I'm using reddit for ages and never even considered anything besides their website.
If the traffic to their site is primarily from the web (or web mobile or the official Reddit app), the client (3th party) users are only a loud minority.
Of course I think the behavior is shitty but I don't think most people really care and reddit will not see any real impact of it either.
Even if you completely accept these policy changes as a long-term positive for reddit's growth, how can you have confidence in that leadership? How can you trust anything they tell you as an investor?
Steve has some kind of problem. It's been apparent before with editing comments in the live db, and it's apparent now. This problem is a risk for reddit. "Don't lie on or about phone calls" is pretty basic risk management and he can't handle it.
Reddit is still a decent-sized company with a whole team of people who've likely been running the numbers. Third party apps like Apollo are a nerd concern anyway, and nerds are outnumbered on Reddit these days; I'm sure most users are happily poking away at the first party apps.
What about mods? Looks like many of them use 3rd party apps to help moderate their subs. They are outnumbered too, but are they worth less than millions of lurkers? I think not.
Reddit is betting that the loud minority are not the ones bringing value to their site. If they are wrong, it may be too late.
Reddit won’t work without API access… it just turns into a 4Chan-like cesspool over night without auto moderation.
After all, Reddit is so shitty that HN will ban you for pointing out behavior here as "Reddit-like."
Oh --- wow --- another SNI clause!
That's not what made Reddit seem like a cesspool to me. It was the commenters.
I was banned from all field-recording-related subs because I asked a question about microphones, and the lack of a particular kind in the market. More people piled in, and eventually we contacted the CEO of a mic company who engaged with us and said he'd make a modified version of a product if enough people expressed interest.
Everyone involved with the thread was banned and it was deleted, with no excuse. I never raised the topic again, but was immediately banned from another recording-related sub when I answered a question about a recorder... as if my account had been flagged by some inbred cabal to auto-ban if I ever showed up.
This behavior utterly defeated the purpose of the forums and stole from users. Yes, stole. It's time that people took stock of the fact that the time we spend to compose questions and answers on forums is not free, and those who deliberately steal it should be called out every time.
Mods can be great, and many of them are. But... there's plenty of bad ones out there that make participating in some communities stifling at best.
We see this all the time on social media, where companies respond to the very vocal minority, because even though they may be a minority, their voice is amplified by social media. Not saying this is the case here, but it's why companies often respond even when the real impact may be small.
The same organization that is dealing with that, also accepted that when they entered a market to where their potential profibility reaches a vast higher amount of people.
The companies asked for that level of audience. They got it, they're operating on a smaller staff than traditionally you would need for that level. Now they're upset they're paying the pipper.
A thousand times this. Plus their repeated insistence that they "aren't like Twitter" (which is true, I think. They're worse.) They are obviously running scared of something, and that something can really only be that the impact of this is potentially enormous.
It also makes no sense you’re implying this is hurting Reddit. They just shut down a huge ecosystem of free loaders and will be able to show more first party usage and therefore ad views and DAU and so on, which aligns so obviously with their goal of having a huge IPO I don’t even know how you think people will “lose trust in leadership”. They are stoked they’re about to make ridiculous stacks of cash, and the few that aren’t don’t matter.
It’s absolutely insane to call them freeloaders. Reddit’s business model is not “we serve pages with ads and advertisers pay us”, it is “those ‘freeloaders’ create content that is the whole value of the company, it is nothing without that — and this results in every traffic that hits the site”
My take on this comment is that these people are considered freeloaders by Reddit. It’s not necessarily rational from an outsiders perspective, but that’s not the point.
I don’t know much about reddit, but if they sell advertising, then advertisers are the customers, users are the product, and anyone else who extracts value from the ecosystem are parasites.
It doesn’t matter if the parasites are an important part of the ecosystem. There is a remarkably deep bench of people willing to replace an any “parasites” that are removed, and if exfoliating the current layer will improve DAU and therefore IPO value then it will be done.
In this context, “freeloader” is a nice way of putting it.
To be clear - I don’t agree that any of this is OK, and I certainly don’t agree that moderators or third party apps are actually parasites - but that’s also the point I think the GP is making.
If the only measure of success is money, that’s what they will optimise for. And an IPO is the shortest of short term goals - a single event which must be optimised at all costs.
Heck, most of the video content on Reddit is reposted from other sources.
plenty more people want to moderate, seriously, why should they pay them? hear me out:
If you pay them "a livable wage" you'll get people in the chair who don't want the job, just the pay. If you pay them less, suddenly you'll run afoul of minimum wage laws, overhead of having employees, etc.
you could auction off the job (mods pay reddit for the privilege, given that more people want to moderate than currently can) but that would encourage the mods to monetize their sub (the more successfully, the more subs would become part of ebaum's world)
voluntary moderation actually is the happy medium, people who love the job and the sub are willing/want to do it.
