Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks
theverge.com
theverge.com
He put in an appearance for about an hour, ignored all the most upvoted questions, then disappeared.
You have to assume that the leadership team is not completely inept and that there must be a valid, urgent reason for willingly taking so much heat before the IPO.
What could it possibly be?
Now as they ramp up to an IPO, 3rd party clients are seen as a liability, not an asset.
They view anyone that complains as a vocal minority, the my don’t believe their MAU numbers will change in any meaningful way.
If anything, all the press around it just raises Reddits profile.
That’s my take on what’s going on, but I have no insider knowledge so I’m just guessing :-)
On the contrary, I really resonated with the top response to one of his replies:
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...
The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.
And it was really hard to see spez's comments without following them from his profile, because they were so downvoted.
So I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.
reddit got lucky - right place, right time, and locked in a strong enough network effect to stay alive despite the best efforts of their leadership. Look at their atrocious UI. The clumsy desperate attempts to drive users to an app. The boneheaded copycat features that never quite work, or are just downright baffling.
In an alternate world a smaller team would have focused on site reliability, mod tools, and a small set of features that made sense. Use third party ad tools until, or if, you get a better homegrown solution. With this route reddit would have been profitable and probably good. Instead...
So, does the heat matter?
Benefit of the doubt only stretches so far.
Perhaps he's trying to pull a Nuclear Gandhi[1] and go 'deep' enough to underflow to being extremely positive?
People keep talking about an AMA session, but there was none. Not every self post on reddit is an AMA session, and I don't think it's fair to call his post one and attack it on that basis.
Sometimes I feel the current situation is exactly what we (reddit users) deserve. Like, we chose to continue using this website even when we knew the leadership is piece of shit. What else did we expect?
Q: How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become
increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
Spez: We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.When I browse the home page all I see is anti-work, anti-capitalism, nuance-less politics, etc.
As people have mentioned, the free money decade is over - users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.
Finally, it is nice. Back to the good old days where things have to at least pass the common sense test.
And then you "blame" the 3rd party apps?
Sounds like a basic failure of housekeeping. But, but let's blame "remote work" or something like that, yeah
I think his lack of self reflection rivals that of Triplebyte's CEO when they forced public profiles on people.
People understand when force is being used against them rather than persuasion, and nobody likes to feel like force is being used against them. I am very happy to see collective force being leveraged towards someone in a position of power.
I think Spez hasn't explored the idea that people value their anonymity, so attaching a credit card to an "anonymous" account isn't going to be popular. If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account. But they would have to trust the community enough to be somewhat open with their books.
Of course the real problem here is likely a violation of fiduciary duties to their investors, although given how things are turning out, he may already be liable.
Also pretty damning they can’t make a profit where others can off their data lol
I agree that Reddit's failure to convert their enormous reach into profit is a failure, I don't agree that this particular thing is damning. I'll bet if you pooled the revenue of every third party app it still wouldn't begin to cover Reddit's overall costs.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/145bxmi/c...
Talk about trying to rewrite history.
He also deleted some of his comments seconds after posting :)
This is pretty typical of AMA's from widely known people. It's nothing more than marketing. AMA do not translate to quality or quantity of answers, only questions.
Reddit, like so many other places, believes it has a right to extract the value the community creates.
But it doesn't. It didn't create the value, the community did. It convinces itself it has a right to profit here, but it really created almost none of the value.
It is then surprised when it can't just sit and extract value from the community without pushback.
This kind of value extraction only works (If at all), when the value being provided by the company is somewhere near that being provided by the community.
Then people are a little more willing to feel like you deserve something.
In reddit's case, it's very uneven. Despite providing the website and bandwidth, Reddit feels to most of its community like a large scale freeloader, as funny as that may sound.
That sort of relationship eventually goes south, though it takes a while sometimes.
All of these places eventually discover that they are not the thing driving real value.
Those that are smart realize this early on, try to make as much as they can while they can, and diversify before it all goes to shit.
Reddit is not one of those.
I used to believe that too, but reality has convinced me of the opposite. There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity. So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it.
The demise of Reddit has been a long time coming, and now that it is actually happening, there is once again no plan for "the community" to move forward. The open source alternatives are all effectively worthless, with Lemmy apparently telling people not to sign up (yep, seriously!) because they can't handle the influx. No doubt Facebook & Co, or perhaps new commercial competitors, are going to pick up the slack as usual, because the real value is in the infrastructure and network effects that make platforms like Reddit possible in the first place.
