Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).
Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...
If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
therefore they don't exist after IPO.
Discord and Twitch have a funding model that would probably work great for Reddit. Allow users to pay a small fee to upgrade their subscription to a subreddit - maybe $1.50/mo per sub or $15/mo for all subs. The upgrade includes access to special emojis for the sub, a special flair or re-colored username, and no ads on the upgraded sub. A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub, and Reddit could pocket the rest.
That creates bad incentives, though. A streamer I mod for once suggested something similar, I told them I’d quit modding in that case. If it’s a job, it stops being a hobby.
There is a name for this effect (it's no cognitive dissonance) I think - I recall reading about it in Freakonomics, wherein they discuss it in the scope of parents being "fined" for picking up their children late. The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a business transaction - instead of being a social imposition - and actually led to more delays, not fewer
Are you referring to incentives? Specifically turning a social incentive to a market incentive?
> The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a business transaction
It should also be noted the parent’s monthly bill was around $380, and the fine was only around $3. So even being late every workday in a month was only an additional $60. And I’m sure some of those parents would happily spend that to be rid of their children for a little bit longer.
I do wish it was recorded whether the length of tardiness increased as well, and what the mean and mode were. Whether parents started to abuse the time or not, in effect milking the daycare for care, is an important data point as well.
Admittedly without quoting it does look out of place. I just edited it to fix that. Thank you!
The most (in)famous example in the US is the American Red Cross following the US forces in Europe during WW2 beginning to charge a few cents for donuts that they had been giving away for free. While they were still inexpensive compared to their usual price at US donut shops, it was a huge change in the relationship that ended up souring a lot of soldiers towards the Red Cross.
The economists have their own name for many phenomena that come down to the same thing that the psychologists would predict. Hence the rise of "behavioral economics" to converge the fields.
If I pay you just a little bit for something you were doing, it may not really register much because it isn't enough money to really do anything with besides buy a meal or a new toy here and there or something.
If I pay you enough for it to be considered a job, that brings in a whole bunch of new expectations on both sides. You may expect to be paid a fair wage compared to what you previously did, to have a good career path, to do something that looks good on a resume, to have a good work-life balance, etc. And they may expect a certain stable and reliable productivity level, advanced notice for any time off, etc.
Then they killed it.
Decent perks for an eye-watering price, and you don’t even get encrypted messages to boot.
Twitch's model works great for creators but not for Twitch and as a result Twitch has been working hard to force their creators to run more ads.
https://www.reddit.com/premium
They don't revenue share with moderators though, because as far as Reddit is concerned, fuck moderators.
I’m unsure why Twitch would keep squeezing every dollar in insane ways unless their funding model isn’t working either.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well:
> Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip jar with a few dollars.
Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when committing said fraud would bring said investigation because it increased the value of its investment.
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.
Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.
For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
Social media sites are usually valued by how many active users they have, so what's a better measure of that?
I am not very active, but people are following me daily.
It's not like they need first to detect those users are bots.
They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users.
I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…
It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it.
Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.
Sure, they could be dumb enough to do that, but no evidence of it.
I agree, but all content _is_ generated by users.
Maybe they're hoping to find a private buyer for all of their equity who's willing to waive due diligence.
(this is more a user persona rather than meaning an actual tiktok user but it seems that's the way Reddit wants to go)
When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply using the site the same way that anyone else could (albeit with a streamlined interface).
But when the actions are done in an attempt to trick individuals weighing financial incentives? That becomes much more murky. Had they bootstrapped these communities prior to the IPO filing? Fine. After the spotlight is on them to prove organic growth for the IPO? Murky.
Strong disagree, reading such things habitually is corrosive to the mind and turns people bitter. For reddit to recommend and promote ragebait subreddits to their user is deeply unethical. And to create fraudulent ragebait content, to make people vicariously mad about something that didn't even happen, is evil on par with being a tobacco advertiser.
Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.
So far…
- PaLM
- GPT3
- Falcon
Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.
But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.
Source:
In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either
And there's the scam laid bare.
It's *NOT* Reddit's content. Sure, by posting you're granting them a whole slew of rights. But you dont transfer ownership to them.
And when your content creators leave, blammo, you have no more new content. And I'm already seeing some subreddits drop dramatically in terms of comments and posts. Tech ones, naturally. Turns out Lemmy is actually pretty cool for a fediverse version of reddit.
We're already seeing the start of death of Imgur as "reddit image host", oh wait "imgur social network", oh wait "no porn Imgur". We all know how this works out. Same game, just a bit ahead of reddit.
They can fully dictate the terms of their API sure, but unless they want to drop off all search indexes there is nothing they can do about people scraping the data the old fashioned way.
There’s a real non-negligible cost to Reddit hosting the content.
The bottom line is there’s solutions here.
- High volume API users pay up and subsidize the cost of everyone else
OR
- All Reddit users pay a monthly 9.99 subscription and the API stays the same.
OR
- A not-for-profit let’s say Internet Archive takes ownership and begs the Reddit community for donations (ie. Wikipedia)
- Everyone will just run web scrapers increasing the load on reddit's servers even more
An API actually REDUCES load and lets you manage it.
Please answer the question:
How is Reddit supposed to make money with increased load and demand for its content?
Please answer the question:
How is reddit supposed to prevent scraping when it is legal to do so, and they have incentive to appear in search engines? Considering that scraping is legal and WILL happen, why not opt to reduce the load by offering an API?
The infrastructure they provide is easily replicable at almost no cost (really it's just the bandwidth that costs any money at all). The community curation and moderation is done by volunteers. The content is all from the users. Reddit Inc is providing almost none of the value, and is just benefiting from network effects. People go there because people go there.
The real meat and potatoes is plain old text with Reddit style markup.
The bottom line is they'll happily pull the rug from under those 3rd party devs if it means they can pump their numbers for their IPO.
Small cost x moderate usage = moderate cost Small cost x overthetop usage = overthetop cost
What they should do is really hammer the LLMs.
I think this is more about the IPO and inflating figures.
