r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

Is mastodon really even taking the spot of twitter?

its not the only way to ensure a community survives, forums have existed before reddit and will exist later. You even have examples of communities that left, created their own version of reddit and seem to be doing fine.

> Reddit leadership has already proven they only wish to harm both shareholders and the community at large under the guise of "increasing shareholder value" and shove their fiduciary duty under the bus.

reddit isn't a public company, so unless the current owners who are the ones putting all this in motion are looking into self-flagellation they haven't proven a thing. The reality is that reddit is huge, and most users couldn't care less about all this drama.

This could be as consequential as the time all Reddit shut down to protest net neutrality.

>Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?

Yes - it's all the sites that people link to on reddit :-P

For the record, there's something happening to all the big Social Media sites over the last few years

IRC/Freenode - dead, replaced by Libera, but not nearly as vibrant as its heyday

Twitter - dying, replaced by Mastodon, Bluesky, and Instagram, none of them really capture the magic that was twitter, Bluesky feels a lot like Google+, Mastodon is regularly policed by people demanding that people not act like it's twitter.. and Instagram is for kids...

Facebook - seems to be dying, they've blown things with their advertising model, and the automagic content moderation is/was also a fail (it either judges everyone far too harshly, or not at all), the users are heading to FB's other sites (Instagram) or Tik Tok

Reddit - dying (but is this temporary?), being replaced by Lobsters, Hacker News, maybe more

Tik Tok - facing serious regulatory challenges in Europe and the US.

It's inevitable that things will die/change, I do find it really interesting that the big ones from the last decade are all suddenly finding themselves on the outer.

One of the exceptions is YouTube, which faced serious competition from the likes of Tik Tok, but still appears to be generating content/high readership, and seems largely immune to the absolute garbage that's been uploaded over the past few years (conspiracy nuts, politics, etc)

> Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?

Back in the day, that was the World Wide Web. Federated gardens are a modern invention.

>All the major subs are either temporarily or permanently shutting down in protest.

Is this true though? Are the subs which normal people visit are shutting down too?

"Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?" Yes. It's called Lemmy. https://join-lemmy.org Just found out about it today.

I plan to avoid the platform as I can, but I worry the admin response will be to revoke the communities from their current moderators and install more cooperative scabs, which will have a profound effect on these communities. I'm not sure what the future holds, but reddit can't walk it back now, so I think it will end badly.

HN — Mastedon is like “fetch”: it’s not going to happen. Does no one on this site understand there are an infinite number of easier ways to be social than a engineers dream of a self serve social network?

> All the major subs are either temporarily or permanently shutting down in protest.

But I'd just add there is a pretty major difference between "temporarily" and "permanently". Major kudos to r/ProgrammerHumor and other subs that are doing it right - saying they will be shutting down indefinitely unless Reddit changes their stance.

Just saying you're only going to shut down for a couple days is essentially theater - Reddit can certainly wait out some popular subs being down for a few days. More generally, that's really the only way protests have a way of achieving their goals, by saying you'll engage in some behavior (or boycott) until your demands are met, or at least met with some change. Anything that's time limited is pretty much doomed to fail. For example, I'm not sure what the organizers of the recent Amazon "walkout" hoped to accomplish. That wasn't a walkout, it was lunch.

As others have said, lemmy is a viable alternative. Just beware that their flagship instance is pretty terrible in terms of political content.

Maybe check out beehaw.org

Lemmy is the federated version.

https://lemmy.ml/

> Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?

Maybe they can go to whatever platform the banned subreddits reformed on. Unfortunately many of the subreddit communities that are now being screwed over in the same fashion by Reddit were cheering on that behavior when others were targeted.

> Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?

Yes we do! It's called Lemmy - it's built on ActivityPub, is Mastodon compatible, and people actually use it!

https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770

Knowing HN users, I don't know why Lemmy hasn't been all over the front page. It works brilliantly.

Both Lemmy and Kbin are part of the fediverse and are seeing explosive growth for the last few days. Once the initial barrier of confusion about how federation works is gone, they are actually pretty promising and I can see a lot of people migrating for good there.

