Lmao, so much for him telling everyone it was just a noise, it’ll be done in 2 days, it doesn’t affect us :D
THIS is actually the best piece of news from that article: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
Arguing that moderators aren’t doing their job is such a complete mischaracterization when mods literally let their subreddits vote on the blackout.
All my homies hate u/spez
He’s said that very few people use 3rd party apps, but at the same time, he says “And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,” So are 3rd party apps very unpopular, or are they taking away a really significant number of users? He’s essentially saying- nobody uses Apollo, but Reddit is dying without Apollo’s users.
So many contradictions in that interview. He’s panicking lol
The thing he doesn’t comprehend is that third party apps were reddit’s value creation engine.
But if you think everything in life is a zero sum game you are delusional.
How many people would have happily spent some of the free credits Google play store awards on paying an annual £5 to be able to continue using RIF to cover API costs?
The thing he really talks about caring about is preventing LLMs from getting his data and using it to provide answers that reduce traffic to Reddit. Except LLMs weren’t purely trained on Reddit, and the high majority of the internet where the training data did come from doesn’t have a convenient API… so that makes it a little harder, I guess, but it really has no effect.
Then other times, he complains about the advertising revenue, but contradicts himself and says actually the 3rd party app userbase is 3% of all users and inconsequential but people just want to bandwagon the poor multi-hundred million dollar company. Yet it’s such a big opportunity cost that can’t be ignored and there’s just no better way.
While it is certainly sad the direction that reddit is going, there is just a little bit of joy in watching the public meltdown after all the user hostile decisions they’ve made over the past few years.
There is not one single new feature added to reddit since before the redesign that has actually added value to the platform for a user.
The redesign made things worse and only worse:
- Login walls for random communities
- Actively user hostile mobile website that doesn’t respect “use desktop site” and tries to funnel people into the app
- Redesign and mobile app are bloated wastes of resources that do less than old.reddit but using several megabytes of Javascript, unusable with anything less than a stable 4G connection
- Full of whitespace and rounded buttons that waste screen space, they expect everyone to have 1440p monitors to have a decent UI density
Visually, I actually quite like the look of the redesign (on desktop at least; mobile’s a whole other story). But it’s so bloated that on my old laptop I could get maybe 10-15 minutes of browsing time before it used up all my ram and dragged my whole computer to a crawl. And it has a whole mess of bugs that make it almost unusable - it feels like someone’s CS project rather than the front end of one of the largest sites on the web.
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That last bit is the rub - if they’d made improvements with the main app or new interface, maybe I wouldn’t want to use RIF… But they chose uber enshitification instead.
This is a screenshot of the Reddit app I took about an hour ago. This was the second post from the top.
Of all the features added since I joined in 2018, only two I found truly useful, especially with the death of other sites. Gallery uploads and polls. That’s it.
Everything else? Useless cruft or stuff that died out where that time and resources could’ve been used to fix new reddit and the app.
In a blog post published by Reddit, the company links to its Moderator Code of Conduct while saying “Dissent, debate, and discussions are foundational parts of Reddit” and it respects the right to protests. However, the rules state that the company can remove moderators if they are uncooperative.
We respect your right to protest, but we also respect our right to not let you protest lolll
What a pleasant, well-adjusted individual.
There’s a lot of points that he brings up that touch broader topics:
Landed Gentry
He’s not wrong on the premise here. He’s wrong with the solution and the why. A community should dictate their terms, if landed gentry is what the community wants, so be it. If the community wants democracy so be it. In the later, that democracy doesn’t need a “company” to be the ultimate arbitrator of democracy, which is what he is pitching. That whole latter is just “corporate control with a democracy label slapped on it.”
Profit
We all do need to remember that running something on the Internet is NOT cheap. Anything that gets popular becomes a quick target for “other nations” (US, Russia, China…) to start putting garbage into and eating bandwidth. Reddit has been running on the techbro funding which has recently ran dry. So this day was always coming. The free cash isn’t there so the cracking of the whip begins.
This is going to happen with anything that isn’t purely community ran. So all those other things like Bluesky that are being tossed, they’ll have the same trouble eventually. Kbin and Lemmy are slightly different in that it is purely community ran. But we the community need to support our admins with cash to keep the server fans turning. Otherwise, even community ran projects can become coporate controlled.
3rd Party Apps
This is the biggest thing for me. We’re either an open web or we’re not. I was on the Internet back in the 1980s when it was very open. It is pros and cons for open vs closed. If Reddit doesn’t want 3rd Party Apps, that makes them closed, that makes them less Democratic. There’s nothing wrong with being closed, McDonald’s likely doesn’t want me eating my Taco Bell in their building. But the CEO keeps trying to say “Democracy” while actually just “trying to run a business”. I don’t go to the Costco to fill up on gas and think the other people there are my “community”, they’re folks from my community but the Costco doesn’t make them my community. Reddit is a business where a community can go to, Reddit IS NOT the community itself.
perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us
With all the leverage in Reddit’s hands, which that’s fine whatever, working with Reddit is going to be one of those sisyphean kinds of tasks. Pray they do not alter the terms futher.
the extent that they were profiting off of our API
And to me that’s the tell. Every other word out of the guy’s mouth is “profit”. And that’s fine, it is his site. But someone putting profit first is going to be hard pressed to focus on Democracy and community. And everyone should at least keep that in mind.
