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Join our CEO tomorrow to discuss the API

reddit.com

118 pointsthrow789 comments

My assumption is that there won't be a mass exodus from Reddit, at least not one that materially affects Reddit's bottom line. People will grumble, but most of them will continue to go there as before. I'm just basing this off historical episodes of internet outrage.

For comparison, when Digg 2.0 came out, people just moved to Reddit immediately, they didn't complain about it on Digg, and vow to leave eventually. They just left and never looked back. I'm generalizing; of course there are counterexamples.

I think we've made an internet where there aren't a ton of viable competitors, so there is no easy path out. The choice is to either get the dopamine hit from the same place as before, or forego the dopamine hit altogether, and for a lot of people the answer is clear.

I'd love to be wrong about this though.

Reddit of 2023 is not the same place as reddit of 2013. It has been transforming slowly from the internet's biggest forum to just another social media site. You can still find some of the spirit of old-reddit in smaller subs but the large ones have entirely changed.

This is good or bad depending on who you are. If you're a user who went to reddit to have conversations with people online, it's bad. If you're that user, this API change and loss of 3rd party apps is yet another nail in the coffin.

If you're a newer user (~5 years) who came to reddit for its social media experience and just want a feed to scroll with memes and pictures of cats, this is API/3rd party app drama is entirely irrelevant to you. This is now the majority of reddit by far, which means reddit the company is just fine.

There's nowhere to go for us classic forum people. There is no equivalent to 2013 reddit. I'm would love for this to be a kick in the ass and to be enough to jump start alternatives, but right now I'm not optimistic. Too much focus on decentralization etc. which I think introduces too much friction for not enough gain.

This is a very different problem than the current Reddit API pricing outrage though. The demographic of us who want a "big Internet forum" is small, probably too small to cater to as a social media company. We also tend to be highly opinionated which means it takes more effort from devs (aka $$$) to satisfy us ("I hate Electron I won't use that bloated POS", "Javascript is evil", "my browser should be my user agent", "my distro doesn't package the libraries that are needed to build this app".) I just don't think there's a site at scale willing to hold people like us.

As you say, Reddit has slowly been transforming into yet another social media site. Maybe federated protocols (ActivityPub like Lemmy/Mastodon, ATProto, etc) can win out. More and more of my topically focused conversations these days happen on Matrix and Discord. It's much more like IRC than forums, but it's generally much easier to stay on topic and the smaller crowd sizes make moderation a much simpler process. I'm also just fine with folks like us scattering into niche spaces. Our interests are niche, our habits are niche, a niche space suits us more than the "social media mall." (I also do use social media for more social media like experiences, but I consider that to be separate from chatting topically about my interests.)

Man. I'm old.

I'm goin' back to /. where CowboyNeil at least warned us when he was going to do something stupid.

I was there the day they introduced commenting.

> There's nowhere to go for us classic forum people.

You are already here

Why don't niche subreddits just start web forums up again? It's simple enough to pay the hosting bills with some sideroll ads (that clever admins could even sell at a premium, thanks to their highly niche audience). Of course, today's Reddit mods would have to reskill a bit to run a forum, pick up some admin tasks, etc. But if they're already donating tons of free time to moderate that might not be a huge deal.

I use maybe 2-5 subreddits at this point because Reddit has rotted out so much. At least half of those are shutting down permanently as a result of the API changes, and the other half are participating in the blackout. I don't need a shared account across all of those services. In fact, I tend to visit subreddits individually anyway so I don't have to guess about the context of every post.

None of my favorite subreddits rely heavily on photo posts, which keeps hosting costs low. In fact, I notice a strong association between quality and text-only subs, likely because it keeps the lowest quality memes away.

It might not work for every subreddit -- I don't anticipate the denizens of /r/funny would embrace a web forum -- but for hobby, book, and series-related communities, web forums have been around a whole lot longer than Reddit. Reddit only took over because it was marginally cheaper and easier to host; if mods lose their useful mod tools and power users lose bearable and efficient methods of browsing, forums start to look mighty attractive again.

I think it's primarily because of discovery. Reddit makes it really easy to find communities for your interests and makes it low effort to start engaging with them. I don't need to check 10 different forums, I just load up my Reddit home page.

Is there something like phpbb or vbulliten but with threaded comments? Reddit's comments experience was pretty nice at the time. Information dense. Same as this site

While you may be right about most, I'll simply speak for myself and say that as a reddit user since 2009 with an embarrassingly large amount of reddit karma, I've deleted my reddit apps, bookmarks, and browser extension this week. My plan is to be more active on this site instead, and perhaps other smaller communities. It's been disgusting to me for the past few years how rare civil discourse has become on reddit, and this was basically the final straw for me.