Is it hard? Yes.

Is it harder than trying to influence Reddit by these "protests"? No, because the later has 0 chance of success.

Dude, don’t kill my velocity. My `create-next-app` command just finished and I’m going to wrap up this side project by Sunday evening. I’ll be starting with the Frontend first. /s

The subreddit system makes this incrementally more doable for aggrieved subreddits: they have a better shot of uprooting enough of just their little community and convincing them to move. There's a decent number of users in those smaller subs that don't really have a wide membership in others so moving is more reasonable for them.

But this: a) is only a little easier, it's still really hard to move even a tight-knit and smaller community like that, and b) really doesn't apply at all for third-party client developers, whose users surely use and belong to a wide spread of the subreddits, so the task for them is more like "replicate Reddit overnight."

The hard part of making a social network is the userbase accumulation. Apollo already has the userbase, if they switch all the api calls over to their own backend it truly wouldn’t be that hard. Especially considering the money involved.

The only sticking point is in all the people who want things to be “federated” for whatever (generally bogus) reason.

Better yet: cloudflare/etc’s preexisting backend.

It's hard if you want it to be a social network, and hard if you want it to be under one domain. If it's a forum to talk about hats for cats at hatsforcats.lol that's not hard, and that's pretty much what the web was pre-Facebook.

Is Reddit/Twitter "better" because everything is in one place? Maybe. But then it's a hard problem that requires money, and we end up where Reddit/Twitter are today.

I mean, it's 2023. Web-based simple threaded conversation platforms should be absolutely trivial to develop/clone/deploy.

I'm not convinced building a Reddit is hard, at all.

But getting a mass adoption of users to make it worth using is.

Which is why I'm continually surprised some startup+VC combo doesn't just build it and then pay the top 1000 broad-to-niche influencers out there to sign up and start relentlessly hawking it on their various social medias.

Really? IME most devs are incredibly bad to underestimate the complexity of apps and problem domains where they don't have any experience.

I'd say an app like Reddit is especially prone to this because most decent devs probably could recreate the core UX (subreddits, posts, comments) in a couple of weeks. The really hard part is all the features people don't usually think about (mod and admin tools, for example) plus scaling up to millions of concurrent users.

The hard part of building a tech company isn't the tech, its users, staff, and money. These 3rd party apps have the first two, and that would be enough to convince someone to find the third for them.

The only limiting factor is ambition. And on a site with quite a few people from the startup world who see that the only thing in the way is the technical difficulty of building the service then it shouldn't be unexpected that people are saying they should take their users off to a new platform they build themselves. Because that's the kind of crazy thing that startup people think about.

Right? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

"Apollo dev should create his own backend and show them!"

OK..? He'll take his 600k users, most of whom never contributed content, and do what exactly? Create his own little dead forum that runs only on iOS?

It's not a technical problem, let's stop pretending there's a technical solution. Plenty of reddit clones exist already (many even open-source).

Yeah, I don't understand why everyone seems so content to settle on imaginary solutions. Even if this was something he possessed the knowledge to do, he's bound by the timeline Reddit has laid out, and there is no way that is feasible, even if he did have 100x the users that Apollo actually has.

Ha are you joking? This site is exactly the place I expect to see that kind of sentiment. It precisely matches HN’s reputation; it’s been a cliche since Dropbox launched.

That's why the blackout needs to be permanent. If even 25% of the users have no clue what's happening and thinks Reddit is crapping out for a couple days they'll shrug their shoulders and use it 48 hours later when it's back up. I don't understand what they think they're protesting by timeboxing it .. Reddit can afford wait it out 48 hours and plan for that.

I guarantee people are going to get an error they can't view the subreddit without reading why they can't.

Seems they might be running afoul of the ADA if they do this and have no usable solution for the blind.

Didn't they say somewhere the API fees won't apply to accessibility focused apps today? Either way, reddit will be dead if they go through with this, so let's make sure the next big thing we pick has accessibility in mind out of the gate.