Reddit content is actively being pillaged by LLMs.
They can EASILY provide high prices to LLMs and low prices to app devs. They just won’t. It’s in their best interests to remove third parties and force everyone on the inferior, ad-ridden official app. They could even make premium-based account tokens to allow them to use third party apps, but that’s too long-term oriented. They have to pump’n’dump NOW.
Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.
Sucks.
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
Keeping third party apps open for Premium users is one way out. Another alternative would be to keep API costs low enough that developers can reasonably pass that cost to subscription users. But the current state would just lead to massive disruption. They will end up killing the golden goose.
Very doable on desktop with RES though, which so far isn't going to be affected by the API pricing changes.
As for desktop: Going by last week stats, in my community, there are about 83 posts/day and 969 comments/day on average with 6 posts getting reported for breaking ToS, and numerous other flagged comments. If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with their tools.
My tool of choice should be able to highlight new answers quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't do this by reddit mobile and their new desktop UI. Reddit's old interface won't allow all mod tools (such as assigning removal reasons) and the new UI is half baked. The mobile third party interfaces have been at least reasonably consistent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/141hyv3/a...
If its too hard I'd probably throw in the towel. I cannot invest my time & energy in futility when the parent company itself isn't interested to solve that problem space.
I did, but maintenance mode doesn't have to mean discontinued, it just means the software is stable and will be patched as issues arise.
> Its a third party tool too
Yup, but explicitly not affected by the API changes.
> If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with their tools.
The two largest subs I mod are about 500k and 300k respectively. I cover a LOT of the modding by configuring automod which is more capable than people realize, and allowing for self-moderation (if users report X amount of times it gets autoremoved).
> My tool of choice should be able to highlight answers quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't do this by reddit mobile and the new desktop UI.
This is exactly how I use RES.
We have automod set up but given how strong opinions can be on heuristic driven scientific areas, I'd be careful not to make it rule based. People will be kicking each other's comments out. That defeats the idea of moderation: civil, well reasoned conversations & productive posts.
But then it depends from community to community. Maybe the conversations in your community are more linear. Mine has to deal with multipolarity & we simply can't do it with how flammable it gets.
(FWIW, this is a screenshot of our efforts to run it according to the rules: https://imgur.com/a/RuU0NKA
The top row is mine as others are dormant moderation members who step up on need basis. 1.3k actions are reasonably high which we can't solve only by automod)
Have firm rules about what is and is not allowed. Match comments for keywords and set rules for how you want such comments to be dealt with. Doing it this way eases moderation by having to review the mod log more often than the mod queue and approve false positives, which as you refine your automod rules, there will be less of.
> It also depends on daily active members (we get about 5.6k DAU on weekly average i.e these people are upvoting/commenting at least. I hope these numbers scale linearly for you
One of the subs I mod is for a very active and polarizing TV show, so it's much mroe active when the show is on, but yes, easily that amount of DAU.I take the view that voting doesn't matter at all, only rule breaking content. I prefer to have a police of minimal interference and suggest users block people they disagree with. Only rule breaking content need be dealt with.
> We have automod set up but given how strong opinions can be on heuristic driven scientific areas, I'd be careful not to make it rule based. People will be kicking each other's comments out.
You can use it irrespective of users, just have it match patterns and take action based on that. It's very very capable honestly. Reviewing the mod log for false positives is much easier in many ways.
> we simply can't do it with how flammable it gets.
Can you honestly say you understand the full extent of what automod can do before you say that? It's not just a simple tool, it allows for complex pattern matching and actions based on that. I mod the subs pretty much myself due to being 'always online', and I keep rejecting other people asking to be mod because I managed to do everything needed with automod and supervision. FWIW the community also says they are impressed with how well the sub is run.
Until they kill the old UI, which has similar issues to third party clients, and basically only gets by because they forgot about it for a decade.
But everything they do now is to try and force arbitrary engagement metrics and this will only drive users away. Contrary to popular belief users don't like bubbles.
a new competitor will arise to fill that void. some jaded user writes something better, at no cost to the company, inspired by what once was and what could be - the virtuous cycle of growth begins anew.
…oh right, that would require non-cost-prohibitive third party access.
welp…
If you downloaded Alien Blue on an old device, you can still use it today, because the standalone Reddit app is a separate application in the app store altogether.
I'm pretty sure they bought the audience. Reddit did not have an app before this, and Alien Blue was by far the most popular one. It was subsequently abandoned and that's how Apollo was born. Even Apollo doesn't have some of the features that Alien Blue had.
See Apollo as an example. You have a single dev, with very fine apple ios ecosystem knowledge, who always adds the latest apple api's and listens to community feedback and makes the best app, he alone can make in whatever way serves him to learn new coding skills and community requested features.
On the other hand on Reddit official app, you have tons of product managers forcing developers to work on many features that are outright against community feedback. See things like reducing information load, or making ads indistinguishable from content. Those features benefit reddit but many users hate them,
Apollo has dense vs wide posts and no ads. Official reddit app doesn't.
The value proposition and the audience they are catering too is very different. Buying the app is not gonna fix the fundamentally opposite goals of both apps. Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that. it also wasted months of their time making some fake reddit nft side proyect that was dead on arrival.
Did you miss the part where it took them years to get a functional video player and it's still the worst one you'll likely ever use?
If reddit puts two juniors working on the video player and then has half the team working on making the stupid profile pictures for users that is not an issue of developer talent.
I have 0 doubt that there are really good devs at reddit, and I am also sure they are being made to work on monetisation shit and not on fixing mod tools, video player, bot detection and power user options which would make the app 1000% times better
For their Customers they will. Their customers are ad agencies.
What they will never make a good product is for its users because the goals of reddit the company and the userbase are opposed.
Maybe they do have fantastic devs, but it sure don't show in what users interact with.
I understand their focus is on users downloading the app, but this is just sloppy poor craftsmanship.
I refuse to, and I will abandon reddit when 3rd party apps stop working.
