Reddit's Recently Announced API Changes, and the future of /r/blind | Hacker News Reader

blind

old.reddit.com

551 pointsnickcotter295 comments

One of the comments:

Yes, modding is where the biggest problems are. When moderating, most of the buttons are unlabeled. It would be quite easy to delete a comment when I meant to lock a thread or whatever, if I forget the exact order I've memorized for the buttons. And adding stuff to sidebars or changing the layout of the sub isn't really possible at all. There are also a lot of dialogues, alerts, etc, that pop up without getting focus. There's also a lack of headings, landmarks, or other mark-up in modmail, making it slow and difficult to use. This stuff really matters when you're helping mod a sub with thousands of users. If all you're doing is reading, and leaving the occasional comment, it's...fine. Not good, but fine.

----

It's important for a sub for disabled individuals to have mods with that disability.

I didn't care about this protest and haven't much followed articles and such about it, but this feels like a kick in the gut. People with disabilities can have their lives substantially enhanced by the internet, if accessibility isn't a bar to them connecting with people, finding info they need, taking actions online (like bill paying), etc.

I hope this gets satisfactorily resolved for blind users of Reddit. Ugh.

It's especially shameful that a large company like Reddit can't manage to.. do HTML right? It really doesn't take that much extra time to do the basics. They need buttons with _labels_.

How did they not get sued already? Was it just because users had access to 3rd party apps?

Product owners don’t care about accessibility. They care about time to market for 99.999% of your users, or for many products 100% of the users. The products I build are not accessible. Designers work hard to ensure they’re not or quite hard to make accessible at best. Modals on modals on modals with important content changing all over the place!

Is it on a "product owner" to care about accessibility? Or engineers to build things properly? If this was any other engineering field - civil, mechanical, electrical, there would be standards which we seem to lack / fail to enforce

> there would be standards which we seem to lack / fail to enforce

This is by design. Software developers are hardly "engineers". They build what the business wants, quickly, and worry about the "properly" after product-market fit is found (or so they're told). This dynamic would be upended if software engineering were licensed.

I can’t even convince design not to make the text grey on grey. It’s not just “disabled” users who are suffering this nonsense.

I get paid the same not to fight. More even, because I’m a team player.

The way this gets fixed in an org isn't by engineers winning fights with designers.

It's by someone at a higher level deciding that they care about accessibility (or that they care about not getting sued), and introducing constraints which their designers and engineers must work within, and making compliance with the constraints part of the QA process.

The way it gets fixed across organizations is government regulation

Relatively few engineers in the US are licensed. It's fairly common with civil engineering because at least moderately senior engineers are signing off on drawings for regulators. But mechanical/chemical/etc. engineers are not in general licensed overall--maybe 10-20% are the numbers I've seen.

And that's not even counting all the jobs like sales engineer, mud engineer (oil business), etc. that are really more engineering-adjacent jobs (if that).

When I took the engineer in training exam--never had a reason to follow through on a PE, it basically required things like a four-year engineering degree, working under someone for some number of years, passing the PE exam, and presumably signing code of ethics, etc. For certain jobs, it is pretty much a requirement past some level but mostly doesn't matter a lot.

> worry about the "properly" after product-market fit is found (or so they're told).

Thankfully for Reddit they found the product market fit 10 years ago.

They're just a bad software company.

This is why I found it hilarious when people say they prefer proprietary software because a commercial company will produce better code than volunteer individuals.

Train drivers are also called engineers, and much software development can be seen as engineering in this general sense.

If the product owner directs work at a ticket level and never assigns it to anyone, it's their fault it isn't there. If the engineers have more autonomy than I've seen at a company are were able to decide what to work on, then sure blame the engineers.

It's on product, because it's an ask from the customer (and requires planning into the roadmap - it doesn't come for free).

Wasnt there some push in the US to make websites acessible or face some very hight fines ? I do remember something like that.

It matters a lot when you have a Gov. contract of some sort.

Reddit doesn't sell to the USG or any US schools or etc.

Interesting, so that is the difference. Thanks! :)

Fortunately the ADA[1] means that you can easily reach their real customer support AKA legal department.

[1] https://www.boia.org/blog/the-robles-v.-dominos-settlement-a...

Modern design philosophy is that buttons with labels are messy and complicated so they should be replaced everywhere by hamburgers and hieroglyphs.

What started as spatial triage on mobile is now the universal design language everywhere, and it sucks.

Regardless, there's still aria-label.

I think they’re referring to aria-labels, not visible text.

Having a site good for accessibility means it is also easily scraped, if it is easily scraped no need to pay for API access, and there goes the money grab

It is not they cant do it right, they do want to do it right because they need to monetize the site to appease the VC's,

Anything that can prevent that, including accessibility, goes

A custom program can find the buttons by label. It's just not labeled in a way the screenreader is looking for.

it is really not that much harder to scrape using XPath and no labels if you know what you're doing…but only if you can see things, of course.

Because (to oversimplify things by a lot) you don't have to care in most cases. You have legal requirements as a public institution, when selling to governments / educational institutions or as an employer (depending on country), but requiring all privately-run, commercial websites to be accessible is usually not a thing. This is not legal advice by any means, and the actual situation is way more complicated than that.

Totally agree. Whilst I think that Reddit _should_ support their blind users in this case, as a general/blanket rule that you can sue anyone who doesn't then everyone's blogs/dinky little sites need perfect/proper accessibility done for them, which just isn't feasible.

Reddit is large enough that if they don't have a positive response for that sub then they're just a total disgrace. Who TF wants to make it harder for blind people to live their lives? Only evil corpo fuckers, that's who.

sounds like they will be sued now! ADA trolling is a thing and it does catch big fish.

if you look at the regular reddit "new" interface you'll totally understand how this occurs.

the interface is a mess, accessibility concerns or not. It's truly an equal opportunity offender in all the worst case.

As a non-web-dev who sometimes builds my own toys, when you say someone building buttons without labels is lawsuit-worthy, it makes me think you're all saying something other than what I'm interpreting. I'm guessing you mean more than

    <button type="button">My Label</button>

or something like that?

That would be the label of a button yes. I think in practice, what's missing is describing the label of a button (or another element with that role) with an aria-label attribute.

Buttons that miss a label are often an icon without text and label (e.g. a delete button with a trash icon).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Thanks for the explanation!

The lawsuit worthy aspect is that labels for buttons are super important for understanding what a button does. A lack of labels (either through not putting text inside the <button> element or using a technique like aria-label) can quickly make an interface unusable for a blind person - the visual equivalent would be completely blank, identical buttons. That barrier is what someone could sue over.

It can also quickly make an interface unusable for a non-blind person, if they block external fonts.

My understanding is that a button used like this is already accessible.

However a button that looks like this:

  <button type="button">
    <img src="/delete.png" alt="Delete post" />
  </button>

Is not. Screen readers will read the simple text on the button, but any descendants of the button will be considered purely presentational (even if as in the example above the img tag includes an 'alt' attribute, it won't be read).

Modern screen readers will now often parse text content out of the button even if there are descendants, but this behaviour is not reliable or according to spec.

To fix:

  <button type="button" aria-label="Delete post">
    <img src="/delete.png" alt="Delete post" />
  </button>

There are other techniques as well such as using CSS to hide text (not with 'display: none' though, which also hides from screen readers, meaning this often feels a bit hacky) or using a hidden element with text content and aria-labelledby to reference the element's ID.

This is a pretty good walk through: https://www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/accessible-icon-buttons/#a...

No, your first code snippet is totally fine. The button's name comes from its descendent elements by default. In this case, the `alt` attribute of the image provides the name.

Sara is good source for accessibility information but I think you've misinterpreted that post. If an icon button uses an `img`, making the image's `alt` the name of the button works well. If the button's icon comes from an inline SVG, background image, or icon font, I recommend Sara's first technique, visually hidden text within the `button`; names from text nodes are more robust than from attributes (`alt` being an exception, in part because it has been around far longer).

Thank you for the correction! Always good to learn.

From recent reports (based on their layoffs), "large" means around 1800 employees. I know they're not all developers, but I don't think labeling the mod buttons is beyond them.

It's much easier to label buttons when you work for a small company, because you know exactly who does what and exactly who is responsible for labelling the buttons and you know exactly what's going to happen to you when you label them, so you just do it and have that debate whenever it happens. Bystander effect, etc.

It's true but that falls more into the explanation-not-excuse category. I bet there's someone advocating for better ad partner integration and driving projects for that - no reason they can't have it for UX/UI/Accessibility too.