While not a message board, the Wikimedia Foundation does well financially, hosts lots of content, receives massive traffic, and has an open API.
> So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users.
Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing. Imagine the internet of old with countless message boards, but under a single sign on.
As far as content moderation, folks talk a lot about AI and the spam it will bring, however, there is also the opportunity for AI moderation.
In theory, yes. In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.
Lemmy is constantly mentioned in these discussions as an open source, federated Reddit alternative, yet the largest Lemmy instance has 1500 monthly active users. That's... nothing. There are tens of thousands of individual subreddits bigger than that. The "Fediverse" isn't going anywhere.
The ever present nags to donate would beg to differ
Usenet.
That's certainly news to me.
Do people forget it's a common protocol that isn't monopolized by anyone and is the widest prevalent even today, perhaps because of it?
Why would anyone invest in this IPO they are trying so hard to make happen? I can’t think of anything left for them to do after this length of time to become profitable. The only things left are the things they are doing that alienate the user base. It seems Reddit is Uber and WeWork with a different hat on.
Your logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from the specific for-profit company that currently exists.
That is unconvincing because it is overly specific in who it is attributing value to. Is Facebook responsible for most of the value of its community? No, because if Facebook didn't exist, Myspace would still exist and do the same thing that Facebook is doing. Therefore, Facebook (and Myspace) are both not creating the value, because if they didn't exist, someone else would exist that does the same thing. The main reason there's one behemoth is because of network effects, which makes it nearly impossible for competition to start, which gives the illusion that that behemoth is doing something unique and exceptionally skilful. But they are not. One valid interpretation is that they're free-riding off the community that they've captured.
No, my logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from infrastructure, network effects, and brand recognition – and not from "the community" as commonly claimed. Once the infrastructure is in place (which requires immense upfront investment) and enough money is spent on promotion, the userbase will cross the critical threshold required for growth, and content will be generated as a result.
Just think about it: If it's really "the users" that bring all the value to the table, then why can't those users manage to organize into a community that's not run by greedy profiteers? Because the "running" is where the real difficulty, and thus the real source of value, is.
What?
Sure there have been. Somethingawful? 4chan? Wikipedia? Usenet? etc
They each commanded a significant portion of the attention of the community on the internet at the time.
If you don't limit it to hundreds of millions, i belong to mid-sized successful communities (woodworking, electrical, DIY, etc) that are maybe 100k-1 million users, doing fine, have been doing fine for decades, and don't have for-profit entities behind them.
In fact, almost all meaningful communities i have belonged to online were not run by for-profit entities. Some later got taken over by for-profit entities, but then failed ;)
"does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it."
This is not at all related to the for-profit piece. The difficulty is in becoming popular, which seems to be, maybe mostly luck? Because unlike what you say, everyone is doing it. Is there any evidence at all that the for-profit was a pre-req to being popular?
In a world where reddit was not for-profit from the start, i don't think it would have changed anything.
It was a place that most Digg users were willing to go to. That was dumb luck. If Digg had not been so stupid, Reddit would not be popular, for-profit or not.
Reddit replaced Digg. Some other startup will replace Reddit.
It’s the users and the content they produce that’s irreplaceable.
Maybe sites like this will only be able to function in the long run if there is some profit sharing involved. Every user gets X ads in their feed every month, and for every 5X posts or 50X comments one ad disappears.
>But it doesn't.
I'm sorry, but it absolutely does. Yes, it has to do this subject to brand risk constraints. But the idea that investors should just expect to make losses on the site is insane. That trying to turn a profit on their own platform represents "freeloading". I guess normally I'd feel sorry for whatever platforms are afflicted with people who hold this sort of ideology, but Reddit has done a lot to cater to people who think like this.
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
If they paid their mods, it might be a different conversation.
No one on Reddit asked investors to come over and invest. They did so because they thought they could get a return. Well, that’s the risk of being an investor, isn’t it?
Reddit brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year ($550m is what I recently heard). Let’s not pretend that the community is at all taking advantage of Reddit, right? I’m firstly skeptical that a site like Reddit can’t turn a profit on HALF A BILLION dollars a year, but fine. Let’s accept that’s the truth. They could have worked with the community on this. There are things they could’ve done. They could’ve:
- engaged the community on the changes
- given devs more than a mere 30 days to figure something out
- responded to repeated requests by the devs to work together
- provided options to the community on various methods of getting more revenue in
They did NONE of those things. The CEO lied and spat in their faces.