Still buggy as hell, but they are improving it.
Only when that crap can be turned off it will be as good or better than a year ago.
Firefox on Android with no extensions.
It's not sloppy or poor craftsmanship, it's intentional.
I’m effect, I guess what you and others are saying is that it doesn’t matter if Reddit has good devs or bad, they are going to put out a terrible product.
This is what it looks like when I click on a post: https://i.imgur.com/wqNAofO.png
This is on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.
Side-by-side comparison (i.reddit.com on the right): https://old.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/7kaqgb/could_...
The customers, ad agencies, are being listened to and their feature requests are implemented.
Imagine a user like a cow, the person deciding is the human who eats the burger, the cow does not decide how big its house is. Similarly users on reddit do not choose the app layout for their convenience, ad suppliers do.
Just on the tech side, the mobile client is not Reddit's bread-and-butter, it's their servers handling traffic, resiliency, recommendation algorithm, spam filtering among many others.
Not that it's simple to run a site this popular, but it's a lot less complicated than many other social media sites.
Reddit bought Alien Blue. Sure, it's got ads and other bullshit, but the core UX is the same. I've never had it crash or cause any problems. I've always been confused by what people mean when they utterly trash on the "official reddit app". Is there another one I'm not aware of?
I do the same work as @dang would here, without the pay and with a little more unreasonable users. (Its not hard to believe HN is the most behaved discussion platform on internet)
Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
I wonder how much third party apps are being caught up in this other issue.
Biggest parties have already mined the data, which is enough for models for long time.
Unless you want the model to find some specific comment yesterday.
By allowing LLMs low cost or free access to their users data companies like Reddit are essentially helping companies like OpenAI choke their traffic.
Over time as people realise it’s quicker to ask ChatGPT a question than it is to post a question on reddit they will start losing content also.
Also think about the difficulty of policing content generated by swarms of LLM bots with API access for PR campaigns.
I am just wondering, where is the limit, since in that case the model might not be trained anymore and instead it is used for similar purpose than search engine. I guess Bing is already doing this, without Reddit API.
I just asked Chat GPT this very question and it didn't mention the Fenrir. It mentioned the other contender (MODE) but it failed to differentiate it from all the other offerings i.e it has the ability to connect a SATA SSD and hold the entire Sega Saturn library on the device.
The cases LLM will need this data in is compiling together more modern useful human knowledge as our knowledge base grows. Information in existing LLMs could shift. This is sort of the issue even academic textbooks deal with when publishing what is considered foundational knowledge: sometimes we discover something new that makes it either not quite correct or invalid.
These are the sort of obvious failures and disconnects that should become apparent if training lags behind. LLM services interested in revenue without plans for continuously updating training data are somewhat betting that not too much will change from most end users perspectives for awhile and for some use cases that might be true but the limits of training data over time for public instances of GPT for example have already hindered some.
Much of prompting, from my anecdata, needs to take that into consideration as one of the base constraints (does this model even have up-to-date information it could query and dump something useful from). To some degree those training limits also help expose "hallucinations" or interpolation/extrapolation attempts of LLM models. If I know it doesn't have this information in the training set and test the system against it, I can observe how well it interpolates, extrapolates, and is transparent about when that's happening. For example if I ask existing models about new syntaxes and structures introduced in Java 21, most should return something back like it doesn't exist, it lacks that newer information, or something to that effect. If instead it starts producing code samples that it couldn't possibly have knowledge of, then I know it's passing back garbage. If it's being continually updated at some frequency, I'm no longer so sure and it may actually be providing new useful information.
So I think they are thinking that and I don't think they're wrong.
Yes, the data is valuable for product recommendations, but not at the price they are asking. And if they ever block traditional scraping then all those "append reddit to google" searches will be gone too. Google is not going to pay them either.
The problem goes away if the apps charge for a subscription, which covers their API access.
And require something like a public key to access the API so you can track requests coming from multiple hosts.
Then any rate of access above that of a power user can be charged for appropriately. And make it so that activating API access is something that can't be automated so people can't create thousands of API dummy accounts.
The problem here is that many users are behind CGNAT, meaning many end users share a single IPv4. Unfortunately the days of counting distinct users by their IP(v4) are over.
Unless they put 100% of content behind a login-gate, it's currently legal* to scrape and use for derivative works, as long as you have the money and the chutzpah to deal with lawsuits that may or may not come.
- https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/12/hello-youve-be...
"I didn't mean to" is a very weak defense.
They would have to come up with a very hard to understand reason behind it though.
Even napkin math shows their numbers to be undefensible and malicious. The very obvious reason behind them is to kill 3rd parties and force people into the official app.
The apollo dev for iOS said 50 million queries was 166$ on imgur which is owned by the same company as reddit and has higher server costs due to images being more expensive to host. Reddit is asking for 12,000 for that many queries.
166 < 12000 and that 2 orders of magnitude are incomprehensible in terms of any technical reason to serve some comments and text posts...
imgur costs $3k per 50m requests: https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
Citing the specific piece of text
> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
Or he is just not truthful, we can't check.
Now I get not every platform users spend the same, and notoriously Apple users can be charged more (see doordash and uber being caught with charging more to those users). I however doubt that reddit users, notoriously hard to monetise, are somehow 20x more valuable than any other user in any other social media that is ad revenue based...
Whether you believe the apollo cretaor on his imgur pricing, or you beieve him or not on any other part of his post. The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented, indefensible.
he gets traffic and potential Ads views from reddit, and can't monetize it well enough. Sounds also not like reddit's problem.
> The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented, indefensible.
this is pure handwaving without any supporting evidence. Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar price on standard plans.
> Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar price on standard plans.
Imgur presents 1/4 of the price for a more expensive hosting option. Even if you refuse to ignore his own quoted price, Reddit still comes off insanely overpriced.
How did you arrive to 12c and $2.5? Also, is it expensive? Okta for example charges $2 just for sign in: https://www.okta.com/pricing/
> more expensive hosting option.
this is again your speculations without any evidence. Reddit is much more complicated product with img and video hosting.