HN has 300k daily active users; Reddit has 52M.

It would take less than 1% of Redditors moving to HN to upend the entire culture here and make this place look like Reddit 2.0.

Nah, that 'culture' will get downvoted into oblivion.

"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

While maybe true, that’s completely at odds with the site’s “experiment” goal and hypothesis. I suggest you take a look at the welcome page for this site once more.

Most users of Reddit are pretty passive. They won't change their behaviour because of this.

It's the power users that's a different matter. The people most engaged with Reddit are likely to be among those who actually participate and make posts. If you see a drop in creators and commenters then we've got a degradation of the entire system.

I see myself as a commenter, a mid range user. I comment often but have posted only three times in 10 years. Without those posters then I'm gone by default even though I don't use third party apps. We'll have to wait and see which segment decides to leave.

It's the funniest (and in my mind a way under-appreciated in this discussion) thing: The people they are driving away are the power users, the exact people who power the platform. These people are the creators of the content Reddit is trying to monetize the consumers of.

"Providing an API costs money", but so does providing chairs for your employees to sit on, yet that doesn't seem like such a crazy thing to be doing "for free".

These are the people powering Reddit, without them it is nothing.

I mean I’d rather not use Reddit than use the official Reddit app. The “there’s nowhere to go” argument only works up to a point where doing nothing is perceived as more desirable than continuing on.

I will say, I think Discord could benefit from this. They have a forum like product and any subreddit trying to migrate has already been having this discussion. The overlap of users is insane.

I used Apollo on my mobile device (paid for a lifetime pro account), and had to uninstall because I was using Reddit _too_ much on my phone. But I am the type of person that tried and also uninstalled Tiktok, and Instagram.

I do use Reddit on my laptop quite a lot - but only with the Reddit Enhancement Suite. Take that away and I am gone, the plain website is pretty bad. But then again I am probably not the target user.

Discord is so awful as an information resource, though. It can't be indexed by search engines so if a server ever gets deleted, that information is gone forever. Not to mention Discord's search is terrible anyway and you'll probably never find what you're looking for even if it was discussed in the past on a server. I also find that most of the messages tend to be pretty mundane chatter; people are just filling space.

I agree with your complaints, I am just saying I haven't seen Discord floated as an alternative, but to me Discord is the only service I can think of that is positioned to swoop in and capitalize on this in a timely manner.

Most subreddits already have a Discord server anyways, and most active Reddit users have Discord accounts. Every other alternative is or would be an upstart.

The technical issues you have could be addressed by pivoting the software.

>I also find that most of the messages tend to be pretty mundane chatter; people are just filling space.

This is similar to my experience, but I think it's because the only Discord servers I am on are similar to Freenode IRC channels, they're programming related or related to a specific technology and the primary reason I'm on there (and most) is to get help when stuck (and I try to reciprocate by answering some questions when I can too.) The primary purpose isn't social.

But from what I have heard, it's used very differently by younger people. There's communities around shared interests or just for specific friend groups etc...

I agree that there won't be a mass exodus but I still think this is the death of Reddit.

I suspect the users that leave may not contribute much to Reddit's bottom line but their contribution to the community is critical for Reddit to succeed.

A consumer looking at memes is probably okay with the official app but moderators and power users (who tend to post most of the popular content) skew towards third-party apps and tools.

Without those mods and power users, you no longer have anything resembling quality content so even the meme consumers leave.

Twitter had Mastadon; is there a service these users will migrate to en masse, or will the results be more fragmented? Personally, the 2nd choices aren't as clear to me as they were in the Twitter case, which makes me wonder if we will see a mass exodus. I was far more aware of Mastadon than I am of the Reddit alternatives, some of which historically have had less savory reputations. Genuinely curious, what are the long-term viable alternatives?

BlueSky is the viable alternative to Twitter. It’s got a vibrant growing community that feels reminiscent of early Twitter

I received my Bluesky invitation a few weeks ago, and from what I can tell Bluesky in its curent state is full of people sharing screenshots from Twitter and complaining about Twitter.

It doesn't feel vibrant to me at all. If anything, it began as an echo chamber on day one and doesn't seem to want to be anything else. As someone who has been on Twitter since early 2008, it certainly doesn't remind me of an early Twitter.