In fact, I’m always a little bemused at the level of shock from folks, especially here, when a company does what companies will inevitably do.
Reddit, doesn’t exist for the good of its users, outside of retaining significant numbers for the purposes of generating profit from selling their data and selling ad space.
Like every other social platform, the primary motive is profit, full stop.
It absolutely feels sleazy that billions of people freely contribute their time and talent to generate content and then get pushed aside when the companies business model changes. But everyone should absolutely expect that from day one.
Social platforms are a fun, but one sided relationship that will eventually turn sour.
The argument that it would not have happened without you is almost always wrong - it is almost always a mistake to assume success is simply because of your choices, and not lots of factors. This is one reason repeat success is very very very rare.
I'm not saying they have no legal right to try - of course they do. I'm just saying it doesn't work because nobody thinks they should be allowed to let it work.
How they run the site and whether they need to make a profit is of no consequence to users - they don't give a shit. You can't make them give a shit. It wasn't who they attracted. They don't have a 100 million users who want them to make a profit. They have 100 million users who don't give the slightest crap about whether they make any money at all.
Yes, trying to generate profit on value they don't create is freeloading. Quite literally, in fact. It is the literal definition of freeloading to try to extract value by taking advantage of what others do. You don't argue they create the value, but instead because they own the platform they are allowed to extract it.
Legally, yes. But that's sort of irrelevant. Socially, no.
The crux of your argument is basically "if my ideology is right than investors are dumb and this is a bad investment" I would agree with that. It was always a bad investment. It still is!
Precisely because freeloading of the kind they are doing always generates enough ire over time to ruin the community. Usually before you can extract enough profit to be worth it.
You can feel sorry for platforms, and for me, that's okay. But you still haven't shown that i'm actually wrong, and in fact, what i've said is backed up by the consistent failure of things that operate the way you seem to think is okay.
I mostly feel sad for you. You seem to have forgotten somewhere along the line that corporations as a kind of entity were created to serve society (not investors), and not the other way around.
I'm not saying all things this large should be non-profit, mind you, just that the kind of skimming that reddit is trying to do, where they think they can make a few bucks in profit per user through freeloading, while providing nothing in return, is neither helpful to society, and doesn't work anyway!
There are more symbiotic for-profits that realize they need their communities to want them to succeed, and do okay.
Put another way - for profits running hosting like Reddit where they think their profit is more important than the communities, and that they are the reason for the success of those communities, basically always fail. Those smart enough to realize neither of these are true sometimes can make a go of it.
For the long term survival of Reddit it is essential they become profitable, otherwise they’ll go bankrupt. And seeing that these communities depend on the existence of Reddit it’s also in the interest of these communities that Reddit turns a profit.
They seem to have serious revenue, about 500M in 2021 (https://businessmodelanalyst.com/reddit-business-model/), you’d think they could make a profit based on that. They had 2000 employees in June 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit), assuming average of 100K cost per employee, that already adds up to 200M.
That may seem excessive for running some community website, but they get 400M+ from ads. Just running an organization to handle a 400M+ business for ads will require lots of people, infra, marketing, etc.
I can see the reasoning behind the thought that if you’ve created all this to enable these communities, someone doing less than 1% of the work, by simply putting an app on top of your APIs and infra and starting to make a profit seems unfair.
What i don’t understand is why they can’t outcompete these apps by providing a better app.
Oh boy. First, this already happened once, that's why Reddit exists. Second, it wasn't happening because it wasn't enough of a problem. Once they generate enough ire it will happen. Will this be enough? Maybe. If not, something else will. It always happens.
always
When for-profits are involed.
You make the same mistake they do - to believe that the success they have is deliberate, and not just mostly dumb luck. Had Digg not failed, nobody would give the slightest shit about reddit. But right up until that point, what you said here could have been said about Digg. In fact, it was said. By lots of people. Yet they moved to Reddit.
In the end, these communities don't exist because of reddit. They exist because people have shared interests. The only thing reddit enables is for them to find each other. If reddit disappears, they will find each other again. I've watched the end of similar sites. I had friends on them. We found each other again on other sites.
The good apps are (a) free, and (b) don't show any ads. Pretty much by definition they can't compete with that and make money.
