They really want the fediverse to grow. I appreciate their dedication to the cause.
“Hold on, dear investors! I’m confident that we can simply steer our ship straight through the middle of the massive iceberg!”
Ironically, had the titanic hit the iceberg straight on it probably would have survived. Swerving at the very last moment was what made it sink.
Be gone with your counterintuitive realism, getting in the way of an entertaining metaphor!
“There is no danger that Reddit will sink. The site is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the user bases.”
" The site is unsinkable. We’ve simply decided to spend some time underwater while we work out some tech issues. "
Just saw on Reddit there are 300+ subs going dark indefinitely. That is what needs to happen. Sure Reddit could come in and find new mods but damn might end up being a decent amount of work/chaos. They should screw up their automods and delete the backup logs. Still probably wouldn’t be that hard for an admin to rollback but still the more pain the better.
Who would they even find to moderate subs with substandard tools free of charge? Especially right on the heels of this fiasco. Maybe they’ll put some bots in charge and just allow pretty much unfiltered moderation in those subreddits.
It’s actually more like 8000+ at this point.
They weathered the fatpeoplhate tantrum, I’m not really sure why anyone thinks a blackout would faze them.
That said I hope lemmy can grow into a mature social content aggregator.
I just posted it elsewhere, but that’s only the beginning. They also announced their intent to turn reddit into an even more ad-infested hellhole than it already is: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/investing-in-what-makes-reddit-unique-introducing-contextual-keyword-targeting-and-product-ads
This is the future of reddit everyone - abandon all hope ye who clicketh here: https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/image2.gif
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable - Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO
Translation - we don’t have control of the 3PA and they are getting in the way of moooore profit, so we want them gone.
I’m 90% certain that this whole thing is due to to Reddit’s new marketing execs saying “we can’t run ads on third party apps”, and then deciding that third party apps need to pay up for their supposed “projected loss in ad revenue”.
It’s the piracy fallacy: “Somebody is using my service without giving ME profit, and so we’re gonna go into a self-destructive tantrum”. “Ignore the fact that nobody ever wanted to pay us for that anyways.”
We don’t need that kind of greed in control of our online communities, good riddance.
What a shitty job at astroturphing there.
"Won’t someone think of the corporations! The evil third party apps (that we admitted were less than 10% of our userbase) are (somehow) bankrupting us! They’re using so much API (even though our website uses at least 5x the API calls)
[Translation: There’s 10% of the people we could shove ads in front of who are getting around it and I want to sell this sucker so I can buy another vacation property]
They’re using so much API
I’m 100% convinced the reason they think 3PA API usage is unusually high per user is because all the high engagement users use 3PA, because their app actively repulses people from wanting to spend time on it. It seems like such a classic product misinterpretation of the stats, I’ve seen this from the inside as a developer before, ironically also at a company trying to IPO and failing spectacularly by completely misreading the room and their users
I hadn’t thought about this but it makes sense. It’s widely known that their largest contributors are 3PA users, I wonder if they did take the bias into account
Since this began, I’ve seen countless screenshots of people showing the Reddit official app crashing. Not just during the blackout, but generally. So it’s not just that it has a poor interface or too many ads… the thing just doesn’t work properly for a lot of users.
@artistan It’s funny in a way that 3PA manage to monetize their business better than they are themselves.
Something like reddit doesn’t long if it’s not profitable. He’s not in the same reality that we are
They love to get creative with the definition of “profitable”.
Yeah I’m done having ads shoved in my face constantly. Corporations ruin everything and this was just the push I needed to remove one more attack vector from my life.
How hard if it to offer a nominally feed as free experience?
There seems to be a misconception by a lot of corporates that shoving ads down users throats will make the users want what is advertised.
Personally, I go out of my way to avoid anything that are shown to me intrusively.
The reality is that ads work. That’s why they even exist and companies pay so much for them. The safest way to not be influenced by them is to not see them.
Block them, skip them, use ad free media
The bright side of all of this is finding out more about the Fediverse and how cool it is
The sad thing is there’s a right way to do everything they want but this ain’t it. Spez is litterally digging a hole using the bricks he could be building with.
No way. I don’t care if Lemmy doesn’t succeed I’m never going to tolerate that shit. I stopped using Twitter when they killed third party apps and forced even more ads into their piece of shit app.
Even if lemmy stays small I don’t care, the community is better here, the apps are open, I don’t see any ads, fuck Reddit, fuck spez, this is what a community should feel like.
And no ads for bags of fucking water either.
Agreed. Beyond just no ads because I go out of my way to block them on my network and devices its nice to browse new and be able to have discussions instead seeing complete shit posts or popular ones with 1,000+ replies already.
Replies like “This is so fucking stupid” with 50k upvotes.
That summarises the reddit commenting and karma experience for me, any comments I’ve made that blew up over 1k were just incredibly stupid comments.
I think that’s actually what I’m noticing most of all? like right off the bat the news/politics communities are actually talking instead of making puns and tweet length comments
almost like Reddit actively encourages blind rage for clicks
They’re free to shape Reddit as they see fit. Although I mourn the loss of the past states of Reddit, I’m also free to extract myself from that ecosystem.
Dang, after reading that, somehow I’m even more glad I overwrote all my past comments and posts with a protest message. You do not get to monetize my speech down to keyword targetting, reddit!
