying need to see ads for your app to use the API. That's not even that uncommon from what I interact with at work.
At the end of the day, Reddit is just a message board. The absolute hubris to think that one could seriously go public with a message board website... It's baffling.
Honestly, Reddit missed the ship to IPO. They should have done it a decade ago if at all.
Without mods, Reddit will become overrun with bots, rendering the precious data Reddit so desparately tries to monetize practically useless.
I mod a small/mid size sub that is still blacked out. Should I leave it private or just let it get overrun with spam?
Shift the community to lemmy and write a pinned post on reddit about the change.
Request members to delete their reddit post.
That would have been a lot easier before the API change. Not sure if that's an easy task anymore (pegging old content)
You don't owe reddit anything.
Sell promoted posts directly, admins have made it abundantly clear they're in it for money over community, get your cheddar too.
Oh, that's harsh but fair
I’m a mod over on r/NoahGetTheBoat and I haven’t even opened reddit more than a couple times since Apollo died.
Burn it
I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.
I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
I was an early adopter of Reddit back during the digg days and I had over a decade of post history there and to see that go.... I couldn't care less. It was all ephemeral bullshit.
Same here. Liking Lemmy like I liked Reddit at the beginning.
16 years and almost 300K comment karma here…
The only thing that had me back on Reddit was searching for something on DDG and getting 99% Reddit results. I see why they are un-deleting people's comments and posts when they close their accounts. Hopefully other forums take those spots.
Same, I just miss some of the interest based communities I was in, but they're growing well on Lemmy right now. Optimistic for the future.
I'm glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don't care. It's a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can't take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.
Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.
I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.
Actually, I like the small community vibe of Lemmy. It’s the dead sub vibe I have a problem with. There are lots of really interesting communities, but you don’t see people posting anything yet.
I like a lot of the tiny vibe but I miss girl Reddit. It was such a unique social media atmosphere and I haven’t managed to find it here. I hope more of the women from Reddit come here
I miss GirlGamers, honestly. It was such a refreshing perspective compared to the constantly angry/circlejerky dudebro vibe of 90% of gaming communities
Are you looking for more girly communities? Maybe consider starting one if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
I was apprehensive of moving over to Lemmy, but I'm starting to get the feel of the fediverse and finally made the switch over.
I think the community can grow over time. It honestly feels like early Reddit, I'm quite enjoying Lemmy!
Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
Where did you see an announcement about RIF for Lemmy? That's awesome!
As far as I know, talklittle is focused on making a Tildes app called Three Cheers for now, and had been working it even before the announcement from Reddit. As much as it would be nice to have a Lemmy successor to RIF, the closest we'll probably get any time soon is an app that's just inspired by the RIF design.
Thanks for the info!
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo's perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don't seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut "unnecessary expenses".
Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.
reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.
the content is the people. that's the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they'll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you're just a dick.
i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn't a word. let's make it a word.
The thing is, they COULD’VE monetized it and still kept it alive. What they’re doing instead is killing the golden goose for a quick cash-out.
Edit: I hate your username. A lot of trauma associated with that failed tongue-twister.
As crappy as it would be, charging users a couple bucks a month for ad free and the ability to use third party apps would probably have been the best move they could make.
It’s not defederated it’s federated and decentralized
oops. don't drink and post, y'all.
I've hoped for decentralizing a lot of stuff over the years and every time the clunky nature prevented them from taking off.
Sadly, until there were centralized spaces the average person didn't really get into the internet when it was IRC chats and disconnected forums.
Cant see reactions Fixed it!
I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn't another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.
I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)
Of the places I've been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn't just in the software but also in the community.
Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I'm trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.
The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.
They had no lockin. Other social networks are connected to your real identity and real life friends and connections. Or they have content creators that you could only find on their platform. Reddit had neither. Leaving it was the easiest thing ever.
This seems intentional at this point...
Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol
Dude, I paid for Reddit Premium or Gold or whatever the fuck it's called for 5+ years just to support. I wish I could claw it all back.
We even used to run "thanks for not using adblock" ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there
Proof that people will gladly support a good product.
Same curve with Netflix. Pirating went down when they started. They themselves, but all the other Streamers as well have gone so greedy that the good product is no longer supported. Reputation ruined, war with customers ensues.
These guys aren't happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that's true, I dare say they've achieved the opposite result now.
So, shall we start calling this 'the Reddit Effect?' We haven't had anything new to supplant the Streisand Effect for awhile, I feel like something like this is overdue
Might be the digg effect ;)
This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it's nice to see!