I thought Reddit announced they would exempt accessibility-focused apps from their API charges in an attempt to not cut off, among others, the blind.

I quit Reddit half a year ago after 15 years of daily usage. 11/10, would quit again.

I quit reddit a while ago and found it very rewarding. I used to argue with people all the time -- yes under subreddits like r/ProgrammerHumor because I disagree with other people's opinions or because their technical understanding is simply wrong -- anyway, it turned out to be a great decision. I realized that most of the time it is pointless to convince other people of anything (people won't admit you are right or don't have the background to understand it), and I should just simply spend my time elsewhere. Most of the memes on ProgrammerHumor are some form of reposts anyway. I spent time on my hobbies and actually reading/learning/trying out new stuff in programming, and my mental health is in a much better place now.

It is a bit striking though that even Reddit provides more agency over user data than Hacker News does.

You must’ve been subscribed to some news/current events related subreddits. My subscriptions are all hobbies and specific games that I’m interested in. Reddit is my escape from all the stuff you mentioned. I use Apollo to browse and comment on my phone. I’m really upset about the API changes. I really want to see people come together with a solution to migrate away from Reddit.

Aren’t there any angels out there who would be interested in funding Christian (and/or the developers of other 3rd party Reddit apps) to develop a new back end using the same APIs? Then it would be pretty smooth to move over.

Early this year, I added a blocklist for Reddit on my PC and deleted the app. I did it upon the realization that for me:

1. It was a time waste. It was entertaining, but more often than not, it wasn't useful or helpful at all. Classic short-term gratification.

2. Various issues with how it was run started to frustrate me. Advertising appearing as genuine posts, poor moderation / mod abuse. Also seemed to be a conflict algorithm, outrage and irrational ideas were disproportionately popular compared to real life.

The smaller communities on the site were good, I'd like to see them find another place to exist. But yeah, I used to think that self-control and discipline was all that was needed, but creating actual barriers like blocklists etc is actually pretty good.

You've gotta remove the default subreddits which are largely dog shit. Seriously, whoever decided that trash like "r/prequelmemes" or even "r/formula1" should qualify to appear on reddit's home page needs to get a new job.

I hear ya. I haven't been getting anything positive anymore out of Reddit for several years at least. And now I'm getting tired of witnessing their greedy nonsense. I can't support it. I went cold turkey on Twitter last year, and it definitely looks like it's time I do the same for Reddit.

I created multiple reddit accounts- one for programming and math stuff, one for books only, one for general stuff, etc.

I quit the general one two years ago because of Reddit's dumb monoculture.

I kept visiting math, cs, and book subs. And helped people with high school math concepts, cs book suggestions, etc.

As a person born in a middle-of-nowhere smalltown, Reddit added a lot of value to my life. And I tried to do the same to others. I had a good running.

All good things end.

I am concerned about how it perfectly substitutes Google. Whether I need to search for quirky not-so-famous movies, or I need recommendation for Neuroscience textbooks, I searched Reddit with Google. With subs shutting down and going private, I wonder how longer will this last.

I think it depends a lot on the subreddits you subscribe to. I mostly use it for engaging in hobbies that I find rewarding and as long as I moderate the time spent it is not wasted. Same as Youtube. If I had to rank, I would say HN is worse in that regard, as you can't even ignore certain topics

Or, you know, Digg. Digg's demise was literally the birth of Reddit's popularity, but the lesson was seemingly lost on Reddit "leadership".

Sometimes it happens, but often it doesn't.

E.g. fandom is doing as good as ever despite many leaving in protest events.

Time will tell which this is.

I think this conflict has been long brewing and has little to do with Apollo, and more to do with powermods running many subreddits not liking that the bots they use will get charged for API usage.

I think powermods don't want to draw the slightest attention to themselves (because users and press would start looking at them a bit too closely) or how/why they use bots.