Eh, sounds unprofitable

It is worth pointing out that even with a 10/10 sight, moderating reddit is a nightmare. If it wasn't for the mod toolbox plugin, I would have probably resorted to making CLI tools instead(many of which I have since reddit offers an extremely limited options for moderating, nuking comments, threads and so on). That said, this is absolutely nothing compared to the unholy mess that is moderating from android/ios. Most moderators plainly refuse to do it. I moderate a big sub and what we do is we have a discord chat and whenever something needs to be taken care of fast and someone notices it on mobile, they simply alert everyone on discord so someone near a computer can handle it.

I agree that their mod access on mobile leaves a lot to be desired and will add that for some people, use of a mobile device is for accessibility reasons.

To drive the point home, there was a point in my life when I was unable to use anything except a mobile device, because I programmed constantly, day and night, for weeks, trying to build a hair rained business about 3D printed jewelry you could share on social media and fork (I called it "social jewelry", I find it kinda cringe and laugh about it now).

I hurt my wrists very badly (due to abysmal typing posture and a refusal to stop working in the face of "minor" pain) and was unable to use a computer for ten months. I could only use a mobile device (and sparingly at that). One might say I was foolish and reaped what I sowed and shouldn't be accommodated for a problem I brought on myself, but what can I say, I saw young and stupid and I thought I was being gritty.

I'm sure many of you can relate to a story like that.

(Figure out your workspace ergonomics, folks. And don't type through pain, take a break, for days or longer if necessary.)

Also: Even if you are not impaired, a phone can go with you and theoretically let you keep tabs on things while running errands, on your break at work, etc. Your work computer may not be a means for you to login to Reddit and moderate anything, even on your break.

There's a reason a lot of stuff is optimized for mobile first these days.

"When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you'd have to say we succeeded."

- Steve Wozniak referring to the fact that people only stare at their iPhones anymore

To be fair, iOS has some of the best accessibility of any computing platform ever. That Reddit managed to screw it up is a testament to THEIR skill, not apples

Moderation on mobile is a nightmare because moderating a single item often involves several distinct actions: approve/remove comment, read/edit user note, ban user, edit ban note, etc. None of these have an unified default interface and most mods only know it from using mod toolbox. Mobile moderation-oriented 3rd party apps are unsatisfactory because they are, well, unofficial and Reddit provides no guidance or resources beyond the API itself whatsoever. It has been improving somewhat over the past two years with many web mod tools being added or revamped, but it's hard to build and maintain trust with the moderator community when Admins constantly make one unpopular move after another.

Reddit successfully offloaded content moderation onto a group of volunteers since the very beginning. This is a massive cost saving factor compared to other major social media platforms. It is only fair for Reddit to invest a small amount of those savings in return to enable volunteers achieve better efficiency.

"It's important for a sub for disabled individuals to have mods with that disability."

Reddit is notorious for having mods on various special-demographic subreddits where members of that demographic would not necessarily recognize the mod as a fellow member. The cloak of anonymity means, however, that few get any inkling unless they bother to investigate (unlikely on a website and an app that invite passivity) or it eventually erupts into scandal.

For example the /r/Netherlands subreddit is ran by trolls who are not from the Netherlands, and does not allow the usage of the Dutch language in the subreddit at all. Instead /r/theNetherlands is the proper subreddit.

The fact that reddit allows moderators to hide the modlist nowadays only makes things worse. You have absolutely no idea who is running things anymore.

Powermods are a real problem with reddit. Letting whoever was the greasiest nerd in 2007 and registered some common word, phrase, or brand name as their personal domain (including in some cases, commercializing it for personal gain) is an obvious problem, and there is no mechanism whatsoever for removing them. The only option is to try and restart the community using another name instead - hence the proliferation of real_x or true_x subreddits. And you will never do anything about the newbies who just search "kleenex" and get the sub with the powermod instead of the true_kleenex one with the actual community.

you have some mods who are notionally in charge of dozens of subreddits - and reminder that one of those powermods was most likely Ghislane Maxwell lol. And at that point you have to be getting some financial or personal benefit from it, because at that point it's a job, you can't moderate a dozen major subreddits in your spare time. So you either make a deal with the brand, or you do it to shape public discourse, etc.

In some respects that's what's going on here too, is powermods see an actual threat to their power, and would rather take their subs dark and raise a pitchfork mob than go quietly. But something has to be done about it sooner or later.

It's this awkward compromise where powermods do a ton of unpaid work for reddit, but they also are not entirely a benevolent force either, there are a lot of them that are really shitty and are kind of namesquatting on important turf. But there's nothing that can be done about it without them all taking their subs private, and if you just eject them then you better have a system in place to replace them afterwards. And you better be ready to replace all of them because they'll all go dark in "solidarity". The usual problems of a coup, really.

The real answer is that you should use Lemmy and if there's two r/kleenex's then oh well, let search optimization direct people to the "good one" and the powermod can be king of the bad one. But Lemmy can't be commercialized for (pinky in mouth) one billion dollars! and SEO doesn't work properly inside a single domain like this, so this is the status quo.

I'm sure there's some lessons there for founders... if you are going to rely on unpaid labor you need to do the 4chan thing and make it clear they're janitors and not stakeholders in your platform, and hammer down any significant power-centers that start to form. Because at this point the reality is they are de-facto stakeholders, whether Reddit likes it or not.

The month before you sell the company is just the absolute wrong time to pick a big fight with your union. And I’m saying this as someone who is not a fan of this particular union.

> The fact that reddit allows moderators to hide the modlist

Luckily, only on the slow version of reddit.

It's hidden on the old version of reddit as well.

Do you have an example? Never heard of that, only the opposite.

Reddit is creating an exemption to its unpopular new API pricing terms for makers of accessibility apps, which could come as a big relief for some developers worried about how to afford the potentially expensive fees and the users that rely on the apps to browse Reddit. As long as those apps are noncommercial and “address accessibility needs,” they won’t have to pay to access Reddit’s data.

“We’ve connected with select developers of non-commercial apps that address accessibility needs and offered them exemptions from our large-scale pricing terms,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says in a statement to The Verge.

From https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...

So if reddit's official app is difficult to use, at what point can regular 3rd party apps claim to be accessibility tools?

Society needs 'allergic to UX dark patterns' to be included in the next DSM

There needs to be a preferences setting sent in the HTTP header to activate high contrast and low motion modes. Just having "dark mode" is not enough.

Would high contrast not be a CSS thing? I know `prefers-reduced-motion` is...

yes, high-contrast is a CSS media query just like prefers-reduced-motion is

* prefers-contrast: more

I agree, but I think you misread the comment you're replying to. They were referring to "dark patterns," a design feature used to trick users into taking actions they otherwise wouldn't. Much harder to flag :P

Sorry, I want all dark patterns to be surrounded by a high contrast "dark pattern border".

this is what the internet was meant to be

Some of those UX dark patterns would qualify as making the site inaccessible to people with add and adhd, others make it inaccessible to people with autism.

engagement driving bullshit could very easy become banned under ADA if the right public servant gave it enough thought.

I actually completely agree with this, but I didn't bring that up specifically because, as an autistic person with ADHD, I have gotten pretty poor responses in the past from saying my needs should be considered by UI/UX designers. There's not a lot of public will to consider autism and ADHD to be "real" disabilities and I'd love to see that change.

It sounds like being accessibility tools wouldn't be enough because they would also need to be non-commercial, which excludes most of (all of?) the popular third party apps.

RedReader is entirely open source and has accessibility features.

Separate “accessibility” apps for people with disabilities always lag behind in features compared to apps that target a wider audience while still being accessible. Basically relegating people with disabilities to a second class experience.

Translation - if we can exploit your free labor we'll allow it. Otherwise get bent.

On the other hand, quoth the OP thread

>One of our moderators, u/itsthejoker, has had multiple hour-long calls with various Reddit employees. However, as of the current time, our concerns have gone unheard, and Reddit remains firm.

Doublespeak from reddit's management is not exactly uncommon, and it seems like something is mismatched between what they communicated in that article and what's related in the thread.

The AskHistorian's mods put together a small list of reddit admin promises to moderators that were broken:

Admins have promised minimal disruption; however, over the years they’ve made a number of promises to support moderators that they did not, or could not follow up on, and at times even reneged on:

    In 2015, in response to widespread protests on the sub, the admins promised they would build tools and improve communication with mods.   

    In 2019 the admins promised that chat would always be an opt-in feature. However, a year later an unmoderated chat feature was made a default feature on most subs   

    In 2020, in response to moderators protesting racism on Reddit, admin promised to support mods in combating hate   

    In 2021, again, in response to protests, Reddit’s admin promised a feature to report malicious interference by subreddits promoting Covid denial.

That really is just shameful. I feel dishonest telling white lies to strangers to make a 3 minute interaction easier.

>noncommercial

This is a water sandwich.