So they really are following Twitter's example. Twitter's lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It's stunning how stupid companies can be.
Just noticed today that Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts. It's like these two platforms are competing on which one can destroy their reputation first.
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I'd just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn't realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn't seem to work anymore 🙁
How does nitter work? Does it scrap the data, or use an API?
Same here because of a Lemmy post. Truly 2023 is the year of rapid enshittification for the large websites that have dominated the internet for the past decade or so.
That needs to be the word of the year.
Wiktionary calls it a hot word
The beatings aren't improving morale, you say? I guess we just need to increase the beatings then.
It is basically "if you refuse to work for free, then we won't let you work for free. Ha, that'll teach them"
You can't quit! YOU'RE FIRED!!
why did it have to be aaron swartz
why couldn't it have been huffman...
I feel like old af now that I’ve watched two huge sites implode due to mismanagement. I was a Digg refuge way back, and now here I am on lemmy…
3 sites if you include Twitter . Twitter and Reddit seem to be in a mismanagement competition right now. Not sure who's winning
Tumblr also kind of got ruined a few years ago too for some people if you were into that platform.
I was in art school when Tumblr was at its peak. Looking back it was dumb, just resharing pictures and gifs but I had so much fun. I met so many people through Tumblr that I'm still in contact with.
I really enjoyed tumblr in a way I don’t really understand now. I think I enjoyed creating something to share of my own out of bits and pieces of everyone else. Idk.
"Oh yeah Plebbit? What are you gonna do next, hack my PC and force me to read nothing else than random reddit content for the rest of my life?"
Steve: "Uh... hey Elon, I have an idea for your new Neuralink thing, can we talk about it? I'm positive it's gonna be a great success..."
Elon: Do I know you?
The enshtification of reddit has reached a head.
It isn’t even about the API drive out anymore of why I’m not going back to Reddit. It’s the CEO though and though
Because the goal was never to get some kind of fair price for using the API. That's why they priced it at "Fuck You."
Ultimately what they want is for people to stop using 3rd party apps entirely because 3rd party apps either don't show advertisements, or they show advertisements that give ad revenue to the developer.
They want everyone using their app because the valuation of tech companies directly correlates to the number of eyeballs they can serve ads to. Old.reddit will be next, and I bet they'll try to start blocking ad blockers after that.
Haha! Yeah, fuckin' Linda, amirite?
Should I know who Linda Yaccarino is?
The new Twitter CEO, who we know is really just there to take the fall for Musk's bullshit decisions.
I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.
I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn't worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren't at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I'd be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it's just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.
In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it's probably a waste of money anyway.
I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they're in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn't surprise me.
This was my experience. Almost every ad I clicked on was a mistake; either I thought it was a real post and wasn't paying close attention, only to navigate away in disgust, or I clicked on it purely by accident. I had like 50k+ karma (to give you some idea of much I used reddit) and might have honestly clicked an ad once.
Reddit ad targeting is a joke and I dont even understand how. How can they not tell what my interests are when I've literally subbed to them? It's the easiest targeting set up in the world and they still can't make it work.
(1) Because the more irrelevant ads they show, the more accidental clicks they can collect, and the more ad revenue. There will be individual clients (e.g. Adobe) who probably have some measurable results, but my guess is that most of their advertisers show pretty good metrics in terms of "cost per click" etc, and aren't paying close enough attention to realize that their real return on ad spend is extremely low.
(2) Reddit's just as incapable / uncaring about writing good ad targeting as they are about constructing the rest of the site.
Pick one. Aaron Schwartz would be furious at the current state of reddit.
Personally the redditbusiness page marketing to advertisers reads like wishful thinking or something straight from /r/boringdystopia.
"Look there's places where people come to discuss flashlight options and other users/google results trust them! Pay us money to look like you're part of that! It's not creepy to try and co-opt at all!"
I'm not surprised that their interface isn't great, they haven't paid for developers to do anything other than try to look more like twitter/facebook in a long time.
I had no idea about this. This is the weirdest goddamned thing. I found so much that I made a whole separate post. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had no idea.
Hey, I loved watching people nerd out on their flashlights! Actually, I was there to get insight on how they were building their own awesome lights, and trying to understand what the difference between lights was.
Exactly, that is a useful resource. It came to mind because I used it to figure out what was worth it when I needed to buy a new one. A flashlight company pretending to be part of it makes it less useful.
IIRC the vendors were obligated to identify themselves. Some of the vendors were just people making hardware mods, too.