Like they say "everything can't be measured in money" (ok, I never say that, but there it is)
Which is what I’m trying to say: you’re framing the actions of Reddit’s CSuite in terms or morals and long term outlooks, which is not how the market will look at their ipo. At all.
If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling their own pockets to bursting. They are zero-sum people by nature and practice. If they really understood and cared about communities, they'd mostly have different jobs.
But that doesn't make it true. And there's nothing wrong with framing Reddit's execs actions in terms of morals and long-term outlooks. We should generally not concede anything to the world-view of the greedy. Whether or not this will hurt Reddit's IPO is worth discussing, but we shouldn't confuse that with hurting Reddit the community, which it certainly will.
Wow, you’re really going to argue pedantically here?
Let me be clear for the fools in the room then. The behavior exhibited here is perfectly rational and likely to be rewarded from the perspective of a pre IPO company looking to pump its financials wrt user count, engagement, and ad views, and therefore any objections about moral or long term behavior ignore the fact that this playbook has been wildly profitable for many people many times, and thusly explains what the Reddit CEO is doing
Looking forward to when people start panning this system / status quo instead of acting like following the incentives is confusing
The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either. Which also isn't pedantry, because in analyses where we seek change to a system, we have to understand exactly who is involved and what their motivations are. So in this case it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO, but as a founder it's possible he's conflicted enough that he might depart from his short-term economic incentives to protect the think he's spent a major part of his life working on. Maybe some of the execs if they came in to prep in for an IPO.
So now we're not talking about the whole company, which is 2,000 employees, thousands of volunteers, and millions of content creators. We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people. That's a much more tractable number.
It is when you're about to restate what I've said...
> The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term
Do you think a company has non-economic incentives?
> On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic".
Right, and I call these people capitalists. Did you genuinely not glean that?
> I will also note that companies don't have perspectives either
> it's worth being very specific that the people involved who think this is "rational" are very modest in number. The VCs, probably the rest of the board. To some extent the CEO
> We're talking about maybe a dozen greedy people
Right. Thus why I said: "capitalists are propagandists who will position themselves at the top and bully all threats they perceive to their system"
It really reads to me like you took bad-faith readings of all my comments, and then restated them differently, while stating it isn't pedantry. You've delivered exactly 0 insights to me. Maybe you were trying to elucidate others, but I don't really see that.
that doesn't mean that some free-to-choose sites won't experiment with paywalls, etc. in an attempt to enhance cost-covering revenue.
But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App Traffic it's probably more that people in reddit care just not their ceo
1. I feel like you didn't read the comment you replied to. It says in a compelling way that reddit wouldn't do this if they didn't feel a threat
2. > But if they have stats saying 1% and less is 3th party App
A solid takeaway from the original post is that you can't trust Reddit
3. All the bad press surrounding this is infinitely worse for their brand. The subreddit strike, for instance, could force their hand into taking authoritarian control over the platform, as they've hinted at. "Reddit abandons democracy" is a pretty damming headline, and they just can't seem to stop digging their hole deeper
Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
Reddit is not a bank account
I argue bases on them but they do not matter to me.
I do not use a 3th party App. For me it makes sense. But if they lied they will hurt themselves anyway
You're forgetting the adage, "there is no such thing as bad press". If you're not a user of the 3rd party apps, then none of these decisions affect you, and most people are just not going to get upset about things that don't affect them directly.
likely untrue. its not just 3rd party apps it affects. it changes api access for anything using the API
for instance modtools will be affected which means literally everyone can be affected desktop or not https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/12rt5f8/how_wil...
some subreddits make heavy use of bots
these are all going to be hugely affected
Look at companies like Theranos where it was the investigative reporting that ultimately led to their downfall.
And as someone who has been on Reddit for 16 years and has never used a 3rd party app this decision does affect me. a) I think less of the company and the site which will affect my engagement and b) It affects everyone else on the site which in turns affects their engagement and the quality of their posts.
Confusing illegal activity with activity you disagree with is not doing the conversation (or society in general) a bit of good
Yeah, but that adage has never been true. It's just something said by people who get bad press to make themselves feel better.
Of course it's not. According to this site, around 3/4 of their traffic is from mobile.
https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/
HackerNews, I love you, but some of the comments in here are detached from reality. You'd be hard pressed to find any social media company that gets more traffic from desktop than mobile in the year 2023. This site is the exception, not the rule.
Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019768/us-retailers-app...