There is no unambiguous single definition of commercial activity in the law: some parts of the law define it one way, some jurisdictions differ as to what is and isn't commercial, and some parts of the law explicitly deny the existence of noncommercial activity (e.g. copyright law). So Reddit has promised literally nothing here.

Furthermore, their explicit goal is to prevent scraping by ML training companies. This is inherently opposed to accessibility. If you add accessibility to copy protection, you weaken the copy protection[0]. So Reddit can either tell blind people to go fuck themselves, or they can accept that there's always going to be at least some backdoor for AI to scrape Reddit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

Yup.

Whatever blind dev is making a living providing an app (or other software) as an accessibility layer for the blind over reddit will now have to potentially do so for free.

The hypocrisy of companies that live on user content is pretty amazing. They want to act like we’re all just vibing. And then hey, really sorry, we gotta put a few ads up to keep the servers up and pay the devs ($424mm worth last year). But you wanna get paid for making an app for blind people to use our site? Helllll no.

Or provide a set of steps to generate a client ID and secret to put into their app, right?

.. And how can a developer not charge for their specialty-app?

Reddit is requiring Disabled to use an app developed at the LOWEST COST - this is clear discrimination, in the legal sense.

It may not be illegal, but legally they are "discriminating", based upon the legal usage of that word.

Also fuck those of us who are visually impaired but not blind because I bet their definition of 'accessibility needs' is going to result in a Reddit so limited it's useless to those who need anything other than text only.

I'm visually impaired (on the mild side) and I have a lot of neuro-visual issues. I have a lot of problems with visual crowding, visual sensitivity to stimuli (bright colors, movement, etc.), and have ~ 20/50 vision when corrected. (Or 20/80ish in my glasses at night time which is also when I use Reddit). I use third party apps because I need a lot of their 'cosmetic' features: I can set the colors to not be too much to process (pure white on black or black on white sucks for me), I can set images and videos to hide by default so they don't distract/tire me browsing but I can easily see them if I want to, I can avoid ads (which tend to flash/move or be very glaringly colored and can easily result in headaches), and I can have more fine grain control over text size, where information is located, etc.

As someone who's blind I never looked at Reddit because it was not particularly easy to use with a screen reader. Now's a heck of a time to discover there are accessible ways of accessing it for the next two months.

Outside of some niche communities, it's been a real crap shoot for many years though. I think you may have been spared a lot of garbage. I can't really put a finger on when or what changed but feel it definitely lost the sheen.

r/blind is a great community, however.

That's a great counter point. I wouldn't know from first hand experience in that case but there are some GREAT communities.

I feel overall though, the tone of discussions and echo chamber sentiment just feels different now. Especially on say, r/all.

I usually only browsed occasionally in anon mode when seeking a respite from "reality", and overall it seemed to go from lighthearted discussions and a lot of really cool, "check this out"-style posts to a sea of outrage baiting, word for word reposts, and outright flamewars. Eventually that seeped in to a number of subreddits in my meticulously tailored logged-in experience.

I was so disappointed by the erosion of something that once filled me with immense joy and from which I have gleaned a wealth of valuable information, I just wrote off the entire thing.

I'm not even sure if it's manufactured in my own mind. A while after I found reddit went through some things that have substantially reformed my general outlook; I am a lot softer now. I'm probably just too sensitive but in my experience, most people there just don't treat each other well.

I can certainly understand how those in a community like r/blind would be predisposed to kindness.

I'm not sure if there's any factual basis in my reasoning, but I feel in general groups facing greater than average adversity tend to value treating others well.

On the other hand, those in more advantageous positions seem to lean in to entitlement, and are disproportionately enraged when they feel taken advantage of... It's funny/sad how that happens.

What are better alternatives to Reddit? Yeah, a lot of subs are echo chambers, circlejerks and struggle with quality in general but if I counted how many times I found it useful compared to the rest of Internet on average, I'd be pretty rich. I often default my searches to site:old.reddit.com <query>, the new UI and app are garbage though.

What worries me is that this isn't a sustainable position. Already the googling for reddit posts sometimes backfires, says hey here's a recent comment from two weeks ago but then you open it and its the same 5 year old post you've already read somehow. Then you have a general decline of the quality of the community, more people posting in a biased manner than an unbiased one, among other issues. Not to mention, advertisers know about reddit too, and are probably shilling the crap out of their products to respective subreddits who link their offerings in the sidebar or the subreddit faq or wiki page. Eventually it's going to be no different than any other enshittified corner of the internet, which is scary because where do you go then? I'd be hunting for actual books again for information. Pretty sad that the world wide web is reaching a point where the old brick and mortar library is the better source of information again, given all the promise it had at the start as being a step forward from that.

similar thoughts here but I think there will always be a successor to a good community, and if you experienced it before, you'll be able to find the next one

I feel like that's not even a sure thing going forward. Consider the present generation of adults. They might have grown up on early reddit, or forums, or even usenet. They have an expectation of how these things operate.

Meanwhile, take the new generation. Some of them might go on old.reddit.com, some of them might only get exposed to the new version of reddit, some of them might not go there at all. As a whole, I'd say a higher percent of online discussion users in newer generations are on a platform like a walled garden, than a self hosted forum or niche subreddit today. This affects their expections and what they understand the internet to be going forward. It affects what sorts of websites or services are able to exist going forward as well. Our concept of the internet will likely die out along with our generation.

There is nothing better in terms of information and all-in-one knowledge, probably, but I have been using forums and some Discords (not much better than Reddit though) for my hobby recently and though it's annoying to check several places rather than one "front page", I still find I can engage with my hobby community perfectly fine. I lost a lot of top knowledge that's locked away on Reddit, but I honestly just spend a bit more time to research things now rather than having an answer at my fingertips with the search "{insert search topic} reddit". It's harder, but as I get older I find I have a lot more free time than I thought I had if I just ignore social media for most of my day. Hacker News and my hobby communities are my social outlet, because they aren't as bad for my mental health, though I have to avoid the more-political topics on HN.

Eternal september happened. The original crop of users was generally pretty good about following reddiquete and not downvoting. Today, the average user seems a lot more hostile in their replies, more willing to downvote your post in disagreement even if it is relevant to the topic, less able to see sarcasm or nuance, more willing to die on ideological hills.

I tried to find the meaning of eternal summer, but it appears to be a movie. I think you mean Eternal September [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Very true good catch

The down-voters are the good faith players - people are getting permabanned for political disagreements.

The community zeitgeist across the board just seems so much more argumentative, contrarian, and angry than it was years ago. Even on the niche subs. On /r/academicbiblical people get banned for spitting nasty stuff at each other in comments. The AnalogCommunity subreddit has a frequent drumbeat of negativity about new film stocks and is enraged about "shilling" if anyone who as much as includes a logo on their gear in a post - as if we, the analog film community, don't want new companies to succeed in analog film? The outrage isn't logical, it's strictly emotional, and it seems like people are drawn literally to the emotion of rage, not an emotional reaction to anything specific and tangible.

It reminds me of trying to find value in YouTube comments around 2008 and realizing there's some kind of community-wide attitude problem completely destroying any chance of it. It's not a discussion forum, it's one of those rooms where people pay $20 to smash stuff up with a sledgehammer and yell.

> The community zeitgeist across the board just seems so much more argumentative, contrarian, and angry than it was years ago.

I have no control group reference for this, only my decades of early adopter existence, but this does also happen to align with the USA’s change of discourse IRL as well.

I wonder how much of this apparent effect is from attitudes changing in the population at large, versus how much is simply from a larger percentage of the population just getting online.

If the latter, am I assuming that the early adopters also happened to be more chill? Is that likely?

> It reminds me of trying to find value in YouTube comments around 2008 and realizing there's some kind of community-wide attitude problem completely destroying any chance of it.

This was my experience as well, even 5 to 7 years ago. It seemed to me like YouTube comments were 99% a-hole trolls back then.

These days, that’s not my experience. Either (or both) I got better at finding cool channel communities, or the platform’s comment section somehow actually improved. My guess is both.

For me its I don’t go to toxic YouTube channels as much these days. I don’t erratically go through diff black holes of content. I watch the same sort of stuff. I usually will stop watching a channel if I notice the vibe in the comments are off (like justifications for bigotry but veiled as moral)

>These days, that’s not my experience.

I wonder how much of this is because many, many users had their YouTube account identity automatically converted to their Google account identity, which would be much more likely to include their real name and a profile picture.

I feel like we need a new XKCD for this situation like the “today’s lucky 10,000” [1] one.

Congratulations! You’re one of today’s lucky million! You discovered a feature that’s useful instead of anti-user just in time for a tech company to shut it down in the name of ~~user~~ shareholder experience!