TBF, after the October Revolution at Twitter, parts of Mastodon could be pretty overrun with both newly-arrived refugees and quite a few Fediverse old-timers snarking on the birbsite.

People tend to talk about things that are salient to them, and disruption of large media institutions hits that button squarely.

I think people will gradually stop using it not as a political stance, but because the UX is so crap. Over time, that stuff matters.

Oh there will be financial repercussions. Anyone hitching their wagon to this IPO is looking closely at management. The IPO is likely driving this in the first place but it’s based on very short term and faulty assumptions. Reddit is already on fire with moderators and content producers. The reality of this short sightedness hasn’t had enough time to sink in yet. It will though.

The exact same thing will happen when the IAMA girl was fired, or when the Ellen Pao controversy ignited.

Overall: nothing.

If all of Facebooks gaffs have failed to bring it down, this surely won't bring down Reddit.

> If all of Facebooks gaffs have failed to bring it down, this surely won't bring down Reddit.

The gaffe here is I can't access Reddit anymore on my phone because the app is gone. It's a little different.

Will those Apollo users go install the worse app, with the worse user experience to continue to use Reddit? Maybe? Maybe not. I won't be. I didn't come back to Twitter when they disabled Tweetbot either.

Neither of of those examples materially affected usability or accessibility. This does.

I've been thinking about this a little bit recently, most directly because of Twitter. I've seen this debate play out so many times over so many companies: "this is a huge mistake, [company] is done for", "nah, they'll just keep going on like nothing has changed", "this is another huge mistake...", "most customers will stay"... and then, finally, one day, many years later, someone is the last customer at that company, long after the company has completely fallen out of the news cycle.

I think we like to talk about Digg because it is unique in this regard: the change was rapid and noticeable, due to an intersection of factors (including the existence of Reddit and the ongoing feud-in-jest between them that made many Digg users aware of Reddit).

But most often, I think what happens is that a company enters a long period of irreversible decline: they screw up, forget their purpose or core mission or whatever, but they don't immediately collapse. What happens instead is they become a revolving door for vulture capitalism, and it becomes utterly impossible for anyone to turn the company around. Depending on circumstances, they can coast along for many years, frustrating doomsayers and boosters alike. We could call this, perhaps, the Radioshack Inertial Effect.

So, sure, it's not like Reddit's entire userbase is going to evaporate in the next 12 months. But, Reddit's already been declining for a while, and this isn't making it better. The people at the top probably see the writing on the wall and are looking for their exit. It'll still be a brand in 5 years, 10 years, maybe even 15, but it's never again going to be better than it was yesterday.

Well put. I should amend my statement: I don't think this will materially affect Reddit's bottom line in the near term, say 12 months. I was trying to capture my skepticism about the direct result of a supposed boycott or limited blackout, and particularly of the kind of ephemeral internet outrage and indignation cycle that seems to ramp up quickly, then dissipate quickly without changing much. I agree that they'll decline eventually, more or less following the pattern you mentioned.

I would assume moderators are the big hurdle here. Unlike those other companies, reddit depends on a small army of dedicated volunteers for it's survival. If all the moderators decide to fuck off, or if they're being honest and the default reddit tools for moderating are unworkable, that could be a serious problem.

I agree with the guess, that's likely to happen because a) if you're already using the official app you don't care about increased tracking or monetization and b) most are unaware of spez.

The only bit I don't agree with is viable competitors, the problem is a little deeper, in that even if there was a viable competitor people still won't move because it's not an exact clone and continuation of their profile (follower numbers, interaction expectations, etc). The rest of your assumptions remain, but I think this is a bit important to talk about so we don't mislead people into creating clones that never take off when they could be creating something new that will take off.

Yep, absolutely nothing will happen because there is no serious alternative to Reddit.

Those complaining are vocal minority that will mostly continue to use Reddit through official app/website.

Agreed, most of those commenting are essentially saying "I'm totally gonna delete my account on June 30th, just you see! Well... unless Reddit backs down..."

They're mostly Reddit addicts and they're probably not going anywhere.

There will absolutely be a material DAU change almost immediately.

The difference is that there is no generally agreed upon alternative for the exodus, yet. Lemmy (like Mastodon for Twitter) is too big of a chore for regular people to use / understand.

But FWIW, I exclusively use Reddit through the Apollo app on my phone and have no intention of installing the Reddit app. I may still end up on reddit occasionally with my desktop browser, but I expect usage to drop by 99%.