The way that’s written is so blatantly and shamelessly “all these people volunteer and provide an amazing service for free! :D look how much money we can make off this free labor without giving any of those volunteers a single cent, and while sabotaging the service!”
If you want to auto-overwrite your comments and posts, or just delete them, check out Power Delete Suite or Redact by June 30th, before the API change breaks these tools.
Well ok then, fuck you and goodbye :D
LMAO giving r/BuyItForLife as a good example of where to put ads.
It is already infested with covert ads posted as content, anyway.
I’m not going back despite reddit sticking with API changes.
I wasnt going back anyway, but now it’s an even easier decision!
At this point even if they run back their changes, I’m not going back.
Chatted with the moderator teams for the subs I am a part of. Two of them agreed we’ll go dark indefinitely, and we have joined in on that via ModCoord’s post.
The largest with just under 1m users is still thinking about it, but I’m fighting for it.
We need to push them where it hurts: active users for their ads to be used on.
Hopefully you don’t have any rogue mods. Apprently r/adviceanimals got the head mod replced by someone that seems to be more inline with the admins-reddit. (u/legweed -> u/CedarWolf)
We’re good teams, but I really hope not. A couple apathetic mods in each, but they seem content to follow the masses.
Its a game of trying to not log in to reddit (because every click they don’t get is a win for us), and needing to in order to discuss all this nonsense.
I just hope enough subs stay dark and get on board with the choice to go indefinitely.
If you really want to hit Reddit where it hurts: Shut down the subs forever, delete all posts and comments in said subs, put up a sticky post redirecting to Lemmy.
I’m absolutley with you. Deleting everything is the only thing Reddit could hurt on the long term. All other protests is just cosmetic.
Deleting everything without archiving is a pretty destructive thing tho, atleast archiving the comments in some other website would be better
We’re sticking to the Fediverse as well so
I find this post at a moment when the show has already started (as can be seen on https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ and https://reddark.untone.uk/ )
But the article is 3 days old. It seems many did not expect that much unity from subreddits going dark. 2.5 billion affected subscribers is quite something!
I’m still in hopes they change their mind in light of recent events. Don’t think they will though.
2.5 billion affected *subscriptions
Many are overlapping people’s subscriptions of course.
Probably 95% of that is overlapping since one person being subbed to 20 participating subs is counted 20 times, and since some default and massive subs are participating there must be a ton of overlap.
Just goes to show that they were intending to kill 3PAs from the start.
That’s the only logical conclusion. Wouldn’t really make sense otherwise.
You would think that more users means more money for reddit. But I think that might be wrong. I can only assume that 3rd party apps make up a small portion of their daily active users (a metric they likely use to sell ad space). And 3rd party apps aren’t giving reddit any ad revenue. On top of that maintaining the API and support for 3rd party apps costs money. From a business perspective it probably makes a lot of sense to start charging for use.
From what I heard 20% of the userbase was using 3PA. Not an insignificant amount at all.
@Da_Boom
@AdamEatsAss
And that 20% likely accounts for the overwhelming majority of the quality content on Reddit.
Most of the 3PA devs has already said, they are not against paying for API usage, as long as it’s a reasonable price. The pricing Reddit wants is definitely to kill 3PA.
Yeah the calculation made by users, based on Reddit’s general estimates, was around $7.50 per user per month. In this case, a $10 per month subscription for every user would likely fully cover the API costs.
Judging by the “$20 million a year” calculation the Apollo dev made, Reddit’s charging around $1,666,666.66 per month.
Any 3PA would need over 222k users a month (with average-to-heavy usage) to justify that price. Ain’t no way any single 3PA has that many users.
and here i was, truly believing that they would reconsider. as of right now ~4000 of the planned 6600 subs have gone private, if that isn’t enough then oh well
There (likely) won’t be any reconsideration. Reddit’s concern right now isn’t the health of its communities. They’re focused on taking the ball of data they’re sitting on and selling it to AI platforms while the AI gold rush is still happening.
I don’t think that makes sense as an explanation for killing off 3PA/API access. 3PAs would increase user base, and so collection of data, by virtue of providing more channels by which users can contribute and improving the experience for those people would likely increase their engagement. The mod tools that make use of the API would also help with curating that data, which increases its value to an AI consumer.
Cheap API access was letting the AI platforms pull Reddit data directly via API. That’s why the “fix” was making API access expensive, so that buying the data from Reddit instead becomes the more cost-effective solution.
Reddit’s not (as) worried about gathering more data to sell, they’re worried about selling the years of data they already have.
But charging over a million dollars a month instead makes little sense.
I’m hoping that a lot of the subreddits that has gone dark would remain dark indefinitely. Granted, the Reddit admins might try to replace the mods on a lot of the subreddits - but at that point the community may not be the same anymore.
there are a few, such as r/196, but most are only doing it for 48 hours unfortunately.
Honestly, a 3 day, partial shutdown is less than 1% percent of their annual online time. The strike has got to last much longer imo
Well, we, the users can continue to strike. I won’t be back on Reddit.
I am super happy about the subs going permanently dark
As sad as I am to see it go, I’m excited to be a part of what’s next!
What does reddit plan to do with all these communities going dark?
They should remain dark until changes are made. A strike with an end date is pointless.
Note that these are just quotes from the disastrous AMA he held last week, not new comments that have been made.
