Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps
theverge.com
theverge.com
Then why is that not an option? The narrative that they want more tracking and control makes sense with the facts we have.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
"If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id
If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute"
edit: Ah, it also requires applying for an API key on their support website which may or may not be granted to you by Reddit and might take some amount of time. That is not comparable to having proper API access.
It's all about the money and tracking the user.
Plus: a subscription would drive many users away.
Why would they force users to do something they're not too pleased about if it wasn't entirely for generating revenue of some description?
Probably not. It's about money, not enforcing a uniform experience.
They say a product reflects the organization that produced it, and it's clear from the app that this is a company with unchecked Promo-Driven-Development and Resume-Driven-Development. There is no impressive metric that measures app jankiness or design clarity in isolation, and the effort to fix it is disproportionately larger than the line that it adds to your resume or promo package. So even though it's glaringly obvious that the app is broken within 3 seconds of opening it, not a single person anywhere in the org is incentivized to fix it.
I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd how dark they've been towards this user class. It's very similar to the Twitter changes.
The nuke approach they've done will send so many of their important, core users off the site.
This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not that scrapers won't settle for html scraping).
And proxying api calls isn't an end-all solution. This introduces a large burden for the developer to not just run a scalable proxy for the API calls, but also must introduce and manage some abuse prevention system, maybe with their own user account system with reputation ratings based on number of times they've hit a rate limit or how many different subreddits they try to access every day.
It also is generally not good for users to have to deal with a proxy like this, since it means the app developer has the ability to log all of their users' usage, and could be compelled by law enforcement / courts to hand over user PII or activity logs.
Presumably the entire 2005-2023 (up to March) dataset which is (was) freely available on Pushshift / torrents is enough?
Also, not that Sam Altman is unbiased, but he did say that social media (Reddit, Twitter) were not super important for developing LLMs (But of course, that's exactly what he would say if they were useful!)
But sure, there are plenty of other data sources as well. On top of the problem of not wanting to train your data on content you know is littered with bots.
Significant outdated cultural knowledge seems the norm for humans too.
One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying members their value. The developer now feels he cannot charge lifetime members an extra $2.5/month because he promised them he wouldn't
Beyond the discussion of is Reddit about to die or not, selling LIFETIME access to someone elses free API is a dumb move, which will always end badly
I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23743993/reddit-apollo-cl...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/r3npbm/last_call...
That's my point though. Reddit is NOT charging $2.5/mo for API access. It is charging a set amount per app (based on overall usage), and the developer has to now be in the business of creating and charging for a whole new subscription themselves to make up for what they have to pay Reddit.
Putting aside the bad salesmanship and planning of selling a forever license, it is absolutely way too much money.
Smart on him for selling those…
Perhaps you should read Christian’s post on Reddit [1] where he described, in detail, what this truly means and how he was effectively lied to by Reddit; and an interview where he states that he actually understands Reddit charging for API access — he doesn’t understand why the burden is being put on the app developers and why they didn’t give app developers considerable more time to make the adjustment with respect to their own pricing [2].
Reddit isn’t wrong for trying to monetize their API to cover service and server costs. Reddit is absolutely wrong for lying to app developers, charging an egregious amount to the app developers, and for not giving them enough time to be able to change their pricing terms and not leave developers on the hook for millions while existing pricing tiers (such as someone who paid in advance) still have months before renewal.
[1] https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_w...
I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.
There are technical issues too. Many users report issues playing videos and gifs.
Finally, the Reddit app serves ads.
You can fix both these issues in the app settings. Turning off feed thumbnails is also a big improvement.
You cannot. The "classic" layout is still less information dense than Apollo, and disabling autoplay only disables autoplaying videos in the "card" layout. Videos still auto-play once a user taps a submission.
While we're here, I forgot how hostile their navigation menu is. At the bottom of the app Reddit has "Home," "Discover," "Create," "Chat," and "Inbox." The latter doesn't even take one to their inbox. It takes them to their *activity." These are clearly not the most used actions on Reddit. They're the actions Reddit wants to encourage.
It's an absolutely insane and frustrating UX. Things slide in from different directions and there are multiple UI elements with similar (but not identical) functionality. That's on top of crap like not being able to download gifs and videos right to my device and the built in video player being broken. There are so many other major social media apps that do things so much better it just boggles my mind at how bad reddit's is. TikTok is so smooth and easy to use, even Facebook is better.