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Since the GP stated they were blind, here's a textual description of the comic: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1053:_Ten_Thousan...

I think this has happened to me a few dozen times on Hacker News when I've seen "X is shutting down" where this is the first I've heard of X and it seems useful to me.

For me this week, it was Blaseball: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/3/23744507/blaseball-shutdow...

That’s one more for me. IDK if I would have actually played Blaseball, but it looks pretty fun.

Correction, the next 3 weeks. :)

If it's any consolation, virtually every subreddit with more than 10,000 members is completely worthless

You can at least for now, download any page in json format by appending .json to the url.

For instance https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.json

     wget https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.json -O hn.json
     jq -c '.data.children[] | {title: .data.title, domain: .data.domain, url: .data.url, upvotes: .data.ups }' hn.json

Results in

  {"title":"Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups","domain":"krebsonsecurity.com","url":"https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/06/service-rents-email-addresses-for-account-signups/","upvotes":8}


  {"title":"Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted","domain":"arstechnica.com","url":"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/dell-in-hot-water-for-making-shoppers-think-overpriced-monitors-were-discounted/","upvotes":12}

If you've gone without Reddit for this long, you're fine. The odds of Reddit having a net positive impact on your life are pretty low.

That's the way I feel. I saw an update about providing API access to accessibility specific apps but even with that I'm still not interested. Why would I want to use a site that makes limited efforts at accessibility and could revoke the ability for people to perform free labor to fix issues they have chosen to ignore?

The percentage of people who use a third party app to read reddit is likely relatively small. They're also the most likely to be invested in the platform. Why make these users angry? Why even take the risk that some of your users might leave for another platform?

If the issue is displaying ads or gathering analytics you can deal with both of those without cutting off third party apps. If you are concerned that others are building big data tools or bots off your free API you can also just grandfather the existing popular clients as free or with a very large discount.

For that matter you can also just set different price tiers for API clients that are used interactively by real people to interact with subreddits vs anyone else.

The social media game is all about network effects. Putting up barriers to making reddit a core service is only a bad thing. What positive gain is reddit expecting from killing third party clients here? As I said ads and analytics can be handled by the license agreement. You can even require them to link a library you provide that does the ad displays and analytics by pulling code from your servers so if you really must have deep control of that experience you can.

People who use third-party apps are the most likely to be invested in the platform but they don't matter at all to reddit, the company. I would assume that they are also the most likely to use old.reddit, the most likely to use adblockers on desktop, etc. Reddit would rather replace them with people that will just use the default mobile/desktop experiences because they're the easiest to set up. That is the gain. NPCs are easier to develop apps for because they don't care if the apps are actually good.

Bingo, all they care about is monetization. Simple

The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked). They may have decided there's no way to effectively monetize third-party app users to the levelling of targeting that their ad platform requires, so these users will always be a cost center instead of a profit center.

Then again these users are likely to disproportionately be posters and commenters, the people who create free content that keeps the broader userbase engaged, or are moderators keeping the site running for zero compensation, so pissing them off seems ill advised.

Based on this thread [1], where an admin accuses 3rd party apps of being inefficient API consumers but refuses to explain why, it's clear Reddit just wants these apps gone and isn't interested in whether anyone is alienated or upset by it.

The looming IPO and showing as positive user monetization numbers as possible is undoubtedly the motivation for this, unfortunately goodwill with the userbase that has taken years to build is getting trashed in the process.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

> The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked

I jusy checked the iOS app’s permissions. It asks for no permissions outside of live activities, for integration with Siri, notifications and background app refresh.

The iOS privacy permissions are different between the official app and Apollo:

- Official app https://i.imgur.com/fjgKlVo.png, see 'Data used to track you'

- Apollo app https://i.imgur.com/icykgJP.png, see 'Data not used to track you'

3rd party apps do not track users, which is a problem for an advertising-based business like Reddit.

Really? You don’t think Reddit can “track you” and use usage data when you’re signed in to Reddit with a third party app?

Apollo doesn’t track you. But Reddit is tracking you either way.

Of course they can track you to some degree either way, however the official app is using an IDFA (advertising identifier) [1] whereas Apollo is not, which makes tracking in the official app significantly easier.

The official app is also hoovering up other deanonymizing data like user location, which helps narrow down ad targeting even further. It's obvious why Reddit prefers you use their official app instead of a third-party alternative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers

The Reddit app does not ask for your GPS location. Reddit has the same very course idea about your location whether you use the official app or a third party app - your IP address.

It’s also a system setting whether you allow an app to use IDFA - which according to at least FB - 80% of iOS users decline.

Yes it does request location, it says in the image I linked above. Advertising identifiers are declined roughly 20% of the time according to Adjust:

>In iOS 10, Apple introduced "Limit Ad Tracking" setting for users who do not wish to be tracked by advertising networks. If the setting is enabled the system returns a default all-zero id for that device. As of December 2020, it's estimated that approximately 20% of users turn on this setting.

Your own linked says that location data is not linked to you.

On iOS you can go to “Location” and Reddit doesn’t show up as even an option.

And you cited an article about iOS 10 that came out in 2017. As of 2021, it’s 88% that opt out of tracking

https://targetinternet.com/resources/how-apple-ios14-changes...

Reddit is doing so much injury to the free labor mods. They are so massively disproportionately injured by these changes, as people who direly need advanced changes. Absolutely wild own goal.

It's not an own goal if the mods will continue to keep doing it because that's all they have.

A lot of mods try to diversify their communities across platforms (Discord, Mastodon)

Keep it in what form?

How little will it take for the communities to spiral?

How would a developer's performance be if you removed their tooling? Could they still develop, sure. Will they want to? Is there some where for them to move.

If not, how long until the pain forces a thousand clones?

I've been around long enough to see the decline of Reddit. Predicted many times but eventually, the bottom will fall out and with the sentiment of the world towards big business and reddit wanting to IPO. I see this as a place people may make a stand. Because what better place than the place itself.

there is a class of power moderators who are monetizing their position, who are dependent on the population of reddit. but most topic-focused communities on reddit are only there because reddit is the most convenient platform. as soon as that is no longer the case, the community will move on, and ultimately that is the same population that supplies the larger monetizeable subreddits.

as a mod of a few topic focused subreddits, yeah, if they ever get rid of old.reddit I'm probably gone. I'll miss the communities but not enough to put up with the interface.

I'm a mod (of an insignificant subreddit), have been active for 15+ years, 6 figure karma, even had the single most upvoted comment on all of reddit one day...they notify you and give you an award when that happens in case you wonder.

My feelings about the site have evolved so much over the years but in the past couple of years the vibe has been turning consistently negative. I'm getting fed up and I imagine a lot of others are as well and I can't imagine this will end up benefiting Reddit in general.

Congratulations for working for free for a for-profit company?

Might I recommend you to turn towards places like Lemmy or other less-commercial and less exploitive websites?

Reddit relies on free work, but doesn't value or help the mods. And now, they're doubling down on screwing everyone and manufacturing fake content for what appears their IPO.

I think it's time to skedaddle.

I think I'm out of the loop... what is this about manufacturing fake content?

Probably referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

Can't fault them for following a tried and true strategy from the same platform: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

You mean "volunteering to keep a community forum polite and productive".

I wish people would quit shitting on mods like they're idiots for taking out the trash.

Yes, though, the larger subreddits are political and repost astroturf. Anti-american garbage. But not every sub is like that. I'll look into Lemmy though.

> You mean "volunteering to keep a community forum polite and productive".

Both of those things can be true.

The reality is those communities--which only thrive on Reddit because of effective moderation--are built on a private platform whose primary method of generating profits is to monetize the attention of those community members.

So, yes, those mods are absolutely contributing free labour that Reddit is turning into private profits, and that labour comes in the form of volunteering to keep those forums polite and productive. Whether or not that's a reasonable tradeoff is up to each individual, though I have to confess I don't personally understand it (despite, in the past, benefiting from it). At least my day job pays me for the labour that they monetize.

And now Reddit is taking a dump all over those free labourers by taking away critical tools that they use to make those forums polite and productive in the first place.

Thank you.

That's why I recommended putting "volunteering time" with actual non-profit orgs and groups, so that 100% of the labor goes to all. I didn't advocate "quit volunteering for a community", cause that's the wrong thing to advocate.

There's mastodon, Lemmy for 2. Discord isn't great, given earlier in the curve of monetization. Same for other for-profit areas. But again, I'd recommend finding communities in a not-profit-driven area and work there.

The for-profit side of things has the same death spirals. I'm just sick of this "web2" crap profiteering and killing useful community stuff.