I used Apollo because it provides a much better user experience and it is not even close to Reddits own App.
I guess they can't and they won't unless they become a NGO.
And I’d say that aiming for long term viability by ensuring they run at least break even is in the interest of their users, so not sure how their current actions are against the interest if their users.
And the fact that users put time and effort in creating content on the platform, this doesn’t mean all its services need to be provided for free to these users.
It is just a fun thought experiment. But I think Reddit the company has been more than just a landlord. They have made more than just rented out space to make Reddit what it is.
In a landlord analogy, it would be like opening a big mall and lure shops and consumers at a loss, making the city centre a void, then raise prices when the original functional community in the city is lost.
I look at these situations where growth is the main goal and it's always a matter of time before the goal outgrows the actual utility or function of the company itself. Reddit really has a job of just keeping the servers online and being there to enforce basic "property" rights.
They make a boat load of money from the dumb cosmetic features of the site.
It is Reddit’s to use at that point, right or wrong.
Unless the community were to just up and leave, I’m not sure anything changes. People provide other social media services their content for free too, even those they don’t like.
Reddit has just laid off employees and is probably paying 4-5x it was before for financing due to interest rates and has to find new sources of revenue, and quickly, IPO or not. Users are great for building communities but they can just as easily turn into a non-rational mob like is being done here.
People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money so Reddit would be glad to be rid of them while also saving on API costs. No other online service allows freeloading millions upon millions of API requests in addition to allowing third party apps to a large extent. Facebook, Whatsapp, Discord, Instagram, Slack, Twitter all don't, so it's a wonder that Reddit did all this time, for free.
If subreddits go dark for 48 hours, then from the perspective of Reddit, they'd think, great, then it returns to normal. If they go dark indefinitely, Reddit admins will wait a few days then force the subs open and demod everyone involved. There is a long list of mods who are willing to contribute.
In the end, consumer boycotts like this simply don't work.
Also, people are upset at how Reddit management, especially their CEO (Steve Huffman), has handled this transition. The potentially libelous comments regarding Christian Selig (Apollo developer) are just one of the many things people are upset about. The bungled communication and lack of transparency just continues to show that Reddit just wants to squeeze value out of the community without any genuine effort to make it better.
I can’t say for sure whether the boycott will work or not. But I definitely can say that there will be lasting consequences. This is a negative inflection point for Reddit as a community and as a community, especially if they forcibly remod communities that go dark.
The silver lining is that if Reddit does manage to squeeze an IPO out of this, we all have a new stock to short ;)
> But I definitely can say that there will be lasting consequences. This is a negative inflection point for Reddit as a community and as a community, especially if they forcibly remod communities that go dark.
No, there won't be lasting (negative) consequences. I've been a reddit user for a long time, almost since they started. There have been any number of controversies, from jailbait, to fatpeoplehate, to watchpeopledie, to incels, to the fappening, to thedonald, to finding the Boston bomber, to Ellen Pao, to the firing of Victoria, to gamergate, to wallstreetbets, and so on.
They had all been covered in the media but to the average user, they simply don't know nor care about these incidents. So many power users don't understand that the average user simply does not care about any of this. They just want to browse Reddit on their phone for the next 5 minutes.
Some people have argued, in the abstract, that if they're willing to make changes to the API they'll probably kill "old" Reddit too, but idk. Some subreddit mods have posted traffic stats showing half of uniques are still coming through "old" Reddit. I don't see them killing it soon... but if they'll do I'll move on.
I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.
If users really cared, they'd delete their accounts and quit using Reddit.
People are comparing this to Digg, but Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay and will continue to comment share and moderate subreddits for free/points.
People think they have any power whatsoever over “their” subreddits, I don’t know how they can think that Reddit won’t just lock their accounts and reopen the subreddits.
Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.
Cutting off and/or driving up the cost of third-party apps through which users access Reddit is changing Reddit. The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average, so even if they are less efficiently monetized as eyeballs, they are large indirect contributors to Reddit’s revenue. Making their experience worse will, it seems near certain, cost content that brings the users that are purer eyeballs to monetize with ads, and thereby cost ad revenue. How much is, of course, unclear.
> Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.
Sure, and they can take over the moderations, and the content creation, and the viewing for ads from the users that they chase off. Not sure how that will work out for them as a business plan, though.
I do agree with you. Bu the outliers usually feed the site with good content. There is a quote by Paul G (or someone)
> whatever the hackers do on the weekends, normal people will be doing regularly in 10 years.