You could just read the link of what was sent to you, idk might help with having an actual conversation.
here is the relevant text.
> the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month
> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
> So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well
In other words the expected price for reddit per user is 12 cents but their pricing model for APIs is retaliatory at 20x that price.
> Also, is it expensive?
Charging 20x what you make yourself, and again 4 times more than a similar offering?
> Reddit is much more complicated product with img and video hosting.
No it fucking isn't. 90% of reddit is text by volume and most of it is super short tokens too. Reddit is so uncomplicated you can make it a 1st year uni proyect to make a backend and front end with nested comments and a text post saved in a db.
it is so uncomplicated most of its work behind the scenes for the apst 6 years has been on monetisation, such as the new ads, the nfts, the reddit premium, the reddit awards etc. thats where all dev time has gone, because the actual website itself is uncomplicated
I think you comparing very different users: power users with 344 reqs per day, many of who are moderator, and some monthly user who visited reddit once a month.
Internet says reddit has 50m daily users, I think you should compare that number.
Also, for 344 reqs we would need to trust apollo dev words, which I don't from obvious reasons.
> No it fucking isn't.
sorry, dont want to comment your unsupported claims anymore.
That number was corroborated by Reddit themselves.[1] There is no reason to assume malice on the side of Apollo. Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a social media site. That is $24/year/user. If you divide Facebook's entire expenditure for 2022 (where they pissed away billions on metaverse), and divide that by their MAU, you get a cost of $21/year/user. You really think Reddit's cost per user is higher than Facebook+Instagram+Whatsapp+Metaverse combined? The number just isn't realistic.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update...
Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.
> There is no reason to assume malice on the side of Apollo.
There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.
> Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a social media site
Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c per click will give you $10 of monthly Ads revenue if you put one Ad on each page.
They also have less than 2.5 the number of users. Counting the total is a very silly way to pretend the usage is high...
> There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.
Those are not strong reasons. He uses the current best availeble data he has, which is comparable API plans he is working with.
He is very, very generous when calculating Reddit revenue. When they published their 100 million revenue quarter Fidelity valued their investment in reddit at 100million, they now value it at 60 which is a 40% drop since then.
Despite this, Christian considers their quarterly revenue 2x what it was at their peak, and adds 150 million on top to round the number to 600 mill annual. Most industry estimates do not go past 350. He borderline doubled their revenue for his napkin calculations.
So no, there are no strong reasons to believe he was lying about his math when he goes out of his way to be unexplainably kind to reddits revenue numbers.
> Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
Depending on how the api is set up you can have. 1 request for the front page, 1 request for the post itself, 1 request for the top 100 comments. scroll a bit, anoher request for the next 100 comments.
That is 4 requests for 1 user by checking one post and seeing a bit of what the conversation is. 34 requests a day is about 10 posts and some frontpage/sub scrolling. That is pretty light use for someone who uses Reddit daily, and its basically patheitc use for Mods who have to put in hundreds of monthly free hours at keeping communities civil.
> For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c
You have 0 chance of getting those rates on reddit, for a number of reasons.
One is that many reqs are on posts with no ads embbeded. two is that 1% ctr is high for reddit. and 3 is because reddit has awful conversion metrics and you are not getting 10c per click.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
They have tried soo hard to increase ARPU and so far they havent cracked past 0.6$ when industry leaders fly past 7$ per user.
So reddit is losing fuck all from those 345 requests, and instead is gonna lose a huge hosts of mods, which will make the site more toxic, harder to advertise and crater their ARPU again making Fidelitys 40% loss since 2018 look like child's play.
You're looking at the wrong product, $2/user/month is for their Workforce Identity Cloud, so auth for employees, not end users.
For a comparable market segment, Auth0 (acquired by Okta) which serves the B2C market charges significantly less [1]. Taking the B2C Professional plan at 1000 MAU which has the highest pricing per user due to lack of volume discounts costs $240/month for 1000 users ($0.24/user/month). Scaling up to the limit of publicly available pricing, at 10000 users Auth0 will only charge $0.15/user/month.
and what is the difference in context of this discussion?
4x is not much lower given difference in capital investments and complexity of product
Reddit is owned by advanced publications which is a huge media conglomerate. Sort of. They have the largest stake in reddit. Reddit spun off of conde nast a few years ago.
imgur is owned by medialab who also own things like kik and worldstar.
It’s quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved, but it’s completely implausible when you add that NSFW content will be removed from the API entirely, and that third party client will not be allowed to be ad-supported.
Wow. I didn't know about that. That would prevent browsing /r/cigars via API calls. Because every post in /r/cigars is marked as NSFW. Why? I'll give you one guess. https://old.reddit.com/r/cigars/comments/ubu6b2/why_is_rciga...
According to the Apollo dev's recounting of the call this is "sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons".
I assume there's a flag at the subreddit level or something, because Narwhal doesn't show the "cheeky narwhal" on /r/cigars (something it does on NSFW subs). I don't know how they'll handle SFW subreddits where NSFW is used for both spoilers and dodgy content though. That's assuming they even care.
I think they probably all should be marked NSFW but it is weird.
The obvious suggestion is multiple tags (drugs, sex, violence, gore etc.). But actually that's a really bad idea because it's a slippery slope of censorship - each flavor of the month bad thing gets banned over a decade or so until there's nothing left to ban.
Respectfully, I think you've lost the plot here. The problem isn't labeling. The problem is overreaching in the first place. And the problem is an inconsistent application of that labeling.
-Children of tobacco users are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084564/)
-People who watch TV/movies with characters who use tobacco are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2770193/)
-People who are friends with tobacco users are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691293/)
-People who see tobacco use on social media are more likely to be tobacco users and, critically, have an increased susceptibility to tobacco even if they are non-users (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35816331/)
The reality is that tobacco use disorder is a socially transmitted disease, and one of the best ways to prevent it's spread is to protect people from viewing tobacco use. By making it so that you have to opt-in to seeing posts about tobacco on their platform, Reddit is helping people avoid tobacco-related content.