I mod a technical sub focused on a FOSS project because it's a good place for people to seek advice and share cool tech. I'm doing it for the people, and I'm doing it because I care about the project. It's small though, only just hit 10K subs, and the moderation load is light, basically just ensuring any vendors who turn up actually contribute to the community, not just a drive-by sales blurb.

No one said you're doing it for Reddit. Most mods are doing it to support their community.

The point is Reddit is pocketing profits from you donating your free labour to the benefit of their private platform.

Dress it up however you like, that core fact remains true.

Yep. But then, I'm paying $0 to host a 10,000 strong community, so you know, swings and roundabouts.

This sounds like a bad way of saying things. If everyone agrees Reddit isn’t a great company then the optics of saying you pay nothing to host on a platform/company that isn’t that good doesn’t seem user focused etc.

The other persons rationale make perfect sense. Any one can justify anything they want as much as they want, profits still went to Reddit.

I stopped modding Reddit by 2019. My politics evolved. I didn’t think it made sense to provide Reddit with free labor.

I'm not providing my labour to Reddit, I'm providing it to the community of users.

Stop kidding yourself: You're providing it to both.

That's fine. You do you.

But it is what it is.

Life is not zero sum. You can structure an exchange so that both sides benefit. Many (most?) Reddit mods believe that was the setup, but it’s being lost now.

As is also the case with Twitter, for example.

Maybe the lesson, here, is that private platforms cannot and should not be seen as the "town square" or a place for "community", and that if you make that choice, you need to be ready to move if the platform turns in an unfavourable direction.

Of course, what we're seeing with things like Bluesky is that, unfortunately, for many, that lesson continues to remain unlearned.

I was a moderator for a fairly large subreddit (6 figures subscribers).

I was a moron doing free work for a for-profit company.

I deserved to be shat on.

That's fair, but that isn't how I felt.

I was the mod for a city subreddit for a while and while it was tiring, it was easy to do (especially with a medium sized group, each pitching in a little bit). Keep the spam and trolling down, and community engagement up. (Then I got banned for calling a spammer on a large message board a spammer).

Name an online community space that isn't a for-profit company, that more than a few hundred people could name.

Facebook Instagram Nextdoor Meetup Reddit

Whoops.

> Name an online community space that isn't a for-profit company, that more than a few hundred people could name.

I have nothing against for profit companies.

I am vehemently against of donating labor to for-profit companies. Especially when they will betray those that provided free labor when it becomes convenient.

Reddit proved me right.

Those are all pretty general platforms. A city community is a specific niche that could work anywhere including on its own.

Community building doesn’t have to be only picking one general social media mega platform to live off of.

Lemmy is too slow to take off. And federation is too inconvenient for the average user.

It's not easy to move a group to a new platform, and there's very little people using Lemmy currently. The thing about Reddit despite its flaws is that it allows access to many large communities with a single account.

> Congratulations for working for free for a for-profit company?

They work for themselves, and use reddit resources free. If anything, this relationship is beneficial for the community, but reddit.

Reddit massively benefits from the existence of the community. They are sacrificing goodwill in the hope that the higher revenue per user is worth the backlash.

> in the past couple of years the vibe has been turning consistently negative

As a regular user, I gave up on reddit a couple of years ago because of exactly this problem.

I deleted my 15 year old account this week and don't miss it. My hn account is next but isn't that old. Why make it easy for the world to track you?

As someone who moderated a couple of communities in the past... Good.

Mods are as much of a problem as they are a help. They rule subreddits like gods and (lots) abuse the shadow ban/delete system to silence opinions they don't like. Lots of others sell out to various influencers/advertisers and help promote whatever they want.

Mods cannot shadowban users. Only admins can do that.

Enh, sort of. You can write an Automod rule to always remove content from one or more specific users.

That's not a shadow ban. The differentiator that makes it "shadow" is that the user does not know that it has occurred.

The user doesn't know their posts were deleted. Other users don't know that mods removed the post either. It just shows as deleted.

Unpopular opinion but I bet Reddit survives this just fine. Those complaining probably aren’t clicking the ads and there are enough people who are addicted to Reddit to replace any mods who leave.

The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho

It seems a safe assumption that nobody is clicking the ads.

I think Reddit will continue, but I see it getting worse. moderation with bots already sucks enough, I can't imagine how horrible reddit without bots will be.

On a second thought, I completely agree with this. I think people have a lot of hope because reddit sucks but the reality is way too many people are addicted to reddit. I know because I struggle not to check reddit all the time. People will likely need a good replacement for reddit to go down.

Install the Leechblock browser extension. Begin with timeslotting Reddit and then just make it permanent. It is just muscle memory to go there. I did not miss it.

If the survival is of the Twitter type, then good luck with the IPO

But the power users are the ones who feed the community (and do moderation, etc)

On a second thought, maybe that's Reddit's idea, just turn it into a GPT generated and Astroturfing maelstrom and see what happens

Reddit will survive just fine.

But potentially consider this comment from the linked reddit post. It is heartbreaking.

> I'm just so tired! That is all! I'm so tired of feeling left behind by people who aren't aware, and who don't care. The choices we have for social media really aren't much, and if they don't care about third party apps, what else are they going to throw away? Will we lose this place too?

The decision has many side effects that Reddit is not acknowledging and it is important to recognize the importance that an API can have, particuarly on accessibility.

Will reddit survive. Oh yeah, they will be absolutely fine. But their decision does negatively impact the world and that is the important story here.

You don’t need an api to be accessible, hence why pressure should be put on Reddit to make their app and site accessible to begin with.

I do feel for the poster, though.

I think its just frustrating to see the same pattern over and over. Start with a user centric experience, capture a large market, progressively worsen experience to make it more appealing to investors (they love bland and stale apparently), then the website dies a slow death and becomes hated by its former advocates.

But hey its fine because the cycle is starting again and there's a shiny new thing focused on its users we can all move to.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

I’m not so sure. Non ad-clicking/viewing users still generate a lot of content.

Official apps always struggle to balance shoving ads in your face and being an actually nice to use app.

No way these apps actually shut down

An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center at their biggest announcement of the decade, won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications, and/or charge $5/month, before shutting things down for good?

All of these app developers are fear mongering, and hiding their true plans, im 100% sure of this

At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described

> An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center

Being featured by Apple doesn't pay the bills and Reddit obviously doesn't listen.

> won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications

The Apollo developer has repeatedly asked Reddit to offer a more efficient method of getting notifications that doesn't require polling. The app backend already uses caching and only a small fraction of the allowed request budget. Reddit doesn't care.

> and/or charge $5/month

$5/month are not enough, in case you didn't notice Reddit's new pricing is insane. Also according to the developer about 10% of users pay the monthly premium subscription. Make it mandatory and most users will be gone.

> At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described

Even if the things you described weren't already long implemented, they don't change the prices which are simply too high for third-party apps to survive.

That’s not how supply and demand work. Taxi medallions tanked in value. Similarly now that the value of any Reddit API based product has tanked…they won’t be worth the same. Not that many of the apps were ever going to be sold for many millions of dollars.

It will survive, but in what manner?

Reddit is currently deeply integrated into the cultural zeitgeist. Much in the way that Digg used to be the discovery mechanism for the forefront of internet culture. Then v4 hit and everyone fled to reddit. Yes, Digg is still there but it's not the Digg of pre-2010.

Twitter is still around post-Elon, but with a lot less relevance and lot fewer legitimate users.

Reddit will still be here in a year, no matter what. But it may look very different than how it looks today.

Is Twitter less relevant? I'm not an active user, but I haven't seen a decrease in links to tweets over the past few months.

Yes. A large number of the people I followed who actually posted interesting content (as opposed to bots retweeting press releases) either greatly curtailed posting, or quit all together. I followed them out the door.

I keep seeing people say this, and I expect to see a decrease in the number of tweets I see linked from the subreddits I follow. But the tweets keep coming. Maybe it's subject matter. I primarily see tweets in sports-related subreddits, so for all I know athletes and sports writers could be the only people still using twitter.

Most of the sports accounts would fall under "Retweeting press releases". I'm talking about people I followed, many of whom were historians so would often publish original analysis, pictures they'd personally combed the archives for and digitized, that sort of thing.

Very much NOT pop culture/politics/etc.

I think the phrase "legitimate users" is worthy of scrutiny in the comment you replied to.

I've only ever really consumed twitter secondhand like you, but I have observed that since the acquisition the quality of discussion in replies to tweets I am linked seems to have significantly dropped, and as objectively as one can opine about that kind of thing. Just angry graffiti and dumpster fire arguments about at-best-tangentially related culture war topics in reply to everything. I've made this comparison once already in this thread, but it reminds me of comments on youtube in the mid 00s.