The app sucks.
I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to
I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.
Apparently all five of them use my little web browser extension with Reddit-specific features, requested by users.
But I can guarantee that your estimate is totally wrong.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255714/reddit-app-dau-w...
Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless
Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.
Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?
Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.
As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.
I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.
In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.
I know reddit is pushing it's all but even that is not 3th party apps.
I just hope they don't get rid of old.reddit.com
The loud minority argument assumes homogenous cohorts, and that the loudness happens to cluster around inconsequential things. These criteria are almost never satisfied in practice.
Any online community today has extreme differences: usually a tiny minority contribute almost all content to the site (posts, comments). In Reddit’s case, moderation is also done by human volunteers assured by 3p bots (as opposed to automated ML policing + human intervention when someone famous gets sour). The vast majority of users are passively consuming, occasionally upvoting/downvoting.
Now, Reddit gained a massive amount of users in the last few years (something like 2x-4x) so bean counters start drooling over ad revenue from them. They may think that the old timers, power users and mods are a minority that can be gradually replaced by the new user pool without major incident. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that the bean counters don’t know either, simply because the graphs they’re looking at don’t have the predictive power they think. They’re risking the company’s main asset to find out.
I've already seen many of these subs having moderator led discussions about relocation options for the communities.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
The primary social role of moderators is to curate the community. That involves enforcing some site-wide rules, but it also involves more local rules like "stay on-topic." It wouldn't do for a forum about NFL football to be taken over by discussion for The Bachelor, even though that's not actionable at a site-wide level.
If the majority of people posting, commenting, etc are coming from the other interface it does not matter if the bulk of the "traffic" which is largely going to be non-power users that just read reddit comes from the web and the new interface.
There seems to be this idea that reddit will need to see massive traffic loss to die, no they need to see massive loss of quality link submissions and comments to die, that is a very different metric
But. I'm not a mod. I don't know what mods use. And the only reason reddit is good is because communities have tools to moderate themselves.
What I use is kind of irrelevant if the people who keep the communities I visit consistent and relatively clean are pissed and walk out. A casual user won't drop the site when Apolo closes, it would be slightly later when reddit becomes 4chan in absence of moderation.
As contractors, we have the same option to us by responding to a request with an outrageous fee that you think nobody will pay so you can avoid having to actually say no.
But he will be the person to increase revenue anyway.
Because he can now say that whatever app survived this is now paying for it instead.
In terms of user counts that's undoubtedly true. In terms of user influence I think that's yet to be determined. I think June 12-13 will be fascinating as a view of just how much of reddit and reddit content is managed by people affected by and unhappy about these changes.
Mods and highly influential users aren't evenly distributed across the user base by account age. Older accounts are more likely to be in both of those categories, and they're also more likely to have shifted to third party apps at some point particularly when those apps addressed problems they were having. There are communities that will never come back from this, and there are users who've earned reputation who will react by removing all their content and their accounts.
In a lot of ways HN is like a single highly-active subreddit - what would the impact be if the chronically underappreciated dang got fed up, removed everything he'd ever posted, and quit? How about if in his position as moderator he decided that it was time for the sub to go away and applied automoderation in such a way as to remove all posts?
For me I will continue to use reddit as I have before.
Do I think it’s going to kill Reddit? No. But I think this is going to have a large effect on their IPO and they will be treated as a hostile entity going forward than a neutral one, and that will add up over time. There’s no plausible deniability.
So, while it may be a small percentage of users, I suspect that losing them (or even just impairing their ability to moderate) will have an outsized negative impact on reddit.
Same. I have never used anything other than old.reddit on a proper computer, with the exception being when I need to edit the new.reddit sidebars for subs I moderate, which I still do on a proper computer.
they might not lose many users, but they'll lose their most important users.
I think this neglects the power struggle that would occur if its many unpaid moderators who do use apps far more than any other group, either shutdown subreddits or straight up quit.
I won't be using Reddit on mobile going forward, and I'll stop using it on desktop when old.reddit inevitably goes away.
That sounds like a pretty big impact for me...
is this a rule of the internet about the most vocal part of the community tends to be a tiny percentage? the "people on the internet" are screaming about something again today. in a previous job, i was introduced to this first hand. that's when i learned people will just double down on an incorrect theory/comment when shown incontrovertible evidence. yet, when you look at the numbers of the people shouting online is just a tiny percentage, but causes so much work for people to defend against. they come across as petulant children throwing tantrums because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.
Hmmm ...
For example, I paid for Apollo Pro as a one time thing so I’m not a subscriber. Only people paying for Apollo Ultra every month are counted. That 50k is just the most invested and dedicated of Apollo users.