In Apollo on the other hand, I view my comments by tapping the "profile" button at the bottom of the screen. In a comment thread, to view a user's history, tap their name and their history pops up. It's smooth and intuitive and fast and simple. I always "go back" views by sliding from the left - the interactions never change depending on context so I always know exactly how to navigate intuitively.
That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app are materially better than the same users directly paying for the service they actually want.
I’m not saying that Reddit handled it well. Buy your option doesn’t seem to be any better.
Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.
Reddit won because it was the Digg-alternative, they’ve always been on shaky ground if people just start posting less. What ever per-impression value they get now on their own apps/website will plummet if people just start using it less, regardless if they’re making ad revenue off every user or only some users.
Plus, yeah it’s an awesome LLM training resource. Make it cheap, why not? Your competitors are expensive, and your data is well indexed by topic and conversational in tone.
Because of Reddit's current practices, I've cancelled my premium membership. I'll likely move on from Reddit unless they chart a path where I and others can continue to use our third party clients happily.
Are we living in different universes?
Less than 1% of Reddit users will be impacted by these changes. If all the people who are upset at this leave, it will have almost no impact to Reddit. A few niche subreddits may die, but that's it.
Tell HN: My Reddit account was banned after adding my subs to the protest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192312 (411 points/10 hours ago/174 comments)
Don't let Reddit kill 3rd party apps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179853 (361 points/1 day ago/254 comments)
How Reddit became the enemy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36177876 (172 points/1 day ago/154 comments)
Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 (406 points/3 days ago/421 comments)
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 (1969 points/4 days ago/1310 comments)
It's a lot more diverse than Twitter, where it seems that only right wing bullshit is shown any more, or HN, where 90% of posters are men aged 20-40.
There are examples of this kind of strict imposition of dogma by fiat in every reddit community, on matters large and small.
The rot is root deep at this point if it's let things like this happen.
> aren't even from Portland
Ah, there we go ;-)
Not really, there are a bunch of small reddits that really is a good source of information and community. E.g. r/leathercraft, r/learnmath, r/godot and so on...
It's a tricky balance. I've been in small (~sub 500) subreddits that are worse than larger ones just because the mods don't enforce any posting requirements.
It seems heavily made up of very young people, which means a reliable trope is "I'm just getting into <genre> -- what are some good artists I should check out?"
But that's pretty harmless; you can just ignore them.
I enjoy trolling those users by posting circlejerk answers in the unironic subreddits.
The lacking management of Reddit have allowed it to become a pretty weird place, not quite as bad as Imgur, but the idea is much the same. The community have been left to it's own devices for many years, and now the owners are trying to get some control back, in an attempt to make a profit. They're a just so far removed from what the community have built that they have no idea how to manage the site anymore.
Ironically she's a felon who lives in her parents basement. Probably shouldn't be moralizing.
https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
Looks like an interesting approach.
I mean, even though you’ve directly linked to the server list (instead of their even less straightforward front page), it’s still confusing. What is a new user supposed to do with this? It’s all incredibly opaque.
Sadly it received less publicity and mind share than lemmy, so not everything might be up to the expectations of the HN crowd.
The average is lost on the first page, and you need her for these social based apps. You need the non tech savvy people to get communities like r/medicine.
Otherwise you get shat you see on IRC LiberaChat nowadays: the channels with people are mainly technical or technically related ones. ... which like, is good for people like us. But I come to HN for quality tech related discussions... I want a place for quality InstantPot talk, or quality ChildFree chat.
If Twitter proved anything, its that its really hard to kill a popular social media network, no matter how badly managed or drama filled it is.
Of course, if someone uses a moral, ethics, or personal political and societal view to judge if a company is well run, then I agree it may appear to many people that Twitter is badly run. But if we take a company valuation and consider the time it took it to achieve it, it's certainly one of the best run companies.
I'd argue this is a failure of imagination more than an endorsement of Twitter. Twitter has inertia - it's going to keep going until it literally can't, and that doesn't mean it's been run well.
It's been chaotic there since acquisition, with major policies being changed on a whim and then retracted and whole functions of the company disappearing entirely or almost entirely. Major news outlets are dropping their twitter presence, and stocks have dropped - if you define that as "good" management, what would bad management even look like?
all together the 3rd party app users and res users consist of millions of the most dedicated tech savvy users that will switch.
myspace and digg technically exist but they're no longer relevant. Reddit is moving in the same direction
Lemmy/kbin is more popular than it has even been and the main lemmy instance is overloaded.