But hey, youtube comments never improved much and that site is still highly relevant today, so hard to make a prediction based off my observed anecdote. And I've never used twitter much at all, so maybe I just hadn't noticed before.

I wonder if the observed decline in discussion quality has any correlation with the "boost" that is given to comments from accounts with blue check marks.

The change in discussion quality has occurred because old Twitter had an objective to cultivate one particular quality of discussion, and Musk Twitter has an objective to cultivate a different quality of discussion. These goals were stated up front by the respective decision makers. Any particular technique is simply a tool for the job. If old Twitter or new Twitter thought a method would aid in their quality cultivation goals, then they would have adopted it: if it proved counterproductive, then they would drop it.

So there is almost certainly a correlation to the boost that is given to comments. But even if it is a causative correlation, the ultimate cause is not the bluecheck boost, but the desire of the decisionmaker.

> Reddit is currently deeply integrated into the cultural zeitgeist. Much in the way that Digg used to be the discovery mechanism for the forefront of internet culture

I don’t know what circles you are in but neither digg nor Reddit are particularly relevant nor ever were at their peak. They’ve always been pretty niche. Reddit hasn’t been relevant since at least 2017 in my circles at least - all communities moved to discord and public discourse has always been on twitter and still is.

Yup, this is the Silicon Valley model. Burn and churn people.

History serves you as correct. Though, I think the energy is more properly spent weaning off of Reddit and fostering a new community. I've seen feature requests from almost a decade ago being promised and there's not even a shred of progress on them. At that point, why not make it yourself?

100k people leaving reddit won't kill reddit, but 100k people can definitely form it's own active community. That many more people than most reddit alternatives as of now.

Time will tell. I'd bet that a sizable amount of people posting the content that actually drives engagement with the website cares about this change, and I think that there's not as many people excited to do unpaid labour in the form of modding as you may think.

Digg is still around. So is Slashdot. For some definition of "still around."

> The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho

The market forces of a site like Reddit (or most web sites, frankly) are fundamentally against accessibility. The mobile web site nags me constantly with a banner popup to install their native app. How does one even talk about accessibility in the presence of dark patterns that make a site inaccessible to even those without the need for a11y?

If I'm being blunt, a11y is nothing more than a sledge hammer that devs use to bash other devs over the head with. A lot of "thou shall nots" with not a whole lot of actual user testing. Sprinkling aria attributes and "semantic" tags all over your DOM doesn't make your site accessible. Not when you're also putting in ads, carousels, and various other things that go completely against it.

Slashdot should be a harbinger to Reddit. Community can just leave. Reddit is happily shutting out very active partners instead of working with them.

It will survive, but the quality of conversation will continue to degrade. It will gain users, but they will be less productive and less engaged. But they will also see more ads.

How can Reddit survive without mods? Reddit will start hiring mods? Most of the content on Reddit is made by a minority of hardcore users, most of them are angry now.

You could argue Digg is still alive right now, I won't call it that though.

> Those complaining probably aren’t clicking the ads

The ONLY real reason people are complaining is because using the official app means seing ads.

All the arguments thrown around there are whataboutisms to try to justify the fact that they want to keep profiteering off of Reddit, that's it.

It's not about the ads. I wouldn't mind seeing ads in my third party app of choice if it kept reddit "free". The problem is, the official app is horrendous; unusably bad. It's equivalent to comparing the web redesign with old.reddit.

I use old.reddit.com but I also use the official app, I don't see anything wrong with it.

I've asked multiple times already people to point out specific issues with the app and nobody did beside "iT's AwFuL".

Specific issues from when I used it for a bit to create image posts a year ago:

- On my screen size, it was incredibly hard to navigate the profile. The profile header covered over half the screen - Notifications were often bugged - You can only have one thing open at once - no way to quickly toggle between two pages. Apollo at least has four buttons in the bottom you can use to go to seperate pages - It was extremely laggy - It sends notifications by default for random junk ("your post got one upvote!!!" "check out this trending subreddit;!!!") and at least once there was a server bug where it ignored me having turned those off and sent marketing notifications anyway

The real issue for me is it just feels bad to use. Everything lags, it constantly loses my place, ...

new.reddit was nice, I was using it back in the beta period. But it's so slow. It's barely usable. Opening a reddit thread from google if I'm not signed in shows like three comments and a bunch of random unrelated junk. Opening new reddit when I am signed in just feels slow. Every action pauses for a moment to do a bunch of react rerenders.

I don't know if they've fixed it by now but back two years ago it was doing react rerenders of practically the whole page while moving the mouse.

Using the mobile app feels similarly bad to using new.reddit

Unpopular opinion but Reddit died a long time ago - the world moved to discord for real community interactions and now all that is left is a 24/7 monetized outrage stream fed by bots, shills and has-beens.

I’m in tons of discords. I finally moved most of them into folders I rarely check. I’ve never been able to get into Discord. Either servers are too active or too inactive. I’m bombarded with Discord invites etc because of the stuff I’m interested in so I know that’s where stuff is now too.

IMO discords insistence on constant relogins and phone numbers for most things makes it not work well for many, including those who cannot give phone numbers for privacy or other reasons. The forum format has a lot of advantages.

Funny thing is that discord is also killing itself. They are not really listening to community. Just look at feedback that is given on their username changes.

I wonder how will they kill themselves eventually. As surely that is coming too.

I know the popular sentiment is that Reddit is doing this to look good for IPO but won't investors google the business they're about to invest a lot of money in?

10 minutes of research makes it completely obvious they're endangering their core business.

Reddit doesn't work without functional moderation. Despite years of asking, the native mod tools are no where close to parity with 3rd party tools. This alienates good mods who are not generic gears you can just swap out, building a strong subreddit culture and rapport takes years of good faith effort. Then they're alienating a sizeable block of the most engaged users, and on top of everything they're shameless discriminating against the disabled.

Who looks at all that and thinks "yes this is definitely a stable venture ran by competent management and a reliable place to expect RoI."

Investors are soulless but they are not stupid.

I would guess that they'll sell it as "we were able to monetize our api and all it cost us were a small subset of users, which are more likely to use ad blockers anyway" and then try to hand it off to the public before the long term effects of those changes happens.

> Investors are soulless but they are not stupid.

To be honest, tons of investors are stupid, don't research anything, and/or just go with whatever sounds cool to them.

The idea that "investors" as a group are any more rational than other group is a myth dearly held by investors.

You're right, and I thought about that too. But even the average idiot can use google and see there is page after page of near-unanimous consensus on how bad of an idea this is.

> 10 minutes of research makes it completely obvious they're endangering their core business.

It's not that obvious.

To me, at any rate, it's not at all obvious that reddit is in any danger of losing a significant number of their members.

Yup. It's just as "obvious" that this shows that management is willing to make the big necessary decisions to preserve revenue and take back full control of the user experience.

I'm not defending Reddit at all, but very often what annoys users is what's good for business (e.g. ads), and so users complaining isn't necessarily a bad sign to investors at all.

I would actually say nothing here is obvious yet. Reddit doesn't seem to be in any danger yet, but it really depends on whether user dissatisfaction snowballs or fizzles out, and that's one of those chaos-theory things that nobody knows, and different potential investors will have wildly different opinions on.

They don't have to lose that much for a problem to exist If we go by the 1% rule, their main value creators, which are more likely to be a Power user who could be affected by the degraded experience, you only need to affect Creators and Mods for the house of cards to start shaking

> They don't have to lose that much for a problem to exist If we go by the 1% rule, their main value creators, which are more likely to be a Power user who could be affected by the degraded experience,

I dunno. In my experience it's the power users who are the last to leave a platform. Whether we're talking OSes, Office suites, etc, it's always the power users who remain after everyone else gets fed up.

In this case, the 1% value their high karma account and name-recognition on the platform more than they dislike the reddit changes.

I am willing to bet a small amount of money that Reddit will continue being fine even with these most recent changes.

Interesting! TIL there is a Windows desktop application called "Reddit for Blind" that can be used to access Reddit with a screen reader:

https://www.redditforblind.org

My instinctive reaction was: "No screenshots on the page!" A couple of seconds later I realised how silly that was, but now as a non-blind person I am interested in knowing what the overall user experience is. Respect for the person maintaining this app!

The funny and ironic part is seeing people kind of contesting decision of a proprietary service, then flee to another proprietary service like discord.

Like, will they ever learn?

You are currently made a comment using a proprietary service.

Your pc and phone also partly proprietary service.

You make calls, send and receive money by using proprietary service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

Sent from my Librem 5, which runs an FSF-endorsed OS.

I would indeed say that hoping for a perfect open source free (as in freedom) scalable web solution with a bustling community is an unrealistic, idealistic alternative. At least, as of now.