You're also really really really missing the broader point here. By what metric should something on reddit be "opt in"? There are some things that are obvious that we all tend to agree in, and those fall into the useful mental model of "would you look at this at work?" But r/cigars does not fit into that model, yet it is still labeled as such. That means there is some other model being used to force users to opt into "sensitive" content. So what the fuck is it and why doesn't it apply to marijuana? Or fast food? Or one of a number of other unhealthy things for you?
And how many of your links apply to cigars? When was the last time you saw a 15 year old smoking a Padron? Fucking never buddy. It's a non-issue. It might play if it were cigarettes or some other trendy thing, but that's not the case here.
However, I have seen children smoking cigars (albeit cheap ones). Evidence suggests that they are doing so because they are imitating their parents or characters in the media.
Tobacco use disorder is on track to kill a billion people by the end of the century. 20% of men die from it. Hiding tobacco use from people who don't have tobacco use disorder is one of the best tools we have to prevent the spread, and I'll gladly voice my support for any measure to do that - even if it isn't applied in the most consistent/fair way.
Basically, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3D8670smTI
Everyone I work with is old enough to drink or smoke, so posting about cigars or beers could be appropriate but also could not be.
Tldr NSFW != age controls
People get super weird about this. Like, "this is an artistic nude, how dare you condemn it as NSFW."
I can however find official documentation that backs up what the admins are saying. The new Data API terms says they no long allow commercial use of their APIs and might implement a cost pr. request. It links to the Data API docs that says 60 req. pr. minute are free as long as it is non-commercial. I would think unofficial reddit apps goes under the non-commercial clause.
To me it looks to be a complete overreaction by the Reddit community because of a miscommunication on parts of a single developer and the Reddit orgs too slow reaction to stop it from spreading.
I don't think that will get a moderately used app very far. These limits would most likely be per API key and not per user
The numbers he posted seem to add up.
If it were a complete overreaction, all it would take is a single reddit admin going "he misunderstood, actually it's going to be x".
why is this assumed? In my assessment, Reddit is offering a quite reasonable charge per API call. If this will somehow cause a third-party app to ride up $20M in costs, it behooves them to optimize. As far as I can see, Apollo caches an absurd amount of data pre load which is not a mandatory advantage any app needs to offer
This also kills off apps like 'removeddit' that sheds light on rampant moderator abuse - it will be even _harder_ to see what the moderators have been up to behind the scenes after this, which is an aspect of the narrative that reddit has been trying to get a handle on for quite a while now.
How many of the complainers are actually watching the ads? It's trivial to block ads on YouTube; just install uBO, or use an app like Revanced.
I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if Infinity goes away.
I don't think many engineers use the official app.
I get what you're saying... but you don't have to be an engineer to have a clue.
I use Apollo, and Reddit already knows everything I subscribe to and read, what more would they get from forcing me to use the official app?
It seems it would enable them to connect it to various ad industry controls cookieless targeting solutions.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
(my comment on this topic from another thread)
Is it not the fraction that uses and posts on reddit the most though? The first party mobile apps are well known as garbage ad-ridden messes of UI. Aren't they killing the golden goose here?
I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.
But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it. I mean, they run communities with millions of views a day, surely there's money to be made out of that even if you don't work for reddit?
This kills the community.
Or rather, it sets up the possibility of the same thing happening over again on a micro scale: the users (who contribute to the community without being paid) in revolution against the mods.
If the sub is popular enough Reddit will take it over and appoint new mods. Has happened before and will happen to some of the subs that choose to go dark as well.
> But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it.
Definitely. Every (lead) moderator of a decently popular community is getting kickbacks one way or another. They do it for "free", but the only ones doing it without some compensation are absolute suckers.
This has happened in the past with subreddits with frequent rule breaks, and has even resulting in a reversal of the original viewpoint of the subreddit
Even if the users start posting only black videos on /r/videos, couldn't reddit just remove it from the default subreddit subscriptions and laugh while the protests themselves have been de-platformed?
It's really unclear where this power struggle will end.
That said I think moderators should make it permanent and see what happens. Reddit will have to install their own mods to turn them back on, and might even have to pay them, but then again I'm sure there's a long lineup of people willing to moderate any of the bigger subreddits for free if push came to shove.
I'm starting to look for new places to go as well because this feels very reminiscent of what Digg did and their downfall. Going from Digg to Reddit seemingly happened overnight. That might even be a good idea - if an alternative is found moderators should go redirect the subreddit to a reddit replacement. That'll really tie their hands up.
I highly doubt that there's a long lineup of people willing to do unfulfilling work for free with little recognition.
i'm pretty sure some of the subreddits participating in the blackout have already been warned that this is what will happen if it goes on beyond the planned two-day period.
My guess is that Reddit Inc.'s vision for Reddit is similar to TikTok. 99% of people mindlessly consuming, with surface-level, vapid comments but no deep discussion.
I am logging off. Hopefully I can maintain the discipline to stay logged off. Next step will be to delete my account. I probably won't as there are some DIY communities where I have really benefited from the feedback of others.
The community leaders aren't just upset about the policy change, but also trying to avoid contending with managing their communities 100% with reddit's inferior first-party moderation tools. It would make sense for the time-gated protests to be followed by a longer tail of deterioriating quality as mods simply quit.
It looks like that's what the /r/music team is planning to do already. They'll be closing the sub indefinitely on June 12, and one of the mods has remarked in a sticky comment on the announcement thread that they've been paying "$5/month to run our own servers to do stuff that reddit can't for the past 7-8 years."
It's remarkable to imagine creating a platform where community members will be so passionate as to work for free and even spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to enable working for you for free. All the more remarkable to see Reddit treating said community this way.
[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/141tzgd/update_rmusi...
I assume they'll do the same to r/Music if they just shut it down. The move for them, imo, would be to automatically allow YouTube and Spotify links, and ban news and discussion posts.
