Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
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.
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
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. :)
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’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!
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!
Thank you! And you, too!
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 so wish there were one here, but yeah, I don’t have the time or experience to make mod something like that.
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.
I agree with you. I’m OK with keeping one foot in reddit just for that sub, but it would feel wrong to use the wider site.
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.
That’s what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don’t really see how Reddit recovers from this. It’s sad because I loved it and there’s nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
There are 3.1 million subreddits.
That 8838 is the number of subs who pledged to protest in some capacity. A lot of them are big subreddits, but still. It’s not like they’ve cut off access to 90% of the site like some people think.
Yeah but how many of those millions are ghost towns?, since a lot of the biggest subs are participating I’m more curious about how reddit will handle it, replacing the mods in every one of them? That’s a lot of man power, I hope whoever they put in charge isn’t an idiot that does it for free, and what’s more funny is that the best mod tools rely on the API and 3rd party access.
At the very least I expect a decline in quality content and spam, trolls, bots etc.
My bet? AI.
If they have any kind of archive of past mod decisions then they can just dump all that into a neural net. And then they get to look all sexy in their upcoming IPO because they are using ⭐️⭐️⭐️ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE⭐️⭐️⭐️ like all the ⭐️⭐️⭐️SEXIEST⭐️⭐️⭐️ companies!!!1! No more of those annoying unpaid volunteers to get uppity any more!
I, for one, do not welcome our new AI moderation overlords, and will probably be done with Reddit if this happens. But I just know someone there has to be pushing for this.
It would take a considerable while to train an in-house LLM AI for moderation purposes, and even if it was trained honestly it would at least be consistent whereas you can get away with breaking mod rules as long as your meme made them chuckle, etc.
Who cares, AI will become a part of Lemmy too and I’m just done with reddit anyways.
Oh I’m not saying these putative AI mods would be any better than existing Reddit mods. They’d probably be even more arbitrary and capricious and unappealable, and I sure don’t expect them to be anywhere near fully-trained. But they’d be owned by Reddit, who would now be ⭐️⭐️⭐️AN AI COMPANY⭐️⭐️⭐️, which is the replacement for “the blockchain” as a thing you vaguely mention your company using if you want rich, dumb investors to wet their pants and throw tons of money at you.
The word you’re looking for is “buzzword”.
That’s the neat part, it doesn’t have to be good.
even assuming reddit can ship an “AI moderation bot” that kinda works in the upcoming week (which will be the feat of the year), quality will start going down long before it can moderate at a good enough capacity to work well.
Over half my feed went dark. I was only getting posts from 4-5 subreddits, mostly news. That’s a big impact on a user.
Yep. I was disappointed WTF didn’t participate.
I guess they’re living up to their name?
All the subreddits I subscribe to went dark except for 1. It’s a sub about this show called “From”. I’m slightly disappointed in them
Losing RIF is what got me looking elsewhere.
Yeah, but those subs contain the majority of redditor interaction. ~70k people on a sub is enough to put it into the top 5%. The top 1% subs are very likely responsible for 50%+ of all reddit posts. Losing just a handful of them is a big deal.
Unfortunately in a few hours most of those subreddits will open back up and it’ll be business as normal. The ones that don’t open will be transferred over to new moderators and they’ll resume normal operation too.
Realistically, for the most part, not much will change for Reddit. A lot has changed for me and you, though. I’ve diversified my entertainment and don’t intend to lurk the same website for hours a day. I like Lemmy, and I like the people here but Reddit is too old and too encompassing to never visit it again.
The problem is that there is a lot of great crowd-sourced knowledge on Reddit on everything from programming to which microwave oven I should buy. It’s going to take time to replace that, if it can be done.
It can be done, it just won’t be done while Reddit is up. Eventually it will go away and that knowledge will have to be rediscovered and reposted elsewhere.
Good point! I hope that happens!
I kind of want all the users to wipe their comments and burn it down like the library of Alexandria. Then spez can’t mine it for AI.
I hate losing the window into humanity, but it would be insanely satisfying to watch the fire burn.
if you do this just remember to redact your comments and posts FIRST and do it only while the subs are live tomorrow not dark right not. read a different post that thishas something to do with what reddit keep and can use.
I actually used power delete suite to do just that. Fuck spez
Couldn’t agree more on your second paragraph. I have lurked Reddit for years. This, however, is my first comment, and it’s on Lemmy…
:D I’m honored to be the first person you reply to! Hope this Lemmy thing goes places.
You and me both! Look at that, I’ve doubled my number of comments…better go and lie down :)
Me, too. I am also a Reddit transplant, and I still don’t understand everything here (also trying mastodon, but they can share users? I admit, I don’t get it, lol), but I’m hopeful that enough people will make the move. I was on Reddit for 15 years, on the old Reddit desktop website, then on RIF when I got a smartphone. I won’t use Reddit’s app, it sucks, so, that’s that.
Yea, My sub is only going dark from the 12th - 14th, i already replicated the sub here. but its not Reddit 0_o I don’t think anything will ever replace reddit but give it sometime and after the exodus on the 30th this will be the only place to be. RedReader on Reddit is a good third party app for reddit (On Android) But its a learning curve but good. I heard it had immunity from the 3p app list cause of its accessibilty.
People said the same about Digg
And MySpace
Digg gutted a lot more content and usability with their redesign.
That said, if reddit axes old…
Reddit might become dog if they follow through with baking third party apps
wonder if we need some discord “lemmy migration office hours” to help users get started?
Remember MySpace?
Yep, I actually do. was to young and internet was iffy back in the day.
Well it forced me to look for alternative. People won’t necessarily stick with Lemmy right now, but they know there are alternative, some of their name and what it looks like.