I disagree: Mastodon works quite well and has an amazing community:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36185731

But he's not contesting the decision made by Reddit as far as I can tell?

Exactly.

If I really feel I need a space following rules I control, I host it.

So, by your words, other people never learn because they contesting decisions of some proprietary org. And you learned to never contest any decision made by proprietary organization and this is good?

Ok, what should they do?

Its really sad more than anything. The modern march of technology has been to take what used to be open standard technologies used by the average computer user at the time, privatise them, wall up the gardens, and lock people in. Now you have people beholden to reddit and discord instead of irc and a self hosted web forum. It reminds me of those quick change oil places: an entire industry with serious real estate holdings exists solely because most people have no clue how to unscrew three things and pour in oil themselves. Its an example of yet another industry with a financial incentive towards widespread ignorance.

Reddit is shooting itself in the foot by effectively banning the tools that moderators use to do their free labor. I'm surprised Reddit didn't take a slower and more gradual approach instead of a drastic change like this. I guess Steve Huffman has IPO fever.

And it's not like they don't understand the importance of mods' free labor to keep subreddits clean of filth and users visiting/contributing. I know somebody who worked there years ago, and it was understood that they had to preserve the good will and trust from mods of subreddits to keep Reddit in a functional and orderly state.

This is interesting, I did not realize (but should have) APIs were used to help blind people.

In this case, I think reddit could face legal issues, at least in the US. So now to me, looks like this change was not fully analyzed.

There might be precedent, if their site and app don't make reasonable accomodations.

https://casetext.com/analysis/national-association-of-the-de...

There's a difference between accommodations and full blown not designing an accessible website. I'm honestly shocked to find out much of reddit is inaccessible and not following WCAG AA spec.

Seems like a slam dunk for a law firm looking for an easy payout.

> but should have

Not really, as the entire reason the API helps us is because Reddit has done such an appallingly bad job at accessibility. There were great third-party Twitter apps and I used them, but when they all shut down, I wasn't left with nothing; the Twitter app (and even the website) are usable. (Although Twitter fired their entire accessibility team so time will tell if it stays that way.)

I doubt it: What laws are they violating? If you get federal grants, your site needs to be accessible. There are other categories (e.g. OTA broadcasts). Not sure there is anything that would apply to a site like Reddit.

> I doubt it: What laws are they violating?

The ADA?

Specifically which clause?

Courts have found websites to constitute "public accomodations".

for websites?

https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

HOLY HELL: https://archive.ada.gov/peapod_sa.htm

You can sue Reddit ! ! !

DO IT!

Shout out to reddit execs for spectacular job tanking your rep ahead of IPO.

Since this change makes a service less accessible to the disabled, is there way to bring injunctive relief under the ADA?

Maybe the Mods could claim they are denied service.

Some references https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234827

Some products can’t be monetized. Sometimes monetization kills its host. Reddit will be a case study in how this dynamic can unfold. I’ll miss it, but a replacement will eventually come along.

I still hope that Reddit will reverse its plans to charge money for its API, but with every passing piece of news like this it just feels less and less likely.

In the interest of preparing for the worst and offering an alternative. I have created https://api.reddiw.com. If you're an app developer that is affected by this price increase please consider adopting it, feel to reach out to me if you have any questions and we can work together.

What's the point of this API? Those endpoints (and many more) are accessible without API token anyway.

You can basically read all of Reddit for free without authentication already.

Reddit is planning to make their API endpoints cost a lot of money. This is a (near) free alternative.

If you go to any Reddit thread and add .json at the end, it gives you the data as JSON and is not behind any authentication. This is what I meant.

This API is useless because you'll still be able to use that.

.json pages are part of the API and will likely be taken down eventually

/r/blind going dark?

Perhaps a naive question, but what prevents a user from running an emulation layer with a virtual browser, that pipes the data to a desired client? Term of service?

Ok what if they decide to run said adversarial interface, host the code outside of judicial grasp, and cover tracks?

Yeah performance would probably be subpar, but if Reddit keeps up this process, that will be the likely inevitable outcome.

It's a real bummer that computers should be strictly superior to non-digital technology for accessibility (a book is a book and doesn't change after it's printed) but for economic reasons, it won't be. I can't even super blame Reddit - they're just capitalists trying to make money. It just feels like an own-goal by humanity.

Yep. Every time someone suggests a special blind-friendly API, I remind them that HTML was that API, and it just got bastardized over time, so you need to figure out how you’d keep it from going through that same process with whatever new thing you propose.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30727672

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961

As an example of how this has beeen completely perverted....

Here's a snippet of HTML from Facebook advert https://imgur.com/Wx8rIOm.png

Just for "Hydrow <blue_checkmark> Sponsored" is the following HTML

Also, attempting to highlight "sponsored" also jumps back and forth because their scripts basically jigsaw the letters together from bits. And, almost all of their content on pages look like this. My guess is to jam up adblockers. But it also screws over anybody with visual difficulties (reduction of visibility to blindness).

Yea, randomized to avoid adblockers catching the div.

On the contrary, I think you can blame people who make antisocial choices. In fact, you have to.

hate the player not the game eh

In what sense is this white knighting? If anything it's approximately the opposite.

It's fine to hate both. The players allow the game to continue as it is, after all.

I’d find this more compelling if you or I were running a Reddit competitor with pro-social choices.

How is Reddit not required to be WCAG compliant?

They are, but lawsuits take years, and management is often ignorant about their responsibilities.

Are they? Link I pasted above (https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/) tells me they aren't.

Happy to correct if I'm wrong.

The definition for public accommodation is purposely ambiguous, but so far, it seems no one has tried to make the case that a site like Reddit would count as one.

They aren't a "public accommodation" (https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/).

From that page:

Title III prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public (also referred to as “public accommodations” under the ADA)

Reddit is definitely a business open to the public.

According to that link, it sounds like they are:

>Title III prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public (also referred to as “public accommodations” under the ADA). The ADA requires that businesses open to the public provide full and equal enjoyment of their goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to people with disabilities. [...]

>A website with inaccessible features can limit the ability of people with disabilities to access a public accommodation’s goods, services, and privileges available through that website—for example, a veterans’ service organization event registration form.

>For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.

The courts also found that Netflix was a public accomodation in 2015 as part of a lawsuit, and Netflix was forced to provide subtitles on 100% of their programming.

I'm not convinced. Reddit is a platform, not a store.

Stores are expected to follow the ADA for things like wheel chair accessibility.

If they put up a community bulletin board, no reasonable person would expect them to rip down anything that doesn't include Braille.

> If they put up a community bulletin board, no reasonable person would expect them to rip down anything that doesn't include Braille.

If there was a readily-available bulletin board that cost somewhat more, but that automatically displayed in Braille to the side any posted items, a reasonable person might expect that they go with the expensive Auto-Braille-Board.

And a reasonable person would very likely expect them not to go with the bulletin board that actively obfuscates the ability of people to use their own photo-to-speech devices on posted items.

If horses had horns they'd be unicorns.

> On May 31, 2023, Reddit announced they were raising the price to make calls to their API from being free to a level that will kill every third party app on Reddit, from Apollo, to Dystopia, to Reddit for Blind, to Luna for Reddit, to BaconReader

This is what I don't get. Nothing's been killed. They can keep existing, they just have to pay. Why is nobody talking about just passing the cost along to the consumer and seeing how objectionable the cost really is?

We know the costs and they’re ridiculous. Under the new pricing the average user of one third party app (Apollo) uses $2.50 worth of requests per month.

OK so charge people $9 a month to use Apollo?

Doing that is going to kill a huge percentage of Apollo's user base. It's not a foregone conclusion that the app will die, but the chances of that happening are much much greater now than they were before. If you were the developer of Apollo I think you'd have every reason to be worried about that, and any opposition to this change would be justified.

> Doing that is going to kill a huge percentage of Apollo's user base

Wait until you find out what happens to Apollo’s user base if they pay less than the API costs.

Not sure what your point is here?

We're talking about the fact that Reddit's API prices are going to be extremely high going forward. Your response was a dismissive "just charge 9 dollars". Obviously that is going to cause a lot of pain for all third party developers, which is the whole reason why everyone is complaining about this.

Again, the thing that is going to cause more pain is not charging anything.

My point is that this whole protest is framed as “We have no option and no way to exist unless Reddit gives in to our demands.” But the reality is that Reddit literally gave them an option.

It’s like the “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” meme. Just make people pay. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

You forget that people using reddit also provide its content. Should users start charging reddit now as well? Reddit would be nothing without its users.

> You forget that people using reddit also provide its content.

No, I’m well aware of that.

> Should users start charging reddit now as well?