July when the actual apps shut down we'll see a huge migration to the fediverse
Reddit's app has terrible UI/UX, as does the website redesign (new.reddit.com, which is the default www.reddit.com). The only good UI/UX is old.reddit.com, which isn't very good on mobile.
Where do you get this information from? And what is "a lot"?
I'd wager 99% of Reddit users (therefor, income) use the official reddit app and new website.
Without those users, there is no platform.
Reddit the company has shown to completely misunderstand the userbase that created their website and they're slaughtering it to make a buck to payoff their own investors. So why not prove them wrong and do it yourself?
Most top-level reddit posts come from bots reposting old content. Those bots aren't using the first party app...
No idea how many of those apps are third party, but I would be willing to bet 'most' of them.
The r/Toronto city subreddit is absolute garbage now because of what the mods have done. They decided they would have "no-crime January" as a trial to see what the subreddit looks like if users weren't allowed to post articles about petty crime throughout the city. When someone gets stabbed in a high-profile area it couldn't be posted under the no-crime January rules. They said they would run it as a trial and offer a survey to see what people thought. They didn't run the survey and the rule is now in place permanently. Of course, when a white guy or incel commits a crime it's allowed, but if it's a BIPOC? Deleted.
Now the mods are trying to astroturf the municipal election we have coming up and push one of the candidates. It's the "progressive" candidate and in true Canadian fashion, if you don't vote for the progressive the reddit mob wants you to vote for you might as well be a Conservative because you're handing them the election. The mods allow people to make posts that say nonsense such as:
> To all Progressives - we need to consolidate behind [redacted] now. [He/she] might not be my first choice but this is finally an election where we can put a people-first person in. We can't screw this up by splitting the vote.
To suggest you can be a progressive but want another candidate will result in downvotes and insults. Funny enough, those insults would get you banned under their famous Rule 2 which basically allows them to delete or ban anything they deem as "not excellent" but when directed at someone who is seen as "conservative" they are allowed. The subreddit has been like this for about 5-6 years, it's only the political polarization that's got more extreme lately.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-theme-studi...
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/_/jgrsf2q/?...
As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reasons other than "build a thriving community of diverse, good faith discussion."
Every big subreddit needs a dang.
People say this, but I find it completely untrue. Many people do a lot of things for good reasons, or else we wouldn't have charities. This cynical outlook is toxic and it is a reason why a lot of the people with 'good motives' get burned out. When no one gives you the benefit of consideration that you actually care about your community and want to see it thrive then you lose those motives. This is coming from someone who moderates many (>15) subreddits, with the largest one having 674,038 subscribers as of this posting.
I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another. On neither side do normal, sane people want to participate.
No idea.
> I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another.
The specialist interest subs are mostly still worth it.
There are better ways to handle this without just saying "give us millions of dollars". Something like requiring that users pay a subscription to reddit to use it, for example.
Sure there is, you can simply stop using reddit. You don't have to replace it with something new. Take whatever other hobbies and activities you already have and extend the time you devote to them into the time-slot formerly occupied by reddit.
For Reddit to be user-hostile is for Reddit to be Reddit-hostile.
Thats reddit. The people that use the first party app and click ads and make money do it because of the content created by both the first party and third party app users.
We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
When you choose where to host your Wordpress or whatever, you don’t worry about someone shutting off the API keys. On this page is a video explaining how that would work:
On the other hand we see this all the time:
https://twitter.com/nk1tz/status/1197347554201133056?s=46&t=...
Isn’t that lovely? The screenshot of HN complaining bitterly about someone controlling their own giant platform that we have all come to rely on. And the only solution is “switch to {{their competitor}}” as if that will solve it. This is just one of thousands of examples.
A free market literally overrun by Nazis is what that means in the end. It's best seen on all the Twitter clone attempts that marketed themselves as "free speech" alternatives - most notably Parler, Gab and Truth Social: they all ended up being echo chambers of Nazis, where no one but them would want to hang out. The "board scene" had similar moments... from OG 4chan to 8chan and others, as soon as the current "hot" platform began to moderate away the worst of the worst (usually due to some terrorist focusing the police and general public spotlight on it), they simply moved away.
The other way, federation of instances like with Mastodon, has a different problem set: while Nazi, CSAM and otherwise problematic instances get cut off from the larger instances, discovery absolutely sucks compared to the elephant (or rather, bird) in the room - there's no way to run "trending topic" campaigns, which was the feature that made Twitter so successful among protesters and dissidents: it allowed them to easily reach a global audience to put a spotlight on government abuses.