This is a recital from memory, prone to be watered down. But the idea is that the outliers are the ones that makes it worthwhile to be in the community. If they are gone because for any reason, landed somewhere else, the normal users will eventually move away. It is not going to be visible immediately, but will have negative effects in the long run.
Large subreddit protests are bad press.
Having a "free trial" of premium for 3rd party apps would mitigate this issue a little bit. You can use Apollo, for example, for 3 months free and then you have to pay for Premium. In fact, a good arrangement would be for both the app develop and Reddit to take their respective cuts.
But then that kind of payment infrastructure requires effort to setup and development and Reddit seems unable to execute on much.
Why is this an issue? 3rd party apps exist to solve a problem for users running into limitations of the web interface or Reddits own abomination of an app. So this will just drive existing users into premium accounts and provides a better UX for them with barely any extra cost for Reddit. If the need exists and the opportunity exists in the form of an API someone will build that app and could still collect money on that on top of Reddit premium fee. Just keep the two separated.
I assume they'll kill off old reddit shortly here, once they implement the API changes.
Subscriptions are high-friction, low uptake, and you're always battling churn. Ads are low-friction and everybody gets them. Plus they can goose the ad revenue whenever they want by just showing more of them.
They might grumble about AI training, but its not really affecting their bottom line. I doubt they'll care much until they start selling their own AI sizzle to investors.
Edit: Oh, and I doubt they care about the hardware needed to serve posts. Guarentee they're using 10-to-100x that for the ads. Ad bidding is complex and has tight timing requirements. Tracking ad/user view data is a big firehose. If they host any of the ads themselves that will absolutely dwarf the text or even video posts. And even then, if they have any kind of a compentent backend engineering team, all those costs will be a smallish fraction of total costs.
The economics are basically the same. Apollo could charge their users $0.25 per thousand requests and continue to operate. They don't want to do so.
It is a burden for the app developers to implement payment processing. And one month was not enough notice. But fundamentally, this is killing apps because most users won't be willing to pay.
(Also, 1000 API requests isn't that little. For example, getting the top 25 posts of a subreddit is just 1 API request. Posting a comment is 1 request.)
Unpaid users are important to these apps because it's what drives adoption. You can release a new paid app to browse Reddit and get maybe 1000 users, or release a free app and get 1 million users, of which 1% convert to paying customers (i.e. 10,000 customers. These numbers are just made up for illustrative purposes).
But they wouldn't have had to. Most of them (all?) don't have registration features, you're meant to have a Reddit account already. A system where only Premium accounts get API access would have just required a way for Reddit to say "sorry, this user needs to upgrade to use 3rd-party clients" when challenged. That's a very simple change, nowhere near the complexity of implementing a payment-processing flow.
A good strategy would have been something like Reddit saying "API users from now on will have to pay, and the price is 2-3x of a Premium subscription, because <bullshit about them taxing the backend more>", wait for the blowback, then say "alright, we listened to you and decided it will simply require any Premium subscription".
It appears that the eng at reddit is so incompetent that they have newer, better, more efficient internal APIs available only to their house apps.
So basically, the public APIs in question have both serious compute and eng costs that -- per a mod comment I can't find again -- are costing more than $10m annually. They can't amortize those costs across their first party apps as well, because those apps are on different APIs. They're looking -- again per a mod comment -- to make money on both the compute and eng costs for these APIs.
Add to this some incredible stupidity, as they continue to underinvest in mod tools and appear not to realize -- though I really can't understand how they could not, since it's been a point of incredible contention with their mod community for many years -- how many mods, particularly those of the biggest forums, are using tools reliant on the current apis to effectively moderate.
tl;dr: it's a big mess. They want to kill 3rd party front ends, and are unwilling to just say so; they continue to not build the tools mods need; they've lost trust with the mod community because of 10 years of lying about investing in mod tools; and they don't want to get everyone onto their internal APIs for reasons they haven't shared.
Oh, and meanwhile, they're launching a new dev platform because... they think someone smart would want to build a business with them after this? I don't know.
The purpose is to lock down API access to extract value from AI training.
Why would the Apollo developer keep working on their app if this subset of users bring in $500/month at best?
I do agree however that it would have probably caused less trouble, because suddenly the users have to pay Reddit rather than the developers.