The overwhelming majority of popular or even "popular niche" subreddits are moderated by a small handful of people, some of whom have moderation powers in hundreds of subreddits. A lot of mods have gone to the trouble of trying to hide it by using alts, but a lot of them just don't care / are proud of how many subs they mod. I'd be shocked if a number of them aren't getting paid or otherwise compensated by groups like PR firms.

Speaking of which, you know who else doesn't want to pay for API calls? Said PR firms, who are known to scan reddit posts for mention of client names so they can do damage control and manipulation.

These people run their subreddits like fiefdoms and they'll do petty nonsense like shadowban you from every subreddit they moderate because you accidentally piss them off in one.

At one point it was common to post in any of a number of subreddits powermods didn't like and discover you'd been preemptively shadowbanned because their bot was scanning for posts in those subreddits.

There is no alternative, so I'm not sure where people would move to.

I think that's unlikely to happen, this is largely anecdotal but while most redditors started on 3rd party apps, I've seen a lot more casual friends who only use Facebook or Instagram gradually move on to Reddit using their own app.

These people likely make up a large enough number that Reddit no longer feels the need to cater to their original audience. Maybe it's just me, but Reddits been feeling a lot more like Facebook for the past couple of years.

Most existing alternatives can't handle the 10000x user growth. They'll be down for enough weeks that reddit will be able to wait out the exodus's momentum if they tried.

Even if that wasn't the primary blocker, most alternatives exist to host primarily politically partisan communities.

Who will they put in charge?

Admins? There aren't enough.

There are some subreddits which are more seperate from the mod team (How much does it really matter who runs r/aww? It can run on inertia for a very long time, for sure), and where a very small contributing group can provide content to a much wider and more casual reading group.

But then there's some where the mods and other highly active users are a more active part in making it what it is. Think subs with weekly book clubs, or game challenges, or what not organised by the mods. Is Reddit going to get staff for all these niches to deliver the same level of experience? Probably not.

I hate what Reddit has become but there's no good alternatives, aside from rdrama.net

Reddit has its moments but I still enjoy it. It's a fun time sink between sets at the gym or if I'm stuck on a bike pedaling and have tired yet again of Duolingo.

That said, I have a tendency to filter a fair bit to avoid the major problems but there's going to be some news that I should hear but is not good news either.

I had a chat the other day with a friend. He's deleted the app as he's been on it quite heavily and needed a break. It's certainly something I've heard out of some people. Meanwhile, there's others looking for where the migration is going, assuming a Digg to Reddit type migration.

If 13 years turns out to be some sort of period for this cycle (like cicadas?) maybe we can name it after you.

was digg much smaller than reddit today?

That conversation was so confusing to follow, and the usage of the idioms like "Bob's your uncle" did not help in the slightest (had to search that one up)

so, how it could happen that he recorded it without consent of other party?

It's always important to keep in mind that HN is big and any given thread attracts a different group of people. What appears to be volatility of opinions is actually volatility of who is participating.

I am one of those people who loved reddit before. Now I see it as a laughing stock.

My opinion is volatile due to a volatile change in policy. It's that simple.

At least part of the difference is that Reddit can be a useful forum for technical troubleshooting of apps / programs. But the dissent in the thread is in reference to it as a social media platform - I think.

It's sort of like the Chinese government vs. Chinese people. I can hate what the government does without any malice towards a Chinese person. Same thing going on here -- the content that is produced by Reddit users is still just as valuable even if the leadership are bozos. Nobody is claiming that Reddit content itself has somehow instantly gotten worse.

Some of those old phpBB and vBulletin forums never went away. They tend to be ones covering niche subjects, though.

We might start seeing more of these with the enshittification of all of today's social media landscape.

The Apollo founder addresses this directly by saying it's just not an interest of his and that it would be a very large undertaking that he isn't wanting to do atm

> All the founders of these apps just seem oblivious to this.

Not oblivious. Read the post by Apollo developer at https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Relevant excerpt:

> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?

> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.

> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.

Building the backend component for a social media site like Reddit is much much much harder than slapping a frontend onto an existing API. And it's en entirely different engineering skillset (distributed systems) that many app developers don't have. You really think they are "oblivious to this"? The reality is it's hard to do.