I will turn it off on the 12th, and we will just suffer without it until we all quit and the sub dies. Oh well.
It meets some psychological need. That might be a sense of belonging, power, purpose, etc. It's why you don't need to pay mods to do this "awful" work. The reason why Reddit would instantly see a rush of people willing to replace them is because that many people want to be mods, for the same reasons.
Whether they're "competent, honest, or qualified" is another question. It's why I love to see technology automate out the role (e.g. community notes).
It's like protesting McDonalds for a day and then going back and ordering a Big Mac. The words you say in your language are going unheard, but the words you say in their language: "you buying things for money" are heard loud and clear.
it seems reddit is already struggling with that piece, so gotta do whatever you can.
If the protest was "We're shutting down our subreddits indefinitely" they might actually motivate Reddit Corporate to take action.
It's like a worker walkout, except one where employees just take a long-ish lunchbreak to wave signs around, and then go right back to working. What's the point? Aint no corporation gonna care about that.
They made this decision before the blackout was planned...
Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way better.
Also reddits use of threads/upvotes can trend discussion towards a general consensus. If I want a recommendation for something that consensus is useful (eg r/televisions weekly recommendations). Discord is kind of a crapshoot of whoever is active at the time.
Am I missing something with discord? I'm a user but I generally don't engage in large communities. And there is so much "filler" discussion, that is hard to lurk.
Not necessarily. But whenever I post on Reddit for a language or programming sub, I eventually get directed to slack because the reddit answers "won't be that good." Discord can fill that niche as well
Creating new topics looks similarly to creating a StackOverflow question, where it will recommend an existing topic if it exists, meaning that the search is separate from the dumpster fire that is server-wide search. It also supports pinning posts on top, so weekly discussions like the one you've mentioned are a possibility.
A couple of servers I'm a part of that have it enabled are much more usable than those that don't and use text channels, but that's not a particularly high bar. I wouldn't say it's necessarily better than reddit / GitHub discussions / Discourse. If they made them indexable by search engines and in some sort of read-only mode, it could make an impact.
If there's no out-of-app discovery, it's still ephemeral content. It cannot be archived, cannot be searched, cannot be found without a discord account, etc.
Edit - Misread you, it sounds like we agree.
Last time I used it it just seemed like a nicer Skype, does it now offer posts in the same way reddit does or is it something tacked on?
I've found that even trying to search for things I know exist on a Discord server can be very hard to find. One example of this is how statements are split up like text messages. If someone explained something in text over five separate side-by-side posts, then searching for something that appears in two posts but never appears in one will not return the result you want.
Also, clearly defined APIs take a lot of flexibility away from them, which is yet another thing that beancounters don't want.
I dislike Reddit's narrative -- the Apollo dev himself is visibly gaslit by this one -- that the apps are "generating" API calls.
Nonsense.
Users generate API calls over client(s) of choice.
As soon as you understand that, you can apply first principles to the rest.
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
As it evolved, new cool things came because VCs poured money in it.
With Web 1.0 people were sponsored by their parents or institutions and they created the early tools and content. They were not personally looking to profit from it. However early VCs were pouring money into infrastructure or bets, so the thing was getting professional and serious, so can evolve. The most demanded content was content created prior-web, and that content was shared freely(the mp3 and divx era) on platforms created by people who were looking for clout and not necessarily monetary compensation.
With Web 2.0 the content was created by people for free but the platforms were completely VC paid. In this stage everything become professional and as it matured we ended up in this horrible state.
Arguably, HN is a reminiscent of the early stages of Web 2.0 and the place has good quality because it's paid by VC who expect to have reach(to the talent and market). IMHO HN is possible because it's not optimised to it's full monetary potential.
This sounds eerily similar to congestion-based breakdown in data networks, or the impossibility of a 100% efficient windmill. If you squeeze too hard, you end up with ~nothing.
The thing is you'd still be the product even though you'd be paying for premium. Analytics on you would still be collected and sold to third parties
For example, when the thing is not free the onboarding of new users would be much smoother for the non-tracking platform because they won't have to show GDPR and Cooke banners.
That episode is hillarously outdated.
I pay Reddit so that others don't have to, to keep the forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to understand this, instead spending subscription money on like, avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
> The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money.
Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that existed in every little niche, most of which went away when Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+ million yearly revenue. Reddit won, they have a perfectly fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-functional social media experiences still left on the internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
> I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standard.
If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work. Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service" only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
What are the costs to run what is essentially a big text based site? They already offloaded all of the image hosting to third parties. Desktop ads would be more than enough to support the site indefinitely. Heck, maybe you can build in something to convert Amazon links to referrals or something. Fine, whatever, it's your website.
I'm sad to say it, but I don't think Reddit will be the same powerhouse in ten years. Just like Facebook, people will slowly start to migrate somewhere else. If they had focused on taking care of the community they already have, it didn't need to end like this.
It's easy to detect "abuse" or "commercial use" and we contact those users and license them accordingly for such use cases.
We also went one step further and completely eliminated advertising on RadioReference.com. Given the user base is very niche and highly technical, the goodwill alone we got from that move gave us a sizable increase in premium subscription revenue. Plus, the quality, of Internet advertising has become so poor it's barely worth opening the space up to advertisers.
I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
You raise rates to a ridiculous number, drag out negotiations with devs and let them drop the news to their users, wait a bit for the revolts and news stories to happen, then make a press release saying "our bad, we love you guys so much, we 'found' a way to get our API prices down".
After all of that, API prices are still higher than reasonable, but all the users and devs are all happy and news stories go out saying how the users and devs won and got a better deal. All while you got the price increases that you wanted.
Similarly I use Baconreader on my phone which is also pretty great.
I've never seen a compelling reason to use "new" reddit or the official reddit app. If they want to kill third party apps then they need to make their own offering much better, which I highly doubt will ever happen.
I'll go a bit further and say that new.reddit is actively hostile to the user experience and is worse than old.reddit in nearly every way. It gets less content on the page and what's there is harder to navigate.