Fark[0] with some polish could look and feel like Reddit real quick but idk if Drew Curtis has the juice

[0]: https://m.fark.com/

I'm fully expecting the top comment to be asking why Spez lied about being threatened when the Apollo dev posted the recording of the phone call, and it'll either get removed or left unanswered

For anyone else curious the dev recorded his conversation with reddit.

https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...

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

It honestly comes across as a threat to me.

Swap "go quiet" with "be quiet" or "go quietly" and it absolutely is a threat. But that's not what happened, and they clarified it in the call.

Why would you consider the former threatening?

You need to take into consideration the fact that this person had already created a large amount of negative press around this API issue. This means that people at Reddit were already feeling defensive, so when someone said something very similar to a threat then it was more likely to be perceived as a threat.

The reason why this is so alien to so many people is because they refuse to have empathy for a CEO. Reddit is filled to the brim with populist rhetoric about eating the rich. CEOs are profit robots, they don’t have emotional states of mind, duh.

All of this makes complete sense.

I couldn’t care less what happens to Reddit but it sure is interesting to watch everyone get so bent out of shape about a fucking website!

I'm also honestly perplexed how many people didn't think it was a threat.

I initially even thought the outrage at Reddit's CEO was because he got caught on tape asking for $10 mil to 'skip off into the sunset' like a mobster, only to realize it was the Apollo dev LOL

But clearly they didn't continue to consider it as a threat after clarification, according to the transcript?

  Reddit: "Oh. Go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry."

  Reddit: "That's a complete misinterpretation on my end. I apologize. I apologize immediately."

Y'all can't behave

locks thread

Or edited

It's clear this is damage control mode since they couldn't even be bothered to give a time frame other than TOMORROW:

> Reddit CEO, u/spez, will be here tomorrow to host an AMA about the latest API updates, including accessibility, mod bots, and third-party mod tools.

I'm willing to put money on them making unsubstantiated claims about abuse of the API and their interactions with app developers which may or may not have happened.

> A Reddit spokesperson said the AMA would likely kick off around 10:30 AM PT on Friday, June 9th.

Weird they didn't put that in the post.

https://www.engadget.com/reddit-ceo-will-host-an-ama-on-api-...

"about the latest API updates, including accessibility, mod bots, and third-party mod tools"

... buuuuut nothing about third-party clients.

This is gonna be a bloodbath.

I cannot conceive of any circumstance under which "Reddit CEO has AMA with Reddit community" would not become a shit-show.

reddit wants to kill the third party apps, straight up. Third party apps hurt reddit's ad revenue. The mobile website hurts reddit's ad revenue.

Given that listing, I expect he talks about how they resolved all the other issues that were brought up with their API changes -- accessibility, mod tools, etc. They're going to work to not cause problems for those use cases. But they want to kill the third party apps, and it doesn't sound like they're budging on it.

> Third party apps hurt reddit's ad revenue.

…then charge for it. But don’t charge an order of magnitude more than the lost ad revenue.

Making some amount of profit on it isn't enough. They want to lock down the user experience.

Same reason Google started Google Talk with Jabber, then closed off their ecosystem. Same reason Facebook embraced third party apps, then shut them all down. Same reason Twitter is locking down their API currently. At a certain size companies want to decide the user experience without outside interference, and they don't want to share.

If you read reddit on BaconReader or a similar app, when you pull up the app you will see 10 posts from subreddits you subscribed to. If you pull up the reddit app, you will see 2 posts, 2 ads, and 2 suggested posts you don't care about. Even if reddit charges for the API, the existence of these alternate clients that work way better makes reddit look greedy and bad, like they don't care about their users' experience. So they wanted to kill those alternative methods of using the site. In the process, they look extremely greedy and bad, and like they really don't care about their users' experience. Yet Facebook went through the same process, and they mostly kept their users. And shutting off the 3rd party systems meant they got to decide the entire user experience without having to compromise with anyone.

They might end up backtracking because of the boycott, and charge a reasonable amount for the API to make a profit. That would allow the 3rd party apps to keep running while not losing money on them. But that is the compromise. The goal was to kill the apps.

> Third party apps hurt reddit's ad revenue.

Not if you are a gold subscriber. Pay $5.99 a month, and viola! No ads.

The awards on this are horribly tone-deaf. Yes, pay the man for fucking you over. I can't believe abstracting payment with goofy little icons makes people so willing to fork over their cash even in situations like this.

As bitwisefool mentioned, anecdotally, a lot of those awards are using free coins or whatever, not from people actually paying money to give them out.