Absolutely! They should organize and stop posting until Reddit agrees to pay them a fee. Do you think this will work?

> They should organize and stop posting until Reddit agrees to pay them a fee. Do you think this will work?

That's basically what we're doing, but skipping the middleman and overhead of paying and receiving money.

> “We have no option and no way to exist unless Reddit gives in to our demands.”

That's a strawman. The complaint isn't that Reddit is charging money for API usage, it's that the pricing is extremely expensive.

> But the reality is that Reddit literally gave them an option.

Charging an exorbitant fee that will most likely kill all third-party clients isn't really an option, but ok.

> It’s like the “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” meme.

This is a very inaccurate analogy, and it makes me think you are missing the point of the complaints entirely.

> There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Again, no one is demanding free API access.

If nobody is demanding free API access, why has the “movement” not put out a counteroffer for pricing that they’d be happy with?

My belief is that it’s because if they announce a number that is not $0, then everyone is going to find out that a lot of people are demanding free API access.

“Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps” is a disingenuous statement.

Is any app even planning to charge the new prices? If they don’t, then they’re killing themselves. Honestly it’s a great campaign by the app makers to whip users up into a frenzy like this because it means more profit for themselves if Reddit backs down on the API pricing.

> If nobody is demanding free API access, why has the “movement” not put out a counteroffer for pricing that they’d be happy with?

I don't think this "movement" of third-party client developers is as organized as you think it is, but the Apollo developer did mention discussing pricing with Reddit here[1] and compared Reddit's API pricing to Imgur. Note that he never mentioned any expectation of "free", just that it was about 100x more expensive. I'm really not sure why you can't accept their intentions as being truthful or valid.

>My belief is that it’s because if they announce a number that is not $0, then everyone is going to find out that a lot of people are demanding free API access.

That sounds extremely unrealistic to me, but you don't have any evidence to support this so I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.

> “Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps” is a disingenuous statement.

It's not, because once they are forced to pass on the costs to their customers they will certainly lose a significant percentage of them. It's impossible to say exactly how many, but it's reasonable to assume that it could cost enough to make their app no longer viable. Again, not sure why that is so hard to believe.

> Is any app even planning to charge the new prices? If they don’t, then they’re killing themselves.

I'm not sure I understand this comment. Obviously all third party clients will be forced to pass on these costs to their customers if they go in to effect because they won't have a choice. I mean, it's so obvious that I'm not even sure why you are mentioning it.

>Honestly it’s a great campaign by the app makers to whip users up into a frenzy like this because it means more profit for themselves if Reddit backs down on the API pricing.

I'm completely baffled as to why you are unable to see this from the point of view of the app developer. Just put yourself in their shoes - if a critical dependency of yours started charging X times what they were charging before, it throws off your entire business plan and may make it no longer viable. Are you saying you wouldn't do anything to try and prevent that from happening before you had to change your whole business plan around in an attempt to stave off what will very likely be the death of your company?

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

> Note that he never mentioned any expectation of "free", just that it was about 100x more expensive

Again, my point is that I believe this is absolutely intentional. If in these emotional pleas to the community somebody comes out and says, “$1 per user per month is what we’re willing to accept”, you’re going to see the people that were on the app developers side flip out and say $1 a month is too high.

My evidence for this is that there’s a reason nobody has put a price they’re willing to pay out.

I guess we just see the situation differently.

You see it as one where Reddit has killed 3rd party apps.

I see it as one where Reddit’s made a choice that will affect 3rd party apps and 3rd party apps are making it look like they have no options.

> Again, my point is that I believe this is absolutely intentional. If in these emotional pleas to the community somebody comes out and says, “$1 per user per month is what we’re willing to accept”, you’re going to see the people that were on the app developers side flip out and say $1 a month is too high.

Your belief is strictly faith-based, without evidence.

> My evidence for this is that there’s a reason nobody has put a price they’re willing to pay out.

You don't know that, because you aren't privvy to all of the conversations that developers have been having with Reddit regarding pricing.

> You see it as one where Reddit has killed 3rd party apps.

I don't just "see it", it's already happened:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_wi...

Apollo (a third party client) has requested half the price and 90 days transition period. The price and transition period seems non-negotiable. Apollo is shutting down: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

> I hope I explained above why the 30 day time limit is the true issue. However in a perfect world I think lowering the price by half and providing a three month transition period to the paid API would make the transition feasible for more developers, myself included. These concessions seem minor and reasonable in the face of the changes.

I am using a FOSS app that cannot charge me. I would probably pay $2-3/mo for my own personal API key. Or, I guess I could just not use reddit ...

Kind of off topic but are there any tools that blind people use that developers can help contribute to?

disruptive, but you can pay for it………

like the costs are absurd… for existing communities… but if there is utility then……

I dont know I can tell I’m stepping on eggshells here for something thats clearly going to happen the way I describe, and not how the protest describes

Reddit is having a Digg v4 moment

It's infuriating how these massive companies refuse to make their apps accessible.

Behold, reddits digg redesign moment.

The community seems to overwhelmingly support the protest. Perhaps this is an opportunity for a coordinated move elsewhere?

Need somewhere to go. There is no second-tier reddit alternative that's good enough for everyone to migrate to.

Seems like there's a good opportunity for a single service that is a Facebook/Twitter/Reddit alternative.

Lemmy looks to be the main contender currently

I repeat: there is no second-tier alternative good enough for everyone to migrate to.

Lemmy looks to be the main contender currently

These protests are pointless. Let reddit kill itself. It had its time.

They directly cut into ad revenue. It won't change Reddit's mind, but is noticed.

I think they might actually help kill reddit faster. A lot of people have joked already that these protests will finally be the kick to get them to quit wasting time on the site. I'd bet that numbers do drop a lot after the protests and at least a few users end up leaving for good.

These subreddit blackouts are so dumb. All it does is reinforce that Reddit can do what they want and communities won't go anywhere. It's like a teenager running away then showing up for dinner. If you want Reddit to get the message migrate your community and nuke the subreddit.

/r/me_irl is doing that, they’re going to permanently go private if the changes aren’t reversed.

That’s one of the most pointless subreddits out there. They need to nuke the default ones to have any meaningful effect.

The goal here is to negotiate. You don't open a negotiation by going scorched earth.

I pretty strongly disagree with this take. I’ve used Reddit for over a decade almost entirely as a “lurker” meaning without an account. The majority of what I watched and read has depended on that reaching the “front page of the internet.”

While I’ve followed these recent changes since the Pushshift shutoff, it’s really only been in the past week that I’ve seen this gain “mainstream” attention. The more of these subreddit-going-dark announcements reach the page, the more people realize this is a widespread issue - even if they don’t click, read, or even think about what’s going on or why, they’re aware of it.

I’ve seen several dozen of these posts reach the front page, plus a litany of media outlet publications. That legitimately matters as an input to financial projections in the context of their upcoming IPO, and it matters even more as a signal to prospective investors, retail or institutional.

Our modern reality is often served to us via algorithms that are trained to optimize for things; the most common thing for content platforms to optimize for is engagement, and the most common signal for these platforms is the upvote. In over a decade I’ve never seen any topic reach front page across such a variety of posts and subreddits, and that is a direct result of individuals upvoting these posts.

I think this demonstrates, already, the collective ability to mobilize action across communities, even if the action is reduced to the simplest Boolean upvote. And that’s an indication that widespread collective action can be coordinated.

I'm not sure how any of that goes against the comment that you're answering to?

I'd go even further and say it reinforces it: despite being the most visible coordinated Reddit event in the past 10 years, nothing will come out of it and everything will be back to normal after 2 days.

The black outs last for 1-2 days. And all it does is make the sub private (afaik, you will still be able to post and comment on the sub as long as you joined it). This is not going to achieve a single thing.

Also, they can unprivate the subs on their own website if they want to, and pretty sure they have data backups if they delete it. Only the government could do anything about this, but I'm not sure any laws were broken here, they just started charging money for commercial use of their valuable pool of data.

> This is not going to achieve a single thing.

It has in the past.

Communities went dark in protest due to reddit not shutting down vaccine conspiracy subreddits during the pandemic forcing reddit to act.

They also went dark when reddit failed to properly vet a new hire who had been a politician with a weird link to bad acts involving a child, forcing reddit to remove them.

There have been other protests forcing responses too. I remember one involving poor moderation tools, and another involving the BLM protests.

Well, let me tell you the difference between those protests and this one - Reddit had nothing to lose by giving in to those demands, only something to gain from better PR.

They have everything to lose by giving into demands here, losing out on corpos paying bank to have access to all their data. They gained nothing from allowing third party apps, they just serve their content with the ads stripped (thus only lose revenue). While I do pity them, they should have expected this to happen at some point.

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