Ugh, thanks for saying this, I'm one of those who believed the narrative that he was an ex employee who left to pursue his passion.
There's no obvious alternative to reddit.
Regardless, I’m pointing out what is the current alternative.
If subreddits move, reddit's front page won't avail them much.
I have several hundred subreddits, that would take me forever on discord.
Less time on the internet. Social media seems to be dying and changing isnt it?
Ex: I have a product, it costs me $1 to make. I want to sell it for $10, so there's a nice profit margin. People will balk because they think it's worth $8, or once I announce any pricing they will protest and try to talk it down. So I announce it'll cost $100. That's exorbitant! Rage rage anger anger etc, then I'm like... does $10 sound reasonable? Oh wow you came down 90% that's really good sure I won't complain about that you are so good to us.
I wonder if Reddit tried this before with e.g. the previous content crackdown; they wanted to crack down to the point where the site would become ready for IPO (mainly get rid of porn), but they knew they'd suddenly lose two thirds of their engagement. They went for small steps then; remove hate subreddits (surely you cannot object to removing racism?? Oh right free speech), then remove porn from r/all, then remove porn from the API / 3rd party apps, before it gets removed entirely.
Another comparison: Trump. Put a far-right nutjob in the forefront, have him come out with some really racist and offensive shit every day, so that the more moderate but mainstream right-wingers get to put in a little racism.
Another stupid comparison: the Sonic movie. They did the first design badly on purpose, because it made people talk about and meme the Sonic movie for weeks on end. Then they did a redemption by changing the design to what they intended in the first place.
Whether we like it or not, most investor money is ultimately managed by rich old dudes who want to save face around their friends and family. Since the US is prudish as all get-out, they don't invest in porn directly through the stock market.
If you want to invest in porn privately, I'm sure those companies will take your money and you can work out a payment scheme and contracts without involving the S&P.
I expect what the average investor actually demands is restraint and keeping porn out peoples faces so it doesn't become what you're known for. Don't become a "porn company" and don't show porn to people that haven't opted in or to children.
> Right now I have no idea if I should continue to work on Sync but as a subscription only app or throw in the towel
> A subscription + incomplete experience (NSFW etc) to me just doesn't sound like a good deal for you guys
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/142dzy8/the_fut...
By all accounts, it was very successful and saved the site, also leaving them resourced enough (including in hardware resources) to embrace the userbase from the imploding digg.
I think it's clear Reddit's current leadership have forgotten how the userbase stepped in for them in the past.
I'm going to give Lemmy a shot and keep my head down and see how it works out. Realistically, I won't be leaving reddit until old.reddit.com goes away or my ad-blocker stops working.
However, other instances can choose to block content from your instance from showing up on theirs. Likewise, you can ask to 'link' your instance to others with similar ideas/rules and share posts between both.
As a result, the only thing stopping someone with particularly niche political views from spinning up their own instance is the potential lack of other interested users.
Also, they likely will find out that backend is also not an easy part very soon.
I say this because the reddit admins keeps trying to hyper focus on things like "Apollo is inefficient" (it is) or "bots will still work" and other secondary concerns in an effort to avoid the very simple issue: their cost is exhorbitant and no amount of vague "we will adjust based on usage" and "non-commercial tools will be fine" comments are going to assuage our fears.
A quick story: a mod from /r/blind told us all about how heavily they depend on 3rd party tools just to be able to do basic moderation. Despite reddit having an app for seven years they still do not even remotely adequately cover the needs of the visually impaired/blind/etc. The mod said several members who are completely VI will have to step down under the new changes because the app is unusable for them in its current state. Why should they trust reddit will suddenly fix it if they've largely ignored their tickets for 7 years? Why should any of us believe any of their vague promises when this has occurred over and over again? Mods/users get angry, reddit says "we hear you," and everyone calms down.
They're panicking at this point because frankly they know we're too cynical/skeptical for their "trust us" spiel and we actually care about this. I know I am probably coming off as over-dramatic here - reddit is not the center of the universe - but this stuff does matter in my opinion. And I am for one am glad to be participating in this blackout.
I have thumbs downed every single recommendation they’ve ever put in my scrolling feed, and now am being forced to consume absolutely random subreddits that their models have decided I’m super interested in because at some point in the last ten years I clicked through an r/bestof link.
Sigh. Now I need to actually figure out Mastodon.
The key to Mastodon isn't to follow other people but to follow hashtags so they are in your news feed, and to use hashtags everywhere in your posts and comments so other people can find them.
Also, I wouldn't call making recommendations in home feed a growth hack, fwiw.
Reddit (and its predecessors, and other social media) became popular because it's an all-in-one. You can just browse /all or comments sections and passively discover new communities to follow, instead of having to trawl the internet and actively vet everything.
It being centralized also means it's centrally vetted; who knows what kind of shit there's to be found on various lemmy or mastodon instances. It sounds off, but I'd rather go to a platform with a large company behind it than something ran from someone's proverbial basement.
Oh, and there definitely are some insane places there. Check out lemmygrad if you want to make your head spin.
You weren't kidding.
> we would like you to know before you request an account that Lemmygrad is a Marxist instance, principally Marxist-Leninist. We like Stalin and we uphold the DPRK’s sovereignty and legitimacy over the whole of Korea. We love China’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
Yikes.
> And in 2012, Twitter introduced stricter usage limits for its API, "completely crippling" some developers. While these moves successfully increased the stability and security of the service, they were broadly perceived as hostile to developers, causing them to lose trust in the platform.
src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#API_and_developer_plat...
Some discussions on HN about it back then: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356825600&dateRange=custom&...
I've been worried Reddit was going to head down this path since Twitter did that in 2012.
I feel like old.reddit.com is next and that'll really seal the deal for me.
Apps like Apollo and other have a good opportunity to change that. They have a „normal“ userbase that could easily converted to new user on a new platform with a simple popup on app startup.