Personally I have looked at Lemmy and nine or kine (something like that) and I think it’s pretty close.
Was it kbin.social?
yes kbin :)
Piggy backing off this to remind people that after multiple reports of a child porn seller on reddit were either ignored or claimed to not to violate TOS, spez personally banned me for harassment after I asked him to intervene.
The CP seller was still active MONTHS later.
deleted by creator
I think Reddit will have a somewhat significant loss in users but it’ll endure, at least for the time being. Social media sites die slower now. But I’m happy I found alternatives because I just can’t see myself using their official app
Absolutely agree with this. Twitter is still going strong, in part because the fediverse is “too hard.” Reddit isn’t going anywhere.
in part because the fediverse is “too hard.”
I think this is probably a good thing, it might keep dumb people away.
As an aside, it’s starting to irritate me how often I see people complain the fediverse/threadiverse is too complex or too difficult to understand. I mean, you managed to understand that email accounts live on different servers, but you can’t apply that same mental logic to forums living on different servers?
I am fairly tech savvy. It took me some time to understand the fediverse and how it works. The thing is, you need to read stuff to understand. That is well above the capabilities of like 80% of people. Oh, and you won’t believe how many people I have met that have no idea what a server is or how email works. Trust me, the bar for entry is pretty high for the average joe. It’s a good filter though.
Having spent the last couple of decades in tech support I’d say you’re being very generous with the estimate of ~20% of people being willing and able to read so they can understand something…
Yeah. I was a lot more cynical before now. Half a year ago I would have said like 5%. And thank you for your service o7.
The part that confused and pushed me away is the fact that depending on which email server you sign up for, you may not be able to send or receive an email to a server that may or may not already exist. If the person/group that runs the instance you signed up for defederates something, you’re out of luck if you wanted to use that instance without making a dedicated account over there. It also doesn’t help that the federation of different instances isn’t automatic or retroactive. Someone on your instance has to subscribe to something on another instance for the federation to start, and it only starts pulling content from that point forward. If you want to see older content you have to go to that instance at a minimum, and maybe sign up for that instance depending on what it is. Those are the biggest factors against the Fediverse, in my opinion.
Completely agree. Fediverse is cool in theory, but I don’t know if I’m fully convinced it’s a workable replacement as a content aggregator that we’ve come to expect in this day and age. Hell, you already have instances like lemmy.ml banning people for posting news stories that show China or Russia in a negative light. And lemmy.ml is one of the default instances advertised when you look into Lemmy! That’s a terrible first impression for new users and I think it’s going to turn a lot of people away if censorship is a common occurence on bigger instances.
Also, the Lemmy app on Android is not very good. I can’t even upvoted any comments or posts because it constantly times out.
That all being said, I’m cautiously optimistic that devs will be able to improve the platform over time. Like I said, the Fediverse is cool in theory and I like the concept, but it does have some major drawbacks for content consumers, as you pointed out.
agree- reddit is a fucking big house that won’t burn down to the ground in a day. we’re should take comfort though in the fact that spez keri’s throwing fuel in the fire hastening it’s demise.
Between this place, and https://squabbles.io/… Reddit is no longer relevant.
As of today, he’s saying “the blackout will pass.” Doesn’t sound he cares at all, so I’m here now. Hello, new friend!
deleted by creator
I think that’s just the biggest ones.
It’s not 8838 total, I’m pretty sure it’s the list of subs that said they’ll participate
Guess I’m sticking with Lemmy, then.
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Honestly fuck that guy. I’m glad that I don’t need to continue supporting this person.
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.
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.
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!
What’s your community, illegallysmoldogs? I have two criminals myself. Subbed.
Thanks 😁
I subbed, too. Too cute! My first sub on Lemmy, lol.
Thanks. I open my sub tomorrow on reddit. but I think its way cooler over here. Another mod over there is going to open it plus its automated now so I will hardly interace with it. but yea I’m loving lemmy and might close the reddit sub don’t know still thinking about everything
Thanks
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let’s gooooo lemmy!
I won’t argue against the need for reddit to be profitable, they’re a business after all, BUT, all respectable software that is paid has different tiers of pricing, usually ranging from single-user to corporate-deployment.
spez is complaining everywhere that they can’t allow corporate-level scraping of data to train AI for free, and that’s fair, but why don’t they differentiate “small” devs developing apps for users from “corporations” training AI?
I find it really hard to believe it’s too difficult for them, other paid software/platforms do it all the time.
The only logical explanation to me is they don’t want to, they just want to kill apps no matter what, that’s why the unreasonable prices for everyone, they’re just using the “no profitable” excuse to do that without a worse backslash than they’re getting already, tho they’re being quite stupid about it.
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
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
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.
Dam this makes my blood boil. My sub went dark for no reason!!
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.
Ahh, the Disney Star Wars tactic.
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.
Yup. I get it too. ‘We’ll lock down and get rid of the 3rd party apps, just give us a couple of months.’
I’m also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.
deleted by creator
This would be very good for Lemmy, I’ve just started an instance and trying to find content from all the federated servers can be a bit of a pain…
It’s not actually about the money in that sense. Don’t be fooled.
No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That’s the real investor pitch, they just aren’t saying it out loud.
If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?
If it’s about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can’t possibly be met? Why don’t they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?
They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can’t pay.
They still have and will sell all the user data.
That’s the reason why I edited all my posts/comments and deleted them afterwards. Also requested all my data with a GDPR form, will also request deletion it they don’t budge
deleted by creator
I thought companies going into an IPO are often unprofitable/losing money, but still attract investments in the hope of future profits.
Something like that!
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.