The solution to go forward is what the EU is doing with the DSA/DMA: allow big, centralized platforms, and force the operators to adhere to a common baseline of moderation standards.
First of all — if you are so worried about being overrun by nazis, you should worry about being overrun by bots, who could gradually astruturf any ideology including nazism or 4chan QAnon or recruiting of incels into jihadism or something as simple as “let’s go to war against China”. (And furthermore, Carthage delendum est.) It is far more insidious because it would be done as a coordinated, long-term swarm attack. A persistent advanced threat, in all communities, available to anyone to deploy. All open communities would turn into a dark forest and you’ll cry out to Zuck and Elon to save you, and trust them even more.
That is why we will soon all be moving to private communities where we — not Zuck or Elon’s algorithms — select who we hear from, and where membership is grandfathered in and/or depends on actually showing up to events in person once in a while and interacting (gasp, you mean like, BEFORE the Internet? When people had fulfilling social lives?)
Rather than preventing people from forming their own communities, you should support open source tools that give them access to their own infrastructure. If they want to label Nagorno-Karabakh on their copy of OpenStreetMap “Armenia” or “Azerbaijan”, they can, and don’t have to kill each other in the name of The State flags.
How about if we each have our own private keychains to sign what we say, rather than Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy (which Google apologized for) or their centralized sign-in which basicallly controls your identity? Or CBDCs and National IDs from The State which are coming? Or even worse, scanning your eyeballs by “Worldcoin” founded by the same OpenAI guys who promised to be open nonprofit and later became closed for-profit?
Tell me, when you are jacked into a metaverse for 10 hours a day (eg for work and some fun), would you want it to be owned by a corporation, their world and you just live in it? Are you preferring to trust Facebook, a company that has surreptitiously spied on your audio and your camera every chance they got until they got caught?
We have perfectly good Web2 solutions like Verified Claims and certificate chains, for many of these things, and you can watch my interviews with the technologists who actually roll it out, such as:
Private Keys and Civic Participation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM
Founder of Freenet, the first decentralized encrypted file sharing platform: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
Well not that anything would be effective. They really do need to funnel people to their app, their revenue per user is awful.
There are many thriving niche subreddits. Maybe the "main function" of Reddit is categorization? If so, it seems reasonably effective, so long as people feel motivated enough to moderate those subreddits. That's the issue at hand.
It is going to be a bumpy ride, and the content owners dont give a damn about third party apps.
I solely blame the developers of the apps, for trusting a mega corporation that is set on path of profiteering and data secrecy.
1. Articulate the reason for your action
2. Explain what specific things need to happen to redress the problem
I haven't seen any clear statement of (2). Am I missing something?
Maybe they figure the implied message of "you are doing a bad thing we don't like. Don't do the bad thing" may be enough to get some change to happen, if change is a real possibility.
Dear Reddit, You are about to do a bad thing. Don't do that thing, or I will leave your platform. kthnxbai
- roll back all API pricing changes to the status quo ante
- Offer more reasonable pricing tiers, for some value of 'more reasonable'
- do what you want with the API, but give moderators the tools they need (right now only available in third party apps)
- something else
What are you missing?
Seems still alive.
I know there are a bunch of spinoffs that use that codebase though, TheMotte, Ovarit, and rDrama
This would potentially be rather different, in that the group being driven away is more _normal_.
With the networks separated, users should, theoretically, be able to switch content networks at will.
It will almost certainly have a noticeable effect, especially if many of these subreddits decide to hold the blackout indefinitely.
Reddit is entirely dependent on a large number of unpaid volunteers to moderate their site. Without moderation the site will turn into a cesspool of spam and other unsavory content. No brand is going to want to put their adds next to that.
The problem is that unpaid volunteer have no obligations towards Reddit. They aren’t employees so you can’t fire them, they aren’t depending on Reddit for their livelihood and you can’t easily replace them (you’d have to find another sucker to provide free labor for you). They certainly can’t afford to hire enough people to replace the volunteer moderators.
So Reddit is now pissing off the very group of people they depend on for their existence, a group of people that can walk away from Reddit with zero consequences. They have shown time and again to not care about the people they need the most to remain in business. They are one dumb-ass move by the admins away from going belly up. Does this company sound like a good investment opportunity to you ?
... And no one will even notice...