You get them free with Reddit Premium which does have other (dubious) benefits.

Redditors often use the awards as a way to send a message that stands out from a regular replies. Reddit also gives away freebie points on occasion in order to entice users into getting into the habit of awarding posts. So it's possible a lot of those rewards are disgruntled redditors using their free rewards to send him a message.

I feel like, in general, awards signal astroturfing. I wouldn't put it past Reddit to astroturf their own AMA.

Personally I still have credits from when they bought Alien Blue.

The link to this post appeared as a home page banner, so they really want people to join this, which may be counterproductive for Reddit.

Are the investors of reddit not realizing the harm Spez is causing them?

Do they actually think they're going to have a successful IPO now? Investors should be working on having spez removed at this point. The dude has made such a bold lie that could put the entire company in legal jeopardy.

If they didn’t realize it in 2016 when Spez manually edited comments that made him look bad (which was only a year after he returned to the company btw) then I don’t think they will now. Something very weird must be going on over there.

I'm nearly certain this is all intentional, to consolidate as many users as they can under the official app. Huffman is in on it, and will be "fired" by the board shortly after which will appease many users with the drama, though the decision won't be reversed. They will then bring in some Wall Street CEO to flaunt the new metrics and possibly even reach profitability with the ad revenue from users in the official app.

Redditors have the memory of a goldfish and most will have forgotten about it a few weeks later.

I bet he'll edit the questions and comments.

Odd that he's choosing to do this personally or at least under his personal username given his previous interactions with the community at large and general hostile sentiment they have towards him. Curious as to what's influencing that decision.

Does Steve Huffman view himself as such a people person that he can calm the crowd? Does he or an advisor think his title as CEO is important rather than just an impersonal "Q&A with Reddit"?

Yes this is what I found odd. His actions are SO clear cut with the audio, there's really quite literally nothing he could say. It's almost like saying nothing would be more beneficial than whatever he could come up with tomorrow.

He might be the fall guy for this, perhaps he was ready to step down as Reddit CEO before the IPO and bring in some type who is amenable to Wall Street. The board will then "fire" Huffman to appease the users, but the decisions will not be reversed.

I mean a smart person would take the opportunity to eat crow, declare mea culpa, and demonstrate that they've learned a valuable lesson.

I'll let others to speculate if he is the kind of person you would expect that of.

I can see this going only one way.[0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfComments/wiki/downvoted/

That's a big hill to climb to beat EA... but sounds like they can do it!

It'll be a minor miracle if that isn't an absolute PR trainwreck.

Even with heavy filtering and planted questions it'll just be a firehose of verbal abuse

Such a delightfully bad idea. It's like watching a train crash in slow motion.

Locked with no comments. The discussion will be about mod tools and bots, not about whether this is a good idea. They don't want community feedback.

I bet it's a shitshow of <removed> through and through by the time it's over.

ThAtS's GrEaT qUeStIoN aNoN!

> continues with shit corp talk..

Is there a Mastodon-like protocol for a distributed community platform like reddit? Smells like opportunity!

There is! It's called Lemmy, https://join-lemmy.org/

I've seen a few subreddits talking about moving over.

I setup an account a few days ago.

Make sure you use a bigger one I guess. The instance i chose wasnt one of the major ones, but did have traffic.

Its now down...not showing on the trackers either.

I am guessing its gone....dunno. Maybe it just crashed and whoever runs it hasnt fixed it or realized.

Similar to why i run my own email domain (but use workspace), i considered building an instance. But have had some reservations that I talked about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285#36241849

If anything im more on the fence than ever.

You may want to read this thread before switching:

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/144clka/warning_le...

Sounds like this is only about public information (username, posts/comments, media). I'd expect those to be scraped and archived somewhere regardless of what the first party server does. For example in the case of reddit pushshift collected that information and published it via torrents and sites like unddit showed it.

https://agorasocial.app

Also, https://kbin.social

Usenet.

I miss Usenet. Pre-Y2K Usenet was still usable. I first saw it in 1994 and it was in trouble by then already. But man...

My quieter corners of usenet were still usable/valuable up until 10-15yrs ago. I miss it too, but aren't quite sure how much of that is rose tinted nostalgia.

I’m curious if there’s ever been a time the “loud internet masses” were right? As far as i know the sites that actually died did so silently - Mapquest, Friendster, MySpace, tumblr, digg.

The ones people complained about seem alive and well - Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, reddit(?)

Spez should host a Twitter Spaces.

I better buy some popcorn.

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