If people can make full fledged client apps that rake in millions of dollars that need corporate structures around it, they can certainly take that pull and build communities that offer Reddit like experience (I mean, you have the UI built already right?) without the Reddit like bullshit.
So what if reddit decides its data is valuable to itself and it doesn't want to share it on your terms?
Maybe you can capitalize on your position as it is right now and strategize your way around it.
Yeah but that isn't the argument. Just because someone has the right to do something doesn't mean you can't criticize it or, in your own words, capitalize on your position as it is right now to hopefully persuade a change of direction. I don't have a dog in this fight but I dislike when the legality of something is used to dismiss criticism.
Nobody really "likes" reddit. They tolerate it. I don't care about reddit the corporation. I like the user generated content there. Since reddit sucks and does things like gatekeep people from viewing their site without mobile app, and other annoying things like that, these app developers should just try to turn those users onto a new reddit-like platform.
I would love to see reddit shaken up from its position as a place for people to have discussions on topics where the comments can be on a wide spectrum. It used to be fun, and it can be again.
But it needs a Napoleon.
I feel like getting an API access is a nice to have.
1. Make an official Web UI (responsive to desktop/tablet/phone) that users like, plus iOS and Android apps that people like? (Maybe make a responsive Web UI that's closer in spirit to old.reddit but with polish, and appeals first to smart power-users, while still quite usable by others? And then make the iOS and Android app store apps that appeal first to the more casual doomscrolling demographic that's still not even comfortable with nested comments and just wants to engage with their reactions to content?) But don't kill third-party apps before then, when Reddit isn't known for good UI after old.reddit.
2. Improve their image and video hosting, and then nudge people to use it (rather than leaning on bandwidth of third parties who sell ads that Reddit could be selling, who eventually try to poach users, or who eventually disappear and take down Reddit-initiated content with them)?
3. Discourage other poaching by third-party services, like subreddit mods of recent years stickying posts advertising the "official" Discord for that subreddit, and try to supply whatever genuine appeal that third-party has as part of the Reddit monolith? (If there is any appeal, and the fragmentation/poaching is not just driven by the mod's self-interest.)
4. Make sure Reddit is getting their share of all the LLM training epic goldmine value of the Reddit corpus? (Maybe this is part of what's behind the API lockdown, but that cash cow might've already left the barn, and maybe there are other angles to also be pursuing urgently?)
These questions have come to mind, but I don't have data or internal business info to answer them.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
It seems to me like this would be the only way for these apps to survive long term, because even if reddit backpedals a bit on this fumbled policy change, it's clear that third party apps are doomed. New attempts to kill them will be more subtle.
Anyway they improved the new reddit, it seems? It looks like they fixed some things and it's not as bad as it was 1 or 2 years ago.
Anyway the reddit model seemed quite good enough, I don't doubt that anybody could really make an alternative clone and gain users.
Mastodon is also expected to slowly get more and more users as twitter seems quite threatened.
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
The only effective form of protest is to quit and use something else. How many are willing to do that?
I created one such API[1] and hope that at the very least it puts pressure on Reddit to reconsider their pricing strategy. If not it should enable third party apps to save a majority of their cost.
You might have misspelt reddit.com Microsoft Edge recommends that you double-check the spelling of the site you're trying to access. Misspelt sites – with similar spellings to popular ones – are known to redirect users to sites that steal and scam your personal information.
Should probably change your domain.
Gee, thanks for making this a lot easier for me, guys!
(ReVanced is the evolution of YouTube Vanced a modified YouTube app. But since they made it a generic patcher, it can now improve Reddit and other apps.)
There's a patch to remove ads, and a couple of other minor things[1], but not much. I requested a feature to automatically minimize the Automod comments that are stickied to the top of every thread in many subreddits, and the request was closed with the reasoning that I could do that manually. That's true, but somewhat beside the point.
> This page received a cease and desist letter from a multi-billion dollar tech company.
I guess you have your answer.
Edit: nevermind, their website is just broken, and that's the default 404 page. I changed the original link to a working one and filed an issue at https://github.com/revanced/revanced-website/issues/106
I mean look at Twitter, since going private, the whole thing has been so clunky, but the parameters governing how well Twitter is doing are still hinging policies related free speech, user-abuse and content moderation.
It becomes clearer as "HN is down?" gets more frequent that there's a real-world cost to some DB lookup and ASCII
And relate to that, who exactly (what person) is applying pressure to the company directors to do this, who is it seeking to benefit, and who exactly is responding with decisions to meet what amount of bar of achievement? What $ is enough, and who is deciding that?
On reddit, I can click the "random" button and immediately discover a community that I can already post in. Do I want to talk on r/entrepreneur, or r/galaxytab (the actual two first subreddits that "random" took me to just now)? I can do that right now, and while there I also see the orangered envelope telling me I got replies to comments I made on r/zelda (also a true story of what happened when I just clicked "random").
As someone in the film industry, I lean very heavily DVXuser, Cinema5D, and Gear Source. Three different sites with three different cultures and ways of doing things. I really like them and they are great resources, but frankly, I find myself on Reddit most of the time anyway because it’s just easier to get the information I need from a variety of communities all in one spot.
This is not a big deal for you, it's the biggest deal for me. I refuse to make any other registrations unless absolutely necessary (healthcare/hospital website etc). If your website asks me for a password, I don't care enough to register.
The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is to scour through Google search results for a forum topic.
Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite understand why some modern decentralized or federated alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising, but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that are relatively circumscribed for most people.
>A Lemmy frontend based on phpBB 3.3.
>Flagship instance for lemmyBB
We good import certain "branches" into our BBSes, respond, and then at night we dialed up the nearest BBS or system and exchanged our messages. Sooner or later the entire collection was exchanged, and everyone was up to date. Not just that, you could slice off a piece and then splice it back in (FidoNet), and it still worked!
You can have a discussion in comp.compression and lo, people would discuss only compression! You wanted to chat about something off the wall? You can find it under the alt. branch, and lo people talked off the wall stuff!
There is nothing new under the sun.