1. Identify the core value of reddit's service (community of communities who upload posts, videos, images, etc.)
2. Identify the cost factors associated with operating those services (app servers, CDNs, bandwidth, employees, etc.)
3. Identify 3rd party clients as competitors that impact reddit's ability to maintain and improve those services (reddit pays the cost of running the services, competing 3rd party clients do not.)
4. Extend an olive branch to the third party devs by offering them jobs (+ big bonuses if they onboard their respective apps' users onto the official app), and an opportunity to integrate users' favourite features from the third party apps into the official app.
It's not a total win, it was never going to be. But good lord, what an intensely poorly managed situation. Typically you get paid a lot as a CEO for moments like this, if you can't handle this then what are you being paid for?
The problem here hasn't been "reddit charges for API access"; it's the totally unreasonable pricing and switchover timeline.
"A clean and readable layout with no/less annoying ads" is a feature of most apps, except the official one, and I doubt Reddit is willing to have that.
I'm not sure if the philosophy of the fediverse really meshes with the idea of social media. It feels like if it caught on it would push people farther and farther into smaller echo chambers (and that seems bad!). However, adopting one large instance seems like a drop in replacement for reddit (and the least painful for the average joe).
It also looks like I can only post and vote on my own instance, so hosting my own Lemmy is worthless, unlike email where I can host my own without any fundamental downsides (although there are some cultural downsides, for lack of a better term).
How is that thing ever supposed to scale?
If you just put all the effort into one single node, you’ve essentially destroyed the idea of decentralization.
Ideally, there will be more of a P2P structure for social media if everything moves forward. It doesn't solve for the problem where large companies can solve for doing the really large aggregation and drive engagement algorithmically. But even if 3-4 aggregators that are independent from each other emerge plus there being a relatively low barrier of entry to create your own, I think it could be sustainable and a major win. Privately funded social spaces are dying a quick death in the age of high interest rates.
Federating votes wouldn't be compatible with anonymous voting.
Not many people like removing CP when growing past a certain size.
spez's recent comments have served to lower this gap, but probably not by that much. My guess is that if a lot of mods end up getting replaced over this, they won't be missed.
It's funny and hypocritical because not one of those Reddit users would ever run their own company in a way that allowed third parties to freely redistribute and profit off their data, but it's wrong for Reddit to somehow.
It's like they have no idea how businesses stay in business.. not surprising really. They're going to burn down Reddit to defend someone who was asking for a $10 million buy out to screw them over and shut down the Apollo app anyways.
If hubris is the only differentiator then it's not a good reason. So, why would Discord take on such a large undertaking?
I think it is very clear that a paid subscription couldn't compete with ads. Discord ARPU less than <$3, while Facebook ARPU is something like $30 for US. And I think if discord penetrates to more general circle, it's ARPU would decrease further.
We need something fundamentally different, whether it’s fediverse-style or just a different licensing on the content. I don’t know. But this pump and dump VC to IPO to “value-extraction” is guaranteed failure. Perhaps some businesses cannot exist without that, but a CRUD forum certainly could.
Not sure if I recall Wong or Pao did things that seemed overtly business / investor motivated? I know there was the controversial firing of Victoria Taylor by Pao that eventually led to her demise.
If anything this has given reddit more visibility, and more engagement within its website too. All publicity is good publicity
Have we as civilization actually wasted over a decade on rot?
what’s your point…?
Basically it feels like all the things YC advises are bs when you look at their “success stories”. Other than connections to investors what they say and what they do so entirely opposite.
However I think that it’s still valuable to look a level deeper at the specific decision making that’s going on at the management level, and how that’s affecting the overall dynamic which has caused Reddit to be popular for so long.
Specifically, these changes disproportionately affect power users and mods, two groups of people who are largely responsible for creating the content that most Reddit users come to the site for in the first place as well as moderating that content to ensure the quality is high (all unpaid!)
In any case, time will tell if these decisions help or hinder the IPO. My personal gut feeling is that reddit will be around in 5-10 years time, and possibly even growing in terms of popularity but we’ll probably see a decrease in quality of content and moderation and potentially a few competing sites existing on the fringes.
It missed the IPO window and overcooked and now is trying to monetize on the backslide.
I'm sure spez knows at least the first set of numbers, and they find the amount of expected loss to be an acceptable risk.
It may be an OK business decision (though I personally think they didn't think it through), but he handled the aftermath in an extraordinarily bad way.