> Reddit taught me things

its community taught you things.

Reddit has done the same for me. I learned life stuff on there that I would have never learned anywhere else. It's a real shame to see it turn into shambles like this.

That would actually be hilarious. I hope the Digg team is scrambling to make themselves a bit more Reddit-like by the 30th, I sure would be.

This is a permanent shutdown, I've only seen temporary ones before.

This is a subreddit I look at sometimes, too. So it's pretty relevant, I think.

Replace with new users? How do you go about doing that and why would they want that?

They already had the tools to do that, and extensively tweaked the platform to have two completely separate interface and user base for reddit:

- the homepage, /r/all, the default subs, served on the new reddit page and app

- the obscure and basement level subs that won't ever see more that a few thousand users (shout out to /r/donteatjimmy), probably viewed by people stuck on old.reddit or a third party client

Heavily pushing the former, and further pushing the latter into a dark corner would have sufficed. They'd had little to no backlash, and could have still boasted huge user engagement etc.

They already had the invite only and private sub mechanism, that could have worked to push the old users into communities that don't get advertised, and potentially have them pay for access.

All of that just to say, there was probably many realistic and not so complicated ways to deal with renewing the user base, all of them looking like better business decisions to me. With the current approach, I'm not sure where they'll get new users from, I don't see the TikTokers moving to Reddit whatever they do, and my grandma isn't coming either just because the furry subs have gone away.

That would make sense except a large chunk are their most valuable users for attracting people to and keeping them on the platform: moderators and power users who submit links. You can't have the 90% of users who never vote, submit, or comment on anything without the 10% who do.

I'm sure they will have plenty of volunteers to be head mod for the day but how many of those people have so little to do that they are willing to continue after that?

We call them scabs.

What’s so hard to solve!? Forums still and can be easily built, it existed years before reddit or social media, in fact, I personally think it’s better to have separate sites specialized in each niche than one giant platform trying to monopolize that, and proceed to call itself “front page of the internet” or whatever it’s called.

It's because like four moderators control like most of the main subreddits.

You’d be hard pressed to find social media that doesn’t trend towards toxicity, but Reddit in particular seems to have a culture of users that want to feel superior at any cost. They’re always looking to put down others and they’re often rewarded for doing so.

https://discourse.haskell.org could be that new home. However most new users would expect a programming subreddit language to exist.

We set up https://discourse.haskell.org a few years ago. It's reasonably active, but topics still tend to get more engagement on /r/haskell. I expect it comes down to discoverability and convenience: people are already have accounts on Reddit, know to look for topical subreddits there and are comfortable with it.

It would be great to get more people on the Discourse rather than Reddit. Would love to hear suggestions for making it easier for people to find!

Users in a browser can see ads; the cost is subsidised.

A lot of third-party apps don't show Reddit's ads.

The CEO is doing an AMA about it tomorrow.

Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...

I think they're caught in a pickle because they've sold "discounted" bulk API access to ML model training companies, discounted relative to the baseline that Reddit was planning to charge these client apps.

At least that was the speculation on HN when the story first came out.

Fun fact: Reddit was backed by YC back in the day when they launched.

Also, people are probably interested to see if Reddit will collapse or not. And to find out where people will go instead.

Reddit was a Y Combinator startup. It only makes sense people talk about it here. That said, I don't expect this to last long regardless of outcome.

This move is totally on brand for r/ProgrammerHumor, I don't see the community having much qualms about how the decision was taken.

To answer your question, the move is of course discussed in the sub, and yes the reaction seems heavily positive.

I could help you there if you'd like.

It's not that hard to get one.

Why, it's closed to new members so no one comments. It's not a place to replace reddit. You are better off going to slashdot.. similiar level of conversation as reddit and many more comments and similiar number of daily stories compared to lobste.rs

The problem with lobste.rs is that I'm not sure that the people whose opinions I want to read give a shit about jumping the hoops to get a membership, you know what I mean? All the people on it are people who cared enough to be on it.