Ownership
And I think that’s the ultimate thing for everyone else. In an open Internet, you the creator own your content. And everything Reddit is saying takes the ownership away from you. Running sites like Reddit, Kbin, Mastodon, and so on are non-zero costs. So I get the desire to make money “somewhere”. And the CEO of Reddit honestly believes that “running ads” defers the costs that would have been otherwise passed on to the users and mods to pay in cash or work. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but a community should get to have say on it. A democracy also gets to vote on if this is their ship to wreck.
And that’s the big underlying thing. The CEO tosses community/democracy and other words to make folks think “they’re a part of this thing” but they are not. Or at least no more part of this thing in the same nature that someone walking into a local hospital is part of the medical community. And in all of those words, the CEO is indicating that he is taking all ownership from the users and presenting something that has the veneer of community and you having ownership of your content.
Live and let live
Some people want that which Reddit offers. So be it. I think I’ve had enough of it, but that’s just me. But the Redditors that are staying ought to know the cart they’ve hitched their horse to. But ultimately, nothing but love for everyone. Reddit has stopped being a good fit for me and I’ve gone elsewhere, but everyone should just use what’s a good fit/feel for them. Except Twitter. The people who enjoy Twitter are a breed of people that defies what I would consider “enjoyable company.”
what a brilliant write up. Really neutral, but straight to the point.
I would give you reddit gold, but… reasons…
Very well put, I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.
@IHeartBadCode very well said.
Well said!
one would hope that techcrunch would do a better job with terminology and concepts… but whatever, man. keep expectations low and never be disappointed, I guess.
From the article:
However, reports suggested that some advertisers had paused campaigns during the blackout. The company has been pushing out more ad tools to attract advertisers.
Yea okok you just double-down on a practice few are fond of 🥰
I’d rather pay to sustain kbin than be fed adverts from reddit affiliates.I am not an rexitter bc I stopped caring for it years ago; These socials are just objectively healthier imo. For now, anyway; let us not be complacent and have the alternate socialverse devolve, friends :)
Everything’s always fab at the start but long-term sustainability is the key to success & there’s no use having a honeymoon period if all turns poorly in the end. Let’s learn from Big Social’s errors and cherish the alternatives we’ve been graced with.
Shout-out to kbin’s dev :))
and ditto for the other fedisocials <3-- I believe this is my first comment here :D –
Finally some recognition at least…
they come across as quite desperate…are they maybe realising that they’re playing with fire?
I just checked out Reddit and the mods are caving at the threats of losing their prestigious roles, even r/apple caved.
I think the best action is to ‘cave’ and then start working on moving your community to lemmy or kbin while the admins are patting themselves on the back.
Some caved, some were replaced altogether.
He talks out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand the third party apps are costing them a lot of money. On the other hand, he says that only 3% of users use third party apps. Is that 3% of users the only thing keep them from being profitable?
Costs them millions, surely makes back far more than that. If this is about LLM why not have a separate API for 3P apps? No mention of increased ad revenue of course. Sounds like a bunch of corporate BS to me.
I find it hilarious how he spilled the beans on how much the API has costed Reddit.
Huffman’s gripe is that some of these apps make millions every year using Reddit’s data, and the company has to bear infrastructure costs of up to $10 million every year, he told The Verge.
And so, he thinks he can charge a single app, Apollo, twice that amount? And what about the rest of the apps, I haven’t heard how much they would have had to pay. It’s absolutely reasonable for Reddit to try to recoup some or all of that cost for the API. I recall Apollo’s creator Christian Selig saying he wasn’t against paying for access, but it had to be reasonable. This just cements why he’s doing this. To kill the 3rd party apps.
TLDR: fuck u/spez.
I would have been willing to pay a bit in order to keep BaconReader. I am very cognizant that I am avoiding ads, and would pay to keep it that way. But I won’t pay an excessive amount.
Steve is not giving me the option. He wants to price the apps out of existence, because he sees them as competition. Which is weird, because the only purpose of those apps is to drive content to Reddit. And their users paid extra to the app developer because they prefer it. Does he not want my content?
@dhork @Contextual_Idiot He wants eyeballs on ads, not content. Like most VC techbros, he thinks content is the easy part of the equation, and people creating content are an easily replacable nuisance.
I don’t think spez cares about what kind of content gets posted, as long as something is getting posted. As evidenced by the glacial response to dealing with problem subreddits. This is also why he’s going to force the subs to reopen at all costs. He needs those posts being made, and he needs the users and lurkers to view those posts for the ad revenue. It’s also what will allow Reddit’s competition to eat spez’s lunch. Quantity is easy these days. But users will follow the quality.
Spez is a hero. He introduced me to the world of the fediverse. Thank you Spez. I wouldn’t have bothered if it hadn’t been for your decisions.