Either he doesn't have good lieutenants around him to advise and support him, or he is too stubborn to listen to them.
However, it seems insane that people are complaining about this for the following reason:
1. Reddit is not profitable, it is literally bleeding money. 2. No Reddit = No 3P apps to access Reddit. 3. The discussion that should be had is whether it is sustainable for Reddit to keep running it's servers and whether the recent decisions are made in favor of additional growth or survival.
Reddit makes money from ads having reach and they're hoping that only a small percentage get premium so that they can continue to make money off of ads.
Why would they reduce the reach their ads are having by making it easy for people to opt-out?
Their API pricing probably reflects the money they are losing by not getting the users on their own platform and showing them ads.
Their hope is that people would switch over to the main app so that their advertisers can pay them more.
Whether you believe this is the case or not, you have to agree that all nuance goes out the window and the mob is only satisfied when it gets what it asks for, not what is in its best interests.
I was half joking when I was talking about nationalizing social media, but we should ask ourselves why we as a society are destroying these tools that we all used and enjoyed using because a bunch of money changed hands. Twitter is undeniably worse off, so is Facebook. Surely we have proved that we can have these things if we wanted to. At the very least, we should have net neutrality.
No way they let something as big as funny and videos(among many others) just shut down for days...
They wouldn't be forced open with zero mods, obviously. They'll find volunteers.
I would expect that if mass demoddings happen though you would see some sort of weird civil war on Reddit emerge though where outraged users would support spamming these subs in the way you describe specifically to ensure that their prophecy is fulfilled. You can even see people hoping for it in this thread already.
Everyone says this about reddit and Twitter and yet it's still not true that twitter has been replaced in spite of the shit show going on there.
Arguably they care too much, and a bit of humbling will be good for Reddit. If the powermods had their way Aimee Challenor would still be working for the site.
Because of the moderators reddit felt like a more human place, a least bad option.
For anybody with two firing neurons it is clear now that these centralized ad-driven platforms are where humanity's conversation goes to get annihilated.
The new thing will be the fediverse. Its still unclear how it will get funded etc. It may well be that parts of it will have the same or similar pathologies. But it wont be all of it.
ofcourse nobody can guarantee that they will execute well, that the outcome will not be a disaster even if well executed or that there will be a willing market at the end :-)
but that plan will go ahead irrespective of user action.
Reddit... It's never been high quality content, but it's something to read when I'm bored. But I think I'm done with it.
For me it was probably this little exchange. Where Spez doubles down on claiming that the creator of Apollo was in some way being shady, without providing any evidence.
Behavior like this shows me that Spez is used to lying and getting away with it. Long ago, Spez was caught editing user comments. Sort of shows that in 15+ years in a leadership role he hasn't learned how to be a better human...
Spez -5264
> His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.
iamthatis +5727
> Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
It would be an ethical thing to do on my part. At least Covid-19 days taught me to stick to ethical decisions.
Reddit offered in the free market and everyone chose. Those who didn’t choose Reddit are still out there not on Reddit… nothing was taken that wasn’t given by choice in the past.
You can’t moan and complain your way into owning Reddit, or it’s api or web services, etc.
Just take your invaluable content elsewhere.
Additionally, with reddit it gets a huge amount of consumer advertising, PR, marketing spend by companies but its not actually to reddit the company (paid mods, sock puppets, customer support, teams of PR "users" and fan boys all shill for their products and brand). Reddit sees other products being sold and want their cut.
But I use Relay Pro some pros :
-Gallerie View -List view -better comments section
So is it not possible for third party apps to create a process which generates Oauth token for each user when they sign up/join in via their app ?
In that manner, each user have their own token and each user can have their own 100 req/min, which should be sufficient for most if not all users.
Sorry, I really don't get why people are so concerned. If reddid wants to shoot themselves in the foot, nothing is stopping people from self hosting alternatives.
I remember the day when digg was overthrown, MySpace, livejournal... there's a long list. But in recent memory, Twitter, reddit, and more(eg twitch) are calling people's bluff and they seem to be at least partly getting away with it (at least they've maintained the market leader position).
Any ideas why?
One guess: These markets have matured into a monopoly with fragmented competition so that the only competitors that are in position to accept new users are niche products and not ready to absorb or capitalize on these collapses (eg federated products or alt right platforms).
Anyways, it's a bit of a pipe dream but I would love if we had something like a non-for-profit which could come in and create a better long-term home and single ecosystem to compete with these monopolies when they start misbehaving. I think signal did a really good job at this. I've been able to move a number of my messaging groups onto it. Pipe dream but Signal or Wikimedia foundation run social networks might be interesting.
They need to become profitable asap since the markets have dried up but users have gotten so used to being subsidised.
This is their own fault and they’re refusing any self reflection as a company.
I doubt enough people care enough to stay off Reddit because Apollo is shut down. (I aways think about how the "nudie scanner" revolts fizzled to a whimper in the end--and how people now just put up with doing the perp stance and being mm wave scanned.)
One way out would be for Reddit to enforce certain restrictions on 3rd party app, similar to Apple's App Store. "You must show ads", for example.
The pricing is actually reasonable. 1/4the of Twitters price.
They could also continue to allow free access, but send ads (which on reddit look like posts) together with the content. Or even better, change their API terms so apps have to follow some guidelines and show ads to free users... and maybe give apps the option to pay for a clean API too?
And of course, continue to offer and promote their own app, with all the ads and tracking they want to add.
Instead they've picked the worse option for their users. They're killing 3rd party clients and tools used by moderators and communities. Apparently they've even lied about their talks with developers and accused one of blackmailing them...
I understand the need to generate revenue, but they're not handling this well.
The paid tier is reasonable, $12k for 50 million requests (1/4th of twitter api) means Opollo will be paying $1.68 million a month. Thats entirely reasonable for such a popular Reddit app.
This gets us back to the original point, users got used to subsidised pricing (free) so Reddit was inevitably gonna get blowback no matter how they spliced this. To put it in perspective, $1.68m is 168k users paying $10/m a month. They have 1.5m active monthly users. Thats means they only need 10% of their active users to be paying customers.
P.S. Its not just a need to generate revenue, if they don't become profitable soon its game over for the current investors and management team. The IPO markets have dried up and nobody is touching anything series A and above.
SV's darling Stripe had to cut their valuation by 50% to get some money, Reddit wont be able to get anything near that. The best they'll get is some private equity type deal (FATAL).
For a large, Chinese invested corporation, the best way to act against, is to ignore it.
"Profitability" is killing the internet. Either you scoop up as much user data as possible, or charge users for basically anything more than the basis (RyanAir model coming to haunt IT?), or investors think that it's just not worthing putting money into you.
Investors are a negligible minority of Internet users, most of them don't even know how TCP/IP works, yet they have the biggest say on how the Internet should be designed. And they're killing it. These big pocketed motherfuckers who put their money into things they don't even understand aren't welcome anymore.
It's time to develop open forums based on open protocols, so all this shit about profitability, walled gardens and centralization goes out of the window for good by design. We need an ActivityPub for forums too - and, who knows, maybe ActivityPub itself with a few tweaks will suffice?
Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277814 - June 2023 (232 comments)
Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268458 - June 2023 (188 comments)
Ask HN: Where are Reddit users migrating amidst the API fee controversy? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36267206 - June 2023 (15 comments)
Reddit CEO Spez AMA Overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265027 - June 2023 (22 comments)
Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264232 - June 2023 (470 comments)
Thousands of Reddit communities will be inaccessible on Monday in protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36263059 - June 2023 (16 comments)
Addressing the community about changes to our API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261369 - June 2023 (364 comments)
Ask HN: Are there alternatives to the subreddits which will go dark next week? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259785 - June 2023 (14 comments)
Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254086 - June 2023 (361 comments)
Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285 - June 2023 (38 comments)
Addressing the community about changes to our API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261369 - June 2023 (320 comments)
Archive your Reddit data before it's too late - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259930 - June 2023 (341 comments)
Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Reddit comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981 - June 2023 (221 comments)
Ask HN: Anyone else disinterested in Reddit API drama? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256545 - June 2023 (26 comments)
Apollo Back end just made public - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256167 - June 2023 (229 comments)
Ask HN: You are given 100M to launch a new Reddit competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255767 - June 2023 (23 comments)
ArchiveTeam has saved over 11.2B Reddit links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172 - June 2023 (150 comments)
Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254086 - June 2023 (352 comments)
Using unmodified third-party Reddit apps with a custom server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36252061 - June 2023 (20 comments)
Power Delete Suite for Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36250785 - June 2023 (31 comments)
Apollo will close down on June 30th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 - June 2023 (1568 comments)
Continuation: