Reddit Doubles Down | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Doubles Down

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407 pointsstanislavb427 comments

I love that the CEO calls the users voicing their displeasure "noise".

When those users voice opinions on other things, it's called content. When those users voice their opinions against reddit, it's noise.

Hoffman continues to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit is.

The very people that give your platform its value are revolting against you, and you think it's noise.

What's your product? What do you create? In what way will Reddit thrive only with what you put into it? Where do you think the content you lace your ads between comes from?

"Windows users"...?

When those.

Probably "When those".. Maybe GP is using dictaton?

When does oozers dun flown da coop…

My personal (cynical) bet is that Huffman actually understands what Reddit is better than us, and Reddit will be just fine after this.

To be completely honest, if a two-day blackout is proven to be the most serious "protest" the community can do, I'll buy Reddit stock when it IPO.

I agree. I think that this is a turning point for Reddit but not towards failure: they’re ditching the hardcore nerd audience that made them. But they’ve long since outgrown that audience and will likely (as a company) do just fine without them. As a community there will be a notable loss.

> they’re ditching the hardcore nerd audience that made them

If it's just the nerd audience I'll bet Reddit win without thinking. But it's more than that: they're ditching some mods who rely on 3rd party apps, and some users who stay on Reddit for NSFW content.

So yeah, I still think Reddit will be fine, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

Who is going to mod it.. couple reddits that I follow daily are public again, however there are no new posts as mods stopped accepting anything.

I am genuinely curious how this is going to work going forward.

Reddit (the company) controls the platform. They can just install new mods if the current mods arent doing their job. I doubt most users would even notice that the mod names have changed.

They will then need to find an pay those mods.

Facebook spends $500m annual on moderation. That's a top-down estimate of moderation costs for a large website.

You can try to do a bottom-up estimate, but how much do you think it costs to moderate the (8th?) largest domain on earth? More or less than that? More or less than what Reddit's current operating income is?

They better get their buck quick before investors realize what that means for the future of content on reddit.

Because much as some folks here seem to believe, there IS actually more to reddit, reddit as it exists today, than just ad impression counts. I'm not some social media genius but the way that this being talked about by some people, who I guess haven't been a part of reddit over 17+ years, I am flabbergasted at how y'all think these things grow and thrive.

What's the market value of 9gag? iFunny?

Digg?

> how y'all think these things grow and thrive

Reddit has grown and has thrived, now the company is prioritising turning on the money tap. They’re prepared to lose X users if it means they can monetise the remaining users by Y amount.

I’m not saying this as a defence, I’ve also been using Reddit for 15+ years and I’m disappointed by what I see. I’m just clear eyed about the game plan.

I totally agree. I just think the mental calculations some folks are doing don't even come close to accounting for power users, mods, and the amount that some of those pissed off users made reddit what it is.

I guess I just find it baffling that people think that the site will have the same value it had today (to users and advertisers) if it is loses its soul. I don't even think I'm being idealistic. I've been through this before. Reddit is more than a view count, or else people wouldn't care they way we do. Did? Something.

How do you monetize what's more than ad impression counts? Also apart from various types of nerds it appears to be mostly outrage echo chambers.

My name's not Steve and I don't think anyone would hire me to consult, but oh I dunno, this sure wouldn't be the way I'd go about it. I've actually read some horrifying hypotheticals on how reddit could've boiled this frog a lot slower, probably quiet silently.

In some sense, as a non-share holder who wants to see people build these communities in the open, I appreciate this approach.

I think that started with the redesign. It's so weird looking at some of the default subs, just pure trash imo, yet there are still the incredibly diverse, bespoke communities ranging from knitting to woodworking. Users in those subs are the real losers out of this.

Those "incredibly bespoke communities" are almost entirely people posting images of a professional/elaborate project, and then asking for feedback in the form of "hey you guys this is the first thing I've ever made please give me some feedback but go easy on me OK?"

It's a massive circle jerk and echo chamber of regurgitated opinions. So in other words: exactly like the rest of Reddit.

And it's also people posting reviews of some tool, or long tutorials on some technique, or answering questions from beginners, or collecting a FAQ with the basics/intermediate level of learning of a hobby which becomes an intro manual of what you probably need to learn as a foundation.

It can be also a massive circle jerk but if that's the only thing you can see from niche subreddits you are coming into this with a massive bias and ignoring the good parts, and these good parts are missing from most of the rest of the web.

I feel that your opinion is the same, just an attempt at a massive circle jerk about how terrible reddit is. It is, but it's also not and if you sincerely can't see how useful reddit is for a wide range of hobbies it's probably because you're a little myopic.

If that's your definition of circle jerk then basically you can't have a conversation with anyone, on any medium.

A conversation is always at some level about voicing your opinion or showing something you've done or bought and basically ask for feedback/reactions.

Eh...the real problem with shutting down Apollo is that it makes the volunteer moderators lives much harder. Those are the people who provide any value to reddit as a platform.

The protest could end today, the 3rd party apps go...and if the volunteer mods go with it, then the site as a whole tumbles onto a decline that eventually kills it.

This. Have you ever seen unmoderated Reddit, it’s called 4chan.

This is actually a great way to protest. If the subreddits going dark for two days isn’t enough, start posting porn or other bad type of content to popular subs that don’t have many mods.

This comparison doesn't really work because 4chan boards tend to be pretty strictly moderated. It's just that the threshold of what's considered acceptable is lower.

Some of the things that volunteer mods defend against is bot spam, repost spam, karma mining, abusive comments, and brigading. Unless Reddit has AI solutions for all of these (not a real suggestion - it's an arms race against similarly-AI-using spammers, and if Reddit had the engineering culture of ByteDance then it would have already built the moderator tools people had been requesting since 2015!) then its niche and generalist subreddits alike will lose their culture and quality faster than one can blink an eye.

> Some of the things that volunteer mods defend against is traffic, traffic, engagement, traffic, and engagement.

> then its niche and generalist subreddits alike will lose their culture and quality faster than one can blink an eye

reddit chaotically overriding subreddit moderation decisions has had that effect for a while.

I moderated a subreddit once. It sucked all the joy out of Reddit for me. Every time I visited the site, I got stressed as to what new nonsense happened.

Fun stuff I had to deal with include: The admin's "Anti-Evil Operations" frequently deleting user comments with no explanation. A persistent pedophile who just wouldn't go away. Getting guilt tripped by a severely mentally ill guy whenever we had to ban him (and his many alts) for breaking the rules. Doxx. Gore. Brigading. White supremacists. Racists with their "racial crime statistics". An impossible to moderate Reddit Chat (there were no chat moderation logs at all). And much more.

I completely checked out of moderation when I remembered that I wasn't getting paid to deal with any of the above. And since then, I've had much more appreciation for all the moderators who were willing to put in time and effort into maintaining a community for free.

If Reddit isn't going to value its communities, it's just going to turn into a clone of the bloated corpse of "I Can Has Cheeseburger", an endless stream of cat pictures and short videos, posted and reposted. High in traffic, maybe, but catering only to the lowest common denominator, stripped of the things that made it valuable to long-time users.

But that's probably fine with them. Reddit seems to have taken that the position that users are fungible, which (particularly when they depend on volunteer moderators) seems somewhat dubious to me.

That's kind of all that Reddit is to me. There are some exceptions, but for the most part Reddit posters are some of the stupidest humans on the internet.

They are great fun with cat pictures and other stupid content. And you'll have the occasional laser-focused sub-reddit (that will be a loss).

But the vast vast vast majority? Utter stupidity.

That's OK, you don't have to subscribe to the ones with stupid content. Just subscribe to the ones with laser-focused content.

The occasional laser-focused subreddit has been my bread and butter on reddit for the past 15 years.

I never access /r/popular or /r/all or any of the default subreddits, all my usage on reddit is from niche communities about my hobbies, and through the past 15 years each new hobby I started there was a subreddit to kickstart it full of information and a community. That's going to be the biggest loss.

Most of reddit the past 10 years has been shifting towards new users just lazily scrolling /r/popular but those users are not profitable, they don't generate value, the ads will be poorly targeted. The laser-focused subreddits is where the value of reddit as a platform comes from, I don't like advertising but I could tolerate targeting on those subreddits as it'd be relevant without invading users' privacy (like the old days of AdSense using the context of the page for ads, not profiling the user).

The vast majority is utter stupidity, I agree, but that is a part of reddit that you can completely avoid if you are a bit more of a power user... It will suck when it dies.

Like my username says, I'm definitely not anything close to a power user, but you're 100% right. Moving to a new city, need info on your current city, or just visiting somewhere? Check their reddit out, between searches, maybe the wiki, and asking questions, you're set. Got a question on random topics? Find the 3-4 subreddits and fire away, no need to worry about quora or stupid articles online. Worst case the community you ask will have some RTFM-attitude to them, but boom - now you got a manual. And like you said, new hobby? Bruh, hit the wiki & the sidebar, go through their resources, ask the community for more if you feel like it. Get detailed help for your issues inside a week, for sure. It's ridiculous how useful it is to have a curated list of resources and a community ready to talk you through those resources, on day 1 of your future hobby, for free. For pretty much all interests. Shit was glorious.

I've read about some people calling for a return to forums. That lacks the one-stop-shop-for-all-interests feel, though - besides, subreddits are quick to tell you about other online communities you should hit up. For some of the older folks on here, how were the old newsgroups compared to reddit? From the little I know - and I mean "I learned about newsgroups from a joke on the Simpsons" little - it kind of sounds like Reddit...

That's exactly what it's going to become. Lop in the eternal September of new users aging-in every year that don't even know what it used to be like and they're set.

Creating an alternative to Reddit would be pretty easy, but the challenge is the critical mass of users necessary for anyone to ever replace it. (We are even using a clone right now.) Another challenge would be scalability, but this is not as difficult as it was in 2005(?) when Reddit came to life. They are playing a dangerous game disrespecting their users.

We're going to see a lot more clones in the coming weeks/months, which arguably also prevents most of them from doing their intended job as a replacement. Eventually, one will form when the dust settles.

It's a slow process, but an inevitable one. Twitter has demonstrated this, where it isn't this instant switch, but a slow burn. We're only now getting Meta's take on such a replacement for example. Same will happen with Reddit now people are aware how fragile it really is. I just don't see direct replacements happening this year.

Anecdotally I do see far more aggressive displacement on Reddit than I did with Twitter however, perhaps due to how impersonal Reddit is where most feel they can abandon it much easier than a Twitter account with many professional colleagues attached.

That's what the average hooman being wants tho, why do you think Tiktok is so popular. Most of the content on there is scripted bullshit/fake scenarios and some dumbass' face "reacting" to some other content. That's what people like...for some reason...

Steve's out here slandering would-be partners, lying to employees, and shoving increasing mountains of poop under the rug. We're approaching 4D-chess big brain energy here.

Also, let's not keep conveniently leaving out that a growing number of subs are pledging to continue the protest.

We still don't know what the impact will be of Instagram's upcoming Twitter clone.

It does look like more of a hybrid between Twitter and Reddit with the threaded conversations and nerd-friendly API layer i.e. ActivityPub.

It will never have the one thing that people come to Reddit for right? NSFW. Not porn precisely, but a range of freedom of expression that goes beyond the narrow band of expression allowed on Zuck’s platforms.

Reddit has always tried to thread the needle of having 4chan-like freedom without 4chan-like anarchy. That’s the secret to its success.

buying stock makes little sense when an avg user is many times less valuable than IG or tiktok.

they're already struggling with worse service on the way.

at least Google and meta have world-class programmers. what's reddit's moat?

The only moat Reddit has is the critical mass of users. Numerous clones exist (such as Hacker News), and a new minimum viable product could be built in a couple of weeks. But once you have the users, it is pretty easy to keep them... unless you make them turn against you.

Is there any measure of how many accounts were scrubbed by scripts and deleted?

Sounds like something you could use an API to find out … oh wait.

He could use it as an excuse to restructure the Mod authority, flagging it as shareholder risk. And that will kick off the slow demise.

As someone that has been using reddit for a decade and a half, I agree with you. We the old timers are stuck in the "good ol' days", when reddit didn't have any subreddits, discussions were mostly about technical topics, and the meme du jour was to put dollar signs in Microsoft's name.

I think it has stopped being that a long, long time ago, and Steve kept track better than us what the new demographics of reddit are. I am sad that the reddit I enjoyed is no more, but I am looking forwards to the new crop of discussion platforms (or whatever else) that will crop up.

>Hoffman continues to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit is.

No, you and others' wishful thinking lead you to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit and Hoffman are. This is just the standard "how to run a business" MBA crap at play. The website you think Reddit is doesn't exist; and that doesn't even matter, as for them it's just another black box that makes money.

I kinda agree, but on the other hand, the statistics were sad. The site I used [0] is currently down, but from what I remember, even with so many subreddits being private, posts per minute went from 1.2k to 1k, and comments per minute from 8k to 7k (talking about the peaks of the curve in both cases).

That is a pretty low reduction and imo shows how those of us who care are not a majority, and the whole thing might end up being nothing more than a gamer-protest.

edit: back up, peak comments from below 7k to below 6k; peak posts from about 1.2k to 1.1k

[0]: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

> Hoffman continues to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what Reddit is.

hoffman founded reddit ... together with btw aaron swartz.

this is a well known fact that he trumpets all the time. founders getting out of touch with their products isn't anything new.

yeah this really has been a mask-off moment for spez.

I don't really understand why it had to be this way. It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled. Even just announcing the same change with 6 months of lead time rather than 1 month would have gone over better. Or boil the frog and gradually introduce API restrictions. It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.

Or they're broke and reddit is soon to be bankrupt.

But even so, if they had just said that, the outcome would be so much different. Because as of now it seems like they're fucking people over for the sake of fucking them over.

Neither the cost of allowing these apps or the revenue the charge would produce could possibly matter.

I'm not so sure - I assume the hyper-valuable users are actually generally using 3rd party apps, so forcing them back on the platform could raise their CPI enough to look good at an IPO rather than terrible.

They have to be much less than 1%, I don’t t see how the math works. Views (and ad clicks) are what matter, not posts and comments. They only need the posts and comments to have something to stick an ad next to.

But the api doesn't deliver ads and the clients don't pay Reddit.

But they don’t cost much. Getting the activity scaled ad rev from these users won’t make them profitable.

Cost is a red herring here - the real metric is opportunity cost. These are users who spend a lot of time on reddit and give up a ton of data, so they can almost certainly get a much better CPI from these users, and give them a ton of ads.

It is a gamble. I am a Reddit power user in part because of the superb unobtrusive experience of old.reddit and Apollo. If you shove it full of ads, it’s no longer the experience I got addicted to. At that point I’d rather leave.

Open AI already showed that you can train an LLM on the stuff reddit's already got and produce a site with as much traffic as reddit gets... so what are the users needed for?

I say this in jest, but only partially... lots of subreddits have noticed influexes of AI bots recently. Maybe spammers testing the water, or maybe you were just the product that was just helping train its replacement.

In online games and newspaper paywalls you have on average 1-3 % valuable users. Even if Apollo made up less than 1%, those are probably the valuable ones so it could be a good chunk of those.

An influx of capital would be easier by making everyone pay $10/mo to access the API via third-party clients. Would still be unpopular but would mean people could still have the experience they want to see from reddit.

but that's the issue - Reddit's been focusing on other forms of content only in the native Reddit app, like TikTok-esque live streams and promoted posts from subs you aren't subscribed to.

They have a $4/month product ALL ready that removes ads and gives you more features. Making that a requirement to use the API is by FAR the simplest and most profitable option. Its also more profit then they're proposing to get from their API charges

Yeah I find it baffling that they didn't just do this

Most likely it's about control, not financials.

I found it interesting that spez admitted in his call with the apollo dev that the actual hosting cost for the api calls were pennies compared to the 'opportunity cost' of not having users use the official app. He basically admitted that harvesting data via the app and selling it to advertisers was reddit's bread and butter now.

People have to realize, from a standpoint of "how do I make all of the money?", this is the only way these sites can survive in a world of reasonably-high interest rates.

There are only so many people who would be willing to pay $x for a Reddit subscription. Would the quality of content and discussion go up? Absolutely, but that's not what Huffman and his VC backers care about. They care about _scale_, and if you can collect the information of every person who goes so far as to even click on a Reddit post that's a result in a Google search, you can have near-infinite scale. At that point, the question isn't "how do I get Joe Schmoe to pay for a Reddit subscription?", it's "How many ads can I cram into every GET request made to Reddit and maximize the price advertisers are willing to pay to be in that GET request?"

Adtech business models are a blight on society. It’s a drug that ultimately, 100% of the time, leads to the downfall of the company due to the fundamental mismatch between company incentives and user desires.

Why is it interesting? Alternative apps aren't necessarily going to show ads, which is how Reddit makes money. Surely those statements are mundane.

It also weakens the 3rd party apps - all the freeloaders will drop off Apollo, etc. if they learn they have to pay monthly for it.

It's win-win for everyone for the most part.

Freeloader is an odd term for a subset of the people who provide what gives Reddit its value.

I would be fine paying a monthly fee to be able to keep using RIF. Reddit throwing up an iron curtain and thinking it'll ultimately end up benefiting them is such a head-scratcher.

Yup, would subscribe to this in a heartbeat to keep using RIF.

I don't understand the Apollo side of this --- that's literally what he's being offered, by his own math. $3/month/user. Fairs fair. He has enough users to make millions a year: their servers aren't his for free forever.

People are tying themselves into knots turning Reddit into either near-bankrupt or evil. Or hyper-focusing on particular elements that are just disputable human interactions, like most (i.e. suggesting he could optimize API calls isn't some slap in the face & shitting on his app. really immature!)

I have absolutely 0 dog in this fight, no huge reddit fan, I just don't like how many people I see bamboozled by him. Extremely manipulative behavior.

You’ve either done no reading on the subject or are trolling/arguing in bad faith.

No, you. More than happy to debate it with you.

This is an incredibly disingenuous take.

First, no it is not 3$. Apple takes a 30% cut, and requires a yearly fee to keep the app on the store. There is also a separate server cost, and a cost associated with paying an engineer. The actual cost is 5 dollars.

Second, there is only one single month to make all changes. Pricing was announced only 30 days prior.

That means payment setup, subscription changes, app update and payment approval requests, etc all need to happen within 30days. This is literally impossible.

Third, there are people who have paid a for a yearly subscription. (10$ total) Those funds either need to be refunded in it's entirety, or be allowed to run out first. Both will not occur within 30 days. That is literally impossible for apollo dev to do. That's just an issue of how refunding works and timelines.

If it is the latter, the dev will be incurring ~50,000 usd in costs every month. This is impossible to sustain.

Either way, there are app store rules that must be followed first. Reddit's timeline is incompatible with them.

And finally, regardless of API costs! reddit has on multiple occasions, defamed Apollo dev. Why would he continue working with a company that makes false blackmail accusations, then doubles down after evidence is provided?

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

This is an incredibly disingenuous take. ;)

- $3/user is the Apollo author’s projected costs. Dunno what the rest of that means. “The App Store charges 30%!!!” simply isn’t relevant other than for devs projecting anything that’s hurt them over the last decade into this story

- What are “all the changes”? My understanding is he’d release an update with a new API key with a CC attached.

- If it’s gravely important that the yearly subscriptions who have paid already get free Reddit, why is he shutting down?

- Why is it impossible to give a finite list of customers a refund in 30 days? Again, isn’t he doing it anyway?

- I’ve developed on the App Store since day 30 and don’t know what App Store rule you’re referring to.

- I think your claim is Apple might not let him get an update out? That’s fine. Do what everyone else does and _don’t add the credit card to the old API key_.

- He can’t afford $60K/month? Why not? Charge more than costs. That’s how business works, you don’t have an inalienable right to free APIs.

- he can’t afford $60K/month, redux: he bring in millions a year, right?

- His two claims are:

1. he was offended because Reddit said the app is inefficient - he won’t put it into quotes so I’m guessing it was just generic “you could optimize your api calls” advice

2. He made a very bad joke that he frames as “mostly joking” and frankly, was blackmail. We’re seeing the other side of it now.

Anything else?

>Why is it impossible to give a finite list of customers a refund in 30 days? Again, isn’t he doing it anyway?

if that's all you got out of the comment, you clearly aren't trying to see the POV of the app developer. He's under no obligation to keep working for a company that has at this point slandered him behind his back and he can shut down his app whenever he wants.

You are free to judge him but I don't think he's losing sleep over internet comments trying to claim he is disingenuous. Personally, I see no fault on his end, especially when Reddit is dealing the cards to begin with.

Do you understand he doesn't work for Reddit?

Do you understand your comments are focused on making judgements about _personalities_, not business decisions? Do you see how they assume others are too?

Since you've indulged, please, allow me:

Your comments are aggro and focused on personalities and people. I don't find them useful or interesting.

Yes, I know my stance on this isn't the common one. I have been taking it for a few days on several forums.

I've obviously seen a bunch of people who were happy to dismiss everything I said. Your replies stand out as the only ones that were wildly off-topic and myopic. You are strangely focused on social dynamics and stack-ranking strangers that will never meet, and assume the strangers are doing the same.

>Do you understand your comments are focused on making judgements about _personalities_, not business decisions?

You chose to comment on a personality and not a business decision. So I responded in kind. To remind you of your comment:

>I just don't like how many people I see bamboozled by him. Extremely manipulative behavior.

This is not a comment about a business decision. This isn't even a comment about Apollo nor Christian. So yea, I reply simply to voice my disagreement with this assertion as you have indeed brought me into your odd argument.Tit for tat.

And since you asked for my useless and non-interesting opinion by proxy: As a fellow dev (not reddit app dev, just general person who has worked on tech only for it to fail due to powers outside my control), I do empathize with here. Trying to and spin my own emotions as being bamboozled is dishonest, inflammatory, and in my singular case, wrong.

https://gist.github.com/christianselig/449b0bd374167ff7335fa...

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...

I honestly can't be bothered to answer any of your claims. You obviously don't read links attached to comments. So read this, or just ignore it. Your choice.

$3/user/mo is also the average cost across all of his (active?) users - you can bet that if the users start having to pay the people who use Reddit constantly will be more likely to subscribe than the ones who use it once a month.

There might genuinely not be a single price that pays for itself, and usage-based pricing might be required.

Yeah, that is what running a business is like.

People are unintentionally grading him on a _huge_ curve, essentially "what if...all I had to do was code and App Store?" That would be nice, I get the impression he's had a fun ride so far where that was pretty much it. Now that the thing he's selling isn't free, he can pound the table and quit, or run the business.

> Now that the thing he's selling isn't free, he can pound the table and quit, or run the business.

Other than the needless personal attack, that's exactly what he did.

He also indicated that it's not even $3, people who pay for Apollo Premium/Ultra tend to use the app more, and their usage would be in the $5-$10 range. So basically he'd be losing a bunch of users who brought the average down, refunding those in the middle, and his entire business would be catering to the most expensive users. $15 would be more of a breakeven, and at that point, what the point of running a tiny app for free?

I would have had no issue paying $10/mo for the Reddit API. Wouldn't have even thought about it.

I'll go out on a limb and say that most Apollo/3P users would've done the same thing.

Really sucks that they chose death instead.

Yup, before all this nonsense I was voluntarily paying for Reddit premium to support Reddit. I had no interest in any of their premium features - Apollo already had no ads and that’s all I cared.

TBH I would have and I think many others would hesitate as well. $10/month is enough to the point where I would consider simply sticking to the desktop site.

for $10/month I'd expect more quality control in communities, and my experience from years of browsing doesn't make me optimistic that my money would improve that.

It's pretty obvious why they want Apollo and similar to disappear.

Because they want the freedom to add more of the features you suggested. To join the existing classics like Chat, For You Feed and the Redesign all of which are insipid and poorly implemented.

Even the new Discover tab isn't even personalised despite recommendation algorithms being so basic to implement these days.

It seems like they realized the value of user content for AI training too late, and are trying to hamfistedly lock down the golden egg goose for their upcoming IPO.

Pushshift.io used to host a complete repository for Reddit. I think there were archives on the internet archive as well. There are numerous torrents with terabytes of text content for training AIs. Perhaps they might lock it down going forward, but language training horse fled and was eaten by coyotes a decade ago.

More (and more recent) content will be need for further training of the models for them to stay competitive and up to date.

Adding .json to any url still gives you everything in json. This has to do with 3rd party clients not showing ads and making up the revenue lost.

How much would it cost at the July 1 API prices? If it's less than $10/month, why didn't all these apps just go subscription only?

For Apollo specifically, about $5/month is what he decided would be sustainable to support Reddit's increased prices, but since there were existing users with yearly subscriptions, it would cost a lot to break even while still providing those users with service.

As for why he couldn't simply shift those users to monthly, it's due to the notice being a month. If Reddit had given a 6-month warning, that would've given everyone time to content with the issue and update their own apps (billing system changes are hard).

> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.

"Why not just increase the price of Apollo?" on https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

people also complain that even if they pay the API, they aren't getting the NSFW which is like you have paid the product, you should get the full product

If they're broke, this doesn't help, since instead of paying, everyone they expect to pay is shutting down

If they're broke than they should have first stopped self-hosting videos and images. I can't believe their API call cost is more excessive than their video and image hosting costs.

I wonder how much impact their shit-tastic video player has on bandwidth costs. On one hand, when it freezes and refuses to play, it saves money. On the other hand, constantly restarting videos to try to get them to play probably costs some since it doesn't appear to be caching properly either. The net cost could go either way.

There's a subtlety that seems to be getting skipped over quite frequently. It's not "the cost of the API call". It's "the opportunity cost of that user not coming to our main website".

I agree, but if we are incorporating the opportunity cost of free-riding 3rd-party users than Reddit also needs to incorporate the opportunity cost of losing thousands of unpaid moderators who keep the site running. I can't imagine the math will be favorable.

How is charging for an API which costs them money "fucking people over"?

To me, there's a way that business relationships are carried out; you can deliver bad news to industry partners in a professional manner.

If Huffman had called up guys like Christian Selig a while back and been like "Listen, it's been great, I love the apps you guys make, but business is business and I want to see more revenue, and to do that I'm going to charge more for the API and probably eventually shut it down, let's work on a timetable to sunset things.", he's not nearly the jerk he is today. No one's under the illusion that Reddit or Conde Nast are charities; they have revenue targets to make.

What makes this fucking people over is the negotiating over API price and implementation timetable that was clearly in bad faith and meant to shut down these applications within the timespan of a quarter. Imagine being told that your way of making a living (which these apps are for their developers) is going away in a month. Sure, these devs are the cream of the crop, but that's still a major life disruption, and you don't do that to the people who helped make your website what it is today.

Giving 30 days notice for people using the API to adjust their entire revenue model. 4 months after saying "hey don't worry we're not going to charge for the API this year".

This isn't just about an API becoming paid. It's clear they want to phase out 3rd party apps without saying it out loud.

I think they’re panicking after being devalued to 6b with hopes of IPOing.

> It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled.

Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.

They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.

I don't think Reddit was telling the truth either.

But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on, and a sufficiently expensive API at least forces them to do engineering work to get all the data. So at the time I believed Reddit's reasoning.

Pushshift was the best unofficial reddit API for years, and did so without any funding problems

I'm talking about deterring ML data harvesting, or at least getting a better price for it.

If it were about ML, why did they go heavily after third-party apps, even making up lies about one of the developers?

Because it wasn't about ML. As I said, I believe Reddit was lying. But the ML story was at least plausible at the time.

>But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on

Google and many other companies for almost 2 decades have spent their time scraping petabytes of data from the web. A lot of that with no expectation of payment. Some companies became billionaires off of that ability to freely access mass bulks of data.

Data scraping has always been a grey area, but I find it strange how it's suddenly taken a turn for some people whenever modern AI comes up. We can't really be drawing lines based on what we feel is good/evil, because we will never agree as a whole on what is good/evil.

They could have set up a signature with 3rd party apps, those apps could have have charged the apps a couple bucks/required ads in the feeds from reddit/etc. Instead they wanted 100% control and 100% of the data. This isn't -just- about killing off AI scrapers, this is about sending a message that reddit is 100% under the CEO's control for when they have the IPO. Wallstreet does not like "free" stuff, all they see are cost centers and profit centers.

Don't underestimate the power of ego.

It causes irrational behaviors.

100% ceo ego driving poor, unsophisticated, and non strategic decisions. This could have been handled so much better. Evidence that he is not the right leader to be ceo

A little crazy to me that Discord can create an attractive subscription tier while Reddit flounders.

Well, maybe not so surprising with their product team.

Different products. Discord is about socializing. Reddit is an anti social social network. Only weirdos would pay to dress up their Snoovatar.

You go the twitter way.

Just cap all existing API keys to roughly the number of users they currently have.

Everyone who is currently using RIF or Apollo or $whatever can continue to use it. They can't add any new users.

Super simple, nobody is losing anything, nobody is having anything taken away. All new users would be fed into the app. Eventually the 3rd party apps would have died off. It would have been a slow, painful and QUIET death.

Twitter capped the third party apps ages ago, but they wouldn’t die. It was still a LOUD death when Musk finally cut them off.

Or just invest in building mobile apps that people love to use more than the alternatives.

Exactly! They bought Alien Blue and made it into the app everyone hates. If they believe in the future of the site it should be a no-brainer to buy RiF and/or Apollo.

Could it be that most Reddit traffic is via web, and so it isn't worthwhile?

Then why is it worthwhile to alienate all users with these API restrictions just so that users move to in house mobile apps?

Could be:

a) 30% on mobile app (made up) would be less than 70% web, but still sizable!

a) Scraping by generative AI companies, etc.?

They're running out of cash, investors want their money back, and their answer it seems is to turn reddit into onlyfans, which requires they wrest-back control of all the NSFW parts of it.

I don't understand why the users aren't just leaving? Surely the software/infrastructure can't be that hard to replicate, especially on a "subreddit" level?

Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?

It seems like quite a few are judging by online comments alone. I'd love to get a hold of the real numbers.

What gets me is if all the third party apps had banded together and said 'july 1st, we all pivoting to support a new platform', that would have been enough of a network effect to effectively cold start the network effect on whatever they targeted. It would have been dig all over again, and this time reddit would have been in the dust bin.

The coordination required for such would be quite intense. Also fragile, as the third party apps would quickly abandon any roadmap agreed upon if Reddit changed its mind.

Maybe it can happen now among the apps that have put their foot down about a complete end, but certainly loses a lot of momentum from those who might have already uninstalled them.

Isn't this basically how Reddit got popular, when everyone was mad about Digg's UI update so they wanted an alternative?

This is something I've been investigating. If one had a gateway that spoke Reddit's API, the apps wouldn't even really have to pivot, just change the API base URL.

And in theory not even that. As long as the traffic can be redirected to a different server it should still work. In practice, however, at least Apollo has some server-side components so it wouldn't be totally plug-and-play without developer support.

Sadly, I'm not sure how to get in touch with the developers/users who may be interested.

(I've also heard that someone's working on a Reddit/Lemmy gateway, but I don't know who they are or how far they've gotten.)

Network effect. The mods don't really offer anything. People won't leave for another platform because there's no content/community. It's even hard for an individual subreddit to leave because a single subreddit isn't enough to be self-sustaining.

> a single subreddit isn't enough to be self-sustaining.

They said, on a website that is essentially a single subreddit.

Unless you mean financially.

Many have. Many more will. They aren't going to announce it, that's gauche.

There is a sentiment of, 'Whelp, was fun while it lasted. Remember, digg, haha. See on the next go around.'

One of the key criticisms from the moderator side of things is that Reddit by itself is not usable; you simply can't moderate a large subreddit effectively using only on-platform tools. So they can't migrate to a Reddit clone which won't have all the third party support that's been built up.

Some communities have talked about going to Discord, but that's of course more of a closed platform in most ways.

After /r/TheDonald was banned, a bunch of right wingers did exactly this by creating TheDonald.win and other sites (including one for /r/TheRedPill), forming the win network. Honestly, the interface was better than Reddit and the site was very active, demonstrating that moving communities off-Reddit is very doable.

TheDonald.win went down because the admin saw the light after Jan 6 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/05/why-the...)

> why the users aren't just leaving?

People are addicted, especially the mods and power users. They won't go, because they've infested too much in building up their "clout."

The main reason is not necessarily because of the information presented today, but because of the years upon years of information the platform currently contains.

If I want to learn something technical (for example, music production) I'll search in google the thing I want to understand, then add the keyword `reddit`.

What the past few days has demonstrated to me, is how much of this information is on Reddit and how helpless I am without it, with all the main subreddits closed.

Furthermore, if I want to ask something technical I'll ask it on Reddit, and will almost always get an appropriate response. So it's been reliable for me as well.

Also, the fact that I don't need to create another account for a separate platform, just so I can ask a question about a new hobby I've just discovered. It's the fact that it's so centralised that makes it so valuable.

>It's the fact that it's so centralised that makes it so valuable.

And as we see yet again in internet history, we see the cost of that comfortability when you put all your eggs in one centralized basket. This isn't the 90's dial-up days; I'd rather create a burner account in 5 minutes and keep my trail scattered across the net than fall into that trap where everything is in one place.

> It's as if the CEO is purposefully being as belligerent as possible to rile people up.

The CEO is following the new leadership playbook, which you should recognize by now, as it's used by Musk, crypto leaders, Zuckerberg, and many more inside and outside of tech.

* Fundamentally it's just following the social (media) trend: Demonstrate brazen, over-the-top arrogance, disregard for consequences, and no empathy. I'm sure people recognize that pattern.

* Applied to CEO roles, it means publicly demonstrating contempt toward groups of people who are (individually) weaker than you, including employees, customers, protestors, etc. And it means disregard for consequences, such as Musk's actions when bidding $40 billion for Twitter, and afterward; or much of what has happened in crypto. It demonstrates your power, demonstrates their powerlessness (if they capitulate), and makes you look like you have extreme confidence and little empathy - which is very trendy now, of course. Disregard for consequences works until they occur. It's basic con-person tactics, the most obvious bad sales techniques.

* When challenged, act more aggressively or with more contempt. Double down.

* Play the victim and characterize those who oppose you as violent threats - which again shows disinterest and contempt for them and their arguments. One remarkable place you can see it is some US Supreme Court justices - it's such a powerful trend in 'leadership' that these people with untouchable lifetime positions even do it. (In case you missed it, Reddit's CEO used this technique.)

These 'leaders' protray themselves as brilliant, innovative, and highly capable, and people assume they must be - after all, they run these big companies. They are just corrupt and swept up in the latest fashion. Power corrupts, no surprise.

The sad part is that I see many on the other side of these issues actually believe this crap - they believe they are powerless and unilaterally disarm, as if the leaders are using the Force when they say, 'you have no power' - 'Oh, I guess I have no power' and they despair. (And then they tell everyone else the same.)

At the cost of a little faith in demoracy (write large - the power of individuals working together), they hold all the power. Our ancestors who in the same way built much of the freedom and society we have now, must be amazed. We just give it all away. The worst of our society haven't given it away - look at Bud Light. Reddit should be toast, or at least the CEO. People just wake up and act.

Without getting too political... Musk is just following President Trump's playbook. Everything you said describes the same way he behaves.

I don't think Trump invented this playbook if that is what you're saying - the power hungry have done this forever, but we can now just see it all in real time.

What made Trump different, and what these other leaders are following, is that he chose to put it out in the open. It wasn't something that just happened with changing tech, he did it on purpose.

With a leader like Steve Jobs you got a lot of rumors about callous behavior in private but got a polished exterior. Trump upended that when he became popular by being publicly crass.

I'm very interested in the recent origins of this playbook. 'never apologize, never explain' is really old, but it seems to be a thing now

I think it's always been a common playbook. It just doesn't come across as a playbook at all when it works; either you assume the issue must have been minor or you never hear about it at all. (How many people remember the Starbucks strikes in November and December 2022?)

The president demonstrated it from 2016 to 2020. We are just seeing the copycats now.

Trump is to blame for the behavior of the company that banned Trump's subreddit? Is there anything this man can't be blamed for?

Well, he did things more brazenly and on a bigger stage than anyone before him, and got away with it. Big numbers of people noticed.

Did Spez ban trump's sub or did Reddit?

There are inevitable more than one Spez at Reddit, but I doubt all 2000+ employees are like that.

This is a public speech playbook to influence a crowd. You need to reach a large audience on your own terms without being challenged. It was not applicable through traditional media, and public speeches occasion with a large audience were very rare. Social media made it possible 24/7. Also the previous US president proving it works was a turning point.

Sure... but if you look at recent history, this is a counter-movement to the plastic-y, corpo-speaky, flowery language and stab you in the back (or allow you to rot in the background) type of leadership.

There's a lot of people who prefer, or at least respect, an openly arrogant or dishonest leader. At least you know where you stand then, and are visible. The alternative, a lot of the time, is a leader who pays lipservice to equality, but has the same underlying disrespect.

The dream is being treated as a capable individual, but if a leader isn't willing to see you like that, it's pick your poison.

Mark Zuckerberg at least doesn't seem particularly arrogant, nor is he playing the victim. During his last interview with Lex Fridman he openly acknowledged past errors and stated that he wasn't sure whether current plans would work. I'm not here to defend him and I disagree with many of his positions but it's worth listening to the interview to gain a more nuanced understanding than the snarky hot takes which dominate here.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vYx9yPEIpJaoh2I4keEjA?si=a...

(Of course, it's also possible that the whole interview was just an act.)

new leadership playbook ?

The examples you cite could not be more different if you tried.

a) One is working towards their IPO. b) One was taken private, and doing nothing would have resulted in Chapter 11 c) The 3rd is a public company, trying to unwind a moonshot project with a budget that dwarfed the cost of the NASA Apollo space program itself.

The common themes in these disparate scenarios is that all 3 leadership "styles" have a strong sense of self-interest (and short term self-preservation), period.

But that's just business.

Its nothing new.

Or give a waiver for the current main apps...

I suspect that spez really looks up to Elon Musk as an idol and decided to bury his head in the sand and go the way of twitter.

Because they want to IPO as soon as possible, so showing a bump of revenue from API shows the promise of more revenues for investors.

Remember they took a 41% cut in valuation recently. IPO is going to be challenging so they want to show as many different streams of revenue as possible.

My guess is that 3rd party apps have reached a user threshold where they pose a potential future risk of pulling the rug out from under Reddit enough to give some non-negligible traction to an alternative. After all, once you've got the app installed, the back end server can be replaced with something else and you can find ways to streamline new user account creation where needed especially if they are paying customers, even offering to reserve existing Reddit usernames on other platforms.

If a Reddit IPO is coming, then this could simply be a form of de-risking. It's a double edged blade, because higher quality 3rd party apps may increase the platform's value while you're on their good side, but rub 3rd party app developers the wrong way and they might start getting clever ideas. A short notification period may reduce the chance of clever ideas reaching manifestation.

> A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout

I find a CEO referring to their employees as 'Snoos' to be offputting personally.

I'm sure it's meant to be a fun and inclusive term but the guy is sending out a pretty serious email that ends in, "I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations."

The tone strikes me as weird for this message and I feel like the term 'Snoo' is infantizing at best?

Maybe I'm alone, it just feels super weird to hear that coming from someone with the title of CEO at a company of more than 100 people

Snoo is the name of the reddit alien. I believe it was going to be the original name of the site (what's new - what'S NOO).

Since "redditor" is a community name, it makes sense there would be a different internal/employee demonym and Snoo fits the site as good as any other name might.

Here’s an idea, call them employees.

Every company I've ever worked for has had some sort of name for their employees. It's probably supposed to foster some sense of community/belonging.

You're welcome to take the cynical approach to that, sure, but I've never felt it to be a particularly harmful thing. It's good to have some semblance of a friendly culture, if only to break up the day.

Some people will like it and I'm sure some people hate it. I've never given it a second thought though.

I always hated it. It feels infantilizing.

I don't see it as any different from schools or sports going "go [Mascot]s!". I was never into that culture, but I also see my world getting more and more lonely by the year.

If others bond together from that, I get it now.

Family! ;-)

Because its us vs them, don’t you get it? Us noisy, violent users getting in the way of the Snoos tribe big shiny IPO.

Lots of tech companies have silly names for their employees, I think it might have originated with “Googlers” but some companies (like Reddit) went a little further. (“Snoo” is also the name of the little Reddit alien mascot.)

I recently joined LegalZoom, where the demonym is apparently "Zoomers". Yeah, I won't be using that one :P

Congratulations on getting hired in this economy!

Thank you!

I believe GitHub employees are called Hubbers

I also think it’s weird and infantilizing at best (patronizing at worst) to call your employees ‘Snoos’ or ‘Metamates’ or any such corponym (for lack of a better term), regardless of the context.

It sounds like something from Dr. Seuss

More like Li'l Abner

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

Reading the full letter[1] I think the first use of that term seems generally fine ("Hi Snoos,") whereas the 2nd one comes across as grossly tone-deaf (which is exactly what I expect from reddit at this point), mostly because the first one is just the opening greeting and can be a bit more colloquial while the 2nd one is addressing actual human beings who are suffering from the strain ("working around the clock" etc) and feels like he's trying to dehumanize them.

The whole letter seems incredibly tone-deaf. calling the protests "noise" is incredibly dismissive of their user base and their concerns. The whole section about not wearing reddit gear outside is an obviously farcical attempt to paint people who oppose this change as violent when they are more likely to be people who never go outside, let alone people who are prowling around with weapons looking for vengeance for API changes.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...

One Snoo not working around the clock is /u/Cryfi the Snoo responsible for helping my subreddit land and manage AMAs. They were unceremoniously shown the door and none of the mods were notified.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

It reminds me of that movie Spy Kids where the villain kidnaps people and turns them into these teletubby like creatures.

Looking back, that was kind of some heavy body horror for a kids movie.

But yeah, “Snoo” is easily the worst tech company name for their employees I’ve heard. I had no idea Reddit had an internal name for their employees. This is way worse than “meta mates” or whatever Zuckerberg ended up coming up with.

Original report is available on the verge[1], which contains the full message sent by reddit CEO.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...

Damn, that's a hell of a message. it'll be interesting to see if it starts to go dark again, if slacktavism takes over and there is no follow through.

Even if subreddits don't go dark, the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult and subreddit support bots that eliminate spam and maintain post quality stop working.

>the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult

Is there a market out there where I can bet all my money against this claim? The idea that this will lead to a spam wave destroying Reddit is wishful thinking on the part of aggrieved moderators who see themselves as forming a Thin Blue Line against a tide of chaos.

I'm not an aggrieved moderator, but I am someone who has moderated in the past and used the third-party tools and bots that allowed a subreddit to remain focused on a specific topic. I don't think you recognize how much random spam and troll submissions are caught by filters and cleaned up automatically in even small subreddits.

Having given up moderation ages ago, I have no dog in this fight. I'm sitting on the sidelines watching the drama with a bowl of popcorn, just like everyone else.

Well, there will still be some anti-spam tools, right?

If there's a detailed argument saying that basic moderation (eg. obvious spam removal and not "I want to ban everyone who's ever said anything nice about Trump") will take say an order of magnitude more human effort without 3rd party tools I'd be curious to see it. If there's a persuasive claim along these lines I'd shift my beliefs, but I haven't seen it so far.

For sure, and I haven't moderated in a few years so perhaps the internal reddit tools have improved since I last used them. They used to be pretty basic and cruddy. The moderation team I was a part of relied pretty heavily on the moderator toolbox:

https://github.com/toolbox-team/reddit-moderator-toolbox

I don't know if the proposed API changes will affect this specific tool, but I doubt moderators would be nearly as up in arms if their tools were going to keep working the way they had in the past.

You can buy reddit stock when they IPO I suppose.

"I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.”

Overreaction much ? Are we really become that desensitized as a society? I find that hard to believe.

Feels like projection. I don’t know anyone that blames Reddit employees for what’s happening, just the CEO.

There are a lot of unhinged people on any major Internet platform. In 2018, a YouTuber shot three people at HQ because she blamed the company for downranking her videos. It’s actually quite lucky this kind of thing hasn’t happened more.

Is it lucky or was that situation an anomaly? Some people are unhinged but they are also keyboard warriors. I doubt even the unhinged redditors are going to go out and start assaulting people over this.

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

FYR

It feels like he trying to create the sense among Reddit employees that they are the victims, probably with the hope that it will temper internal criticism and create a sense that they are in this together (as opposed to its basically execs against everyone else).

Did you see the death threats in the github copilot copyright case?

I haven’t. Where can I read about that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36270427

> [The judge overseeing the case has permitted the plaintiffs to remain anonymous in court filings because of credible threats of violence [PDF] directed at their attorney. The Register understands that the plaintiffs are known to the defendants.]

> https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Overdramatizing threats to your own personal safety is a common tactic of seasoned victims, and is routinely employed by all parties in these sorts of disputes.

No people are insane.

Remember no man's sky fallout? Or cyberpunk one?

Over 8k subreddits went dark, not just 1k.

https://reddark.untone.uk/

Noticed r/indiegaming "gone". Good for them.

"My executive decisions were perfect, and do not need to be questioned, because I am a vic--I mean, we are all victims of unfair treatment by our regular users who have collectively gone insane and dislike all of us for no reason, a problem we must overcome as a team, right?" /s

Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Pretty much all investor funded companies follow this path sooner or later. Lock the platform, squeeze the profit. Sad, but not much can be done about it.

Anyone else remember the giant exodus from Digg.com to Reddit? No one I know talks about Digg.com any more. But hey, maybe it is profitable.

Due to some quirk of when and how I used the Internet, I not only never used Digg but have only really heard of it in relation to the exodus you mentioned. So, interestingly, I don't remember the exodus but I also feel like people talk about Digg.com all the time (as a cautionary tale).

Yes agreed, I'm in the same boat as you. I hear about the Digg Exodus all the time, have for many years. It's often mentioned when talking about the origins of Reddit too.

Digg was a social bookmarking site like Reddit. It originally ran on user submission of links, user voting, and then user comments on those links. It had a separate slew of problems than Reddit does today but it did have a similarity in laughably myopic and user despising management.

Digg decided that taking user submissions didn't make them enough money so they changed the model to letting sites pay to submit links. Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section.

This and other issues pissed off a lot of users. Then there was a massive protest where all the submissions and comments said go over to Reddit. Reddit's user base ballooned with former Digg users. Digg went forward with its stupid submission changes and a significant percentage of users stayed on Reddit and Digg became a ghost town of PR submissions and astroturf comments.

Like Reddit the value of Digg existed almost entirely in its user base. Once the users left there was no utility left in the site. It was a darling of "crowd sourced" content so without the crowd there was no content.

> Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section.

Plus compared to Reddit, any kind of real discussion was a pain in the ass. (As opposed to a bunch of people sequentially shouting into the void in an un-threaded manner.)

I used to read Digg heavily and joined the exodus to Reddit after, I think the outcome was similar but back then Reddit was popular enough and it had no power mod problems as Digg, also transitioning was easier because it was just web version and no native client. This time a third client alone as Apollo can make people go away.

Sure.

But there was reddit.com for people to migrate to.

Let's see the 99% figure out the fediverse.

This change will be slower, but it seems a truth that in life, inside a company and in communities, there are some people who do much more work / have more influence than others. If the best / brightest / most helpful etc people leave, there's rarely much more than a shell left.

I think the Fediverse will slowly pick up steam, and perhaps rival reddit in 5 or 10 years. Which is fine. One long-term advantage of the Fediverse is that it's more immune to corporate shenanigans. And ultimately, for all of us, this is a long game.

That's a good point.

I honestly can’t figure out how to engage with the fediverse. I keep asking but it just doesn’t make sense. This from a person who had no problem with IRC.

https://lemmy.world/post/37906

I haven't tried it. Requires email to sign up.

Reddit makes like half a billion, it's plenty profitable for what it is. The problem is that management is trying to make it into something that it's not in an effort to make even more money when the site just isn't geared for it.

It's like if McDonalds instead of just opening more stores decided that it can make even more money if it turned into a bar and grill because steaks have higher margins.

Agreed. The tech world keeps facing this problem, where to justify the valuations that companies end up getting, they need to keep trying to "take over the world". Sometimes it works, and we get stuff like youtube migrating away from just viral videos and video hosting, into supporting an ecosystem of content creators. But so many times it's just wasteful money and effort.

Reddit management already did this when they began self-hosting all images and videos. It's pretty disingenuous to complain about excessive API call costs when you voluntarily decided to pay for hosting and streaming Petabytes of video and images.

And their hosting is REALLY bad. Videos have NEVER worked right for me on Firefox and it's been years with no progress.

The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page.

Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.

I did try to watch videos on the official app and it was bad, I tried changing to 3rd party apps and I was blown away that you could actually watch videos with it.

Yeah, very odd move considering how difficult it is to get profit out of hosting images and videos on the internet. It like they had this massive cost neatly externalized and just decided to take it on instead. Even though no one asked for it.

That led directly to where we are today. But IMO the situation isn’t comparable: if Reddit is Digg then who is Reddit? There isn’t really a viable alternative.

Now people use native clients and none of the alternatives have a good one even compared to the official Reddit client

For me, it was slashdot to Digg to reddit...

We have been talking a lot about digg recently actually. Mostly by comparison to reddit.

Wikipedia mentions the original founder of Reddit saying

    this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."

I feel some echoes of this statement with Reddit's recent changes. Maybe these exoduses are a cycle. I think it's a relatively recent phenomenon for a huge online service to last beyond one or more decades, and I'm not sure with these kinds of funding models and sheer user numbers it's realistic to expect these kinds of VC-funded services to last in perpetuity. Could they last 30 years at that size? 50?

Maybe in another 15 years, whichever successor to Reddit is found unsustainable/unreliable (decentralized or not), everyone left with a dire need of niche online subcommunities shrugs their shoulders and moves on once again. I don't see them having another choice. The need for online communities will always be there in my mind, especially since the existence of Reddit has proven that it can be done, and someone will build something else that everyone conditioned on these forums will use eventually.

I hold out hope, but an unlikely outcome is the mainstream somehow attaches itself to a service with a different funding model like Wikipedia or AO3, or these kinds of message boards are treated like public utilities. It will still be a massive burden to administer, but the outcomes could be different. I remember reading how "critical" subreddits were given a pass from the blackouts like /r/Ukraine because the value of their information trumps anything related to Reddit operations. A part of me thinks that Reddit's current playbook takes into account that some parts of its existence have become too important for mods/users to shut down, and that seems different to Digg's situation in 2010. They simply weren't as big as Reddit today. This is uncharted territory.

Regardless, in my mind, a lot of things in life don't last forever, not just Digg or (soon possibly) Reddit. But lots of people rode the wave regardless for 15+ years, and have gained a lot of useful knowledge from Reddit in the meantime.

So people will inevitably flock to other closed platforms like Discord because those platforms are the objectively superior choices, and they're not ideal for various reasons, but in my mind you just have to meet people where they are. And I think a service like Discord could absolutely implode with a few misplaced administrative changes. But at this point I tend to see these things as part of a greater circle of life, and it's (probably) not like they're going to implode almost immediately in quick succession. Just that your time spent there is a part of a particular nexus in a particular point of human history, and it's going to be limited. So, enjoy it while it lasts.

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

As if on cue, I couldn't read past the first paragraph because of two different popups trying to get me to subscribe.

wired is the absolute epitome of enshitification

Was WIRED ever not just the johnny-come-lately of tech hype-cycle?

Surely that's boingboing. I always thought their tagline should be "last month's news, today!"

Try https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Get uBlock Origin and turn on the annoyance filter to make your life infinitely better.

Thanks for this! Long time ublock user but never new about these filters

Same here, hadn't heard of them. Thanks. :)

Just went in the UBlock Origin settings... and yep, there are 14 potential "annoyance" filters. Just turned them on an applied them. Lets see how it goes...

Most of those must be new additions. Whenever I set up a new browser I enable every list, and I only had 5 annoyance lists enabled. I'm glad I checked again!

I can never decide if it's reasonable that they're off by default (they break more things, and they're not "ads") or if it's an obvious missed opportunity to improve millions of people's lives.

Either way: yes, annoyances++. It helps a lot.

> Usual bait and switch from Reddit.

Providing an API for free for 15 years. Yeah, total bait and switch.

15 years of leaving money on the table. Not quite at the level of Uber in terms of setting money on fire, but respectable nonetheless.

The bots enabled by the free api was what allowed Reddit to transition from a small hangout into "the front page of the internet". Without the bots and tools enabled by the free api the site will rapidly devolve into a cesspool like Facebook.

It seems that the end game of corporate controlled social media is for corporate interests to control what you read or watch.

Happened with the feed of Facebook. originally was a true social network where you scrolled through what your family and friends posted. Now it is a algorithm designed to maximize attention and sell influence,

Happened with YouTube. Used to be really pro independent user … now the search functionality is barebones giving you maybe one or two results… the rest promoted content.

TikTok just straight up controls what you consume from the get go

Reddit wants to join in the same model. Heavily corporate moderated content masquerading as “use content.

Sadly I am not too hopeful for a new platform. Any true open forum upvote downvote platform will be torpedoed before it can get going …

Have you checked out lemmy yet?

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

What's to see there?

I hate to admit, but this comment pretty much sums it up: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/209870 (first part talks about communities in general, the rest is about r/Dota2 in particular - but can mostly be applied to most other subreddits)

I really don't want it to be like this, but it sums up perfectly how I feel about it. I'm not on Reddit to make posts - about 99.999% of time I don't have anything to post, and those five minutes a year when I possibly do aren't today. I'm lurking around, then maybe participating in comments, chatting with people or just expressing My Importantly Worthless Opinions(tm).

I've checked out Fediverse and it's essentially empty. Those who make all the posts I was commenting on haven't moved there. If they will, I will visit, for sure. But if they won't (and seems that they won't) - I won't stick around simply because there's nothing to do there for me, personally (I'm no content producer).

Blackout doesn't address this. Neither are all those "check out Lemmy/Kbin/... posts" I've seen.

Reddit knows this and that's why they call users like me "noise". I guess, moderators included (as I get it, most mods don't post - they have a different role)?

> I'm not on Reddit to make posts - about 99.999% of time I don't have anything to post, and those five minutes a year when I possibly do aren't today.

I hope Reddit did their due diligence in this. My feeling is that the people who found a 3rd party client and even paid for it are the ones in the 0.001% who produced the content for the rest of the people.

But we'll see in a few weeks if /u/spez starts forcing subreddits to open.

> My feeling is that the people who found a 3rd party client and even paid for it are the ones in the 0.001% who produced the content

Random data point: I paid for Apollo Pro (not Ultra - it didn't have any features that I wanted), and turns out I've lied about 99.999%, it was more like eight nines as I have a Reddit account since 2011 and my only post ever was on r/KeybaseProofs. I thought I had some questions that I've wanted to post, but it seems that I've always solved them without ever posting, just searching for answers harder - so my memory had failed me.

Apollo is convenient and features were totally worth the money. Even for someone who only browses and posts only comments. The official app is no good.

So... I don't know. I share your hopes that everyone else is not like me (but then why no one is posting on Fediverse?)

I'd be a lot more willing to try if whatever identity I made was somehow portable to another instance if I change my mind later, rather than feeling like I've just entered into permanent lock-in with a random party of unclear reputation and future compared to the other choices. At least for me, that choice-barrier is surprisingly strong.

YouTube search is officially trash. It doesn’t even support excluding terms using “-“.

I was trying to find video essays on Cyberpunk, the worthless search kept giving videos of the stupid Cyberpunk 2077 video game. I had to use Google search to find what I needed.

Also YouTube search likes recommend me unrelated stuff too nowadays. For heaven sakes, can we have a search that just do its damn job.

> YouTube search is officially trash. It doesn’t even support excluding terms

Thinking back to around 1995-2005, I really regret how so many "search" tools (both online and in certain OSes) have become opaque and unreliable "let me guess it for you" engines. Features to correct them when they are wrong--like negation of terms--are sometimes unreliably badly/non-documents, or nonexistent.

It's not a lack of knowledge or skill--FFS Youtube owner Google has its own history as a search engine there--but all the commercial incentives aligned for Enshittificiation, and I wish I knew how to fix it.

There is definitely something wrong with discovery UX on youtube. I have many interests, but each of my devices has converged down to one topic based on usage. I don't know how to explore new topics, it's like I can only flip between my recommendation algorithm or global trending.

All they had to do was make API access require Premium. $4/month and all the pieces were laying there. Thats twice as much monthly profit as their current super inflated API pricing would bring them for the same users.

Reddit made themselves a real mess here and it's all SO stupid.

I'd pay that to not have to use their awful mobile app or new.reddit

> I'd pay that to not have to use their awful mobile app or new.reddit

How much are you willing to pay?

You don’t think there would still be a huge outcry from folks who are paying $10 a year for Apollo and now have to pay $58?

not enough to cause an entire blackout

No shit hey. Fucking rocket appliances apparently. Charge me $4 for premium and give devs 3 months to implement the changes or something. It feels so blindingly simple that this who mess is mind numbingly stupid.

It's stupid but you have to keep in mind Reddit's execs are liars. The API users aren't costing Reddit money and they're not the reason they have profitability problems.

Reddit wants to wrap all their content in a mobile app. There they can force ads without the option to blocking, they can force (paid for) "suggestions", and they can vacuum up all that sweet personalized data from every user.

Quick napkin math shows that they’re currently making about 10 cents in ad money per active user per month. Any subscription would bring an order of magnitude more income.

Somehow Relay's developer figured a way to make his app viable with "$3 (or less) "

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/12/23758616/reddit-app-survi...

It's so simple, yet brilliant. However, I wouldn't pay more than $2 or $3 for it.

Of course, the two day blackout will not have huge revenue impact, but two week one will. And if it goes on beyond that, those who will have the most to lose will blink (i.e. Spez and investors)

If Spez doesn't blink, the investors will make him.

I don't think he's' going to win this one without making concession.

I do hope the mods have the balls to continue the blackout as long as it takes. This couple days is a joke. A longer strike will be noticed, especially by would be IPO investors. As it is, if this IPOs, I’ll be selling short via put options on this. Management is incompetent. Will not succeed with this anti visionary leadership.

I wouldn't say it takes balls to not click the "public" button and instead touch grass. Everyone will be just fine without their feed crank fix.

If anything, the mods are getting a break from their stressful lives as Reddit mods.

I wonder what Reddit's owner (Advance Media / Condé Nast) think of all this. I assume there is a point where (from Advance's POV) the API changes hurt the IPO more than they help. There may also be a point where having (Reddit co-founder) Huffman as CEO is more of a hindrance than a benefit.

Note that while Advance Media is still a large shareholder, they haven't been the majority shareholder since some point in 2017-2019 as they got diluted by various investment waves

I think that point was 5-10 days ago.

Imo the boycott isn't going far enough. The communities affected by this should just pool resources and either migrate to an existing clone or build one. If it sticks to only hosting text, and handles images/videos via external links hosting costs would be very manageable.

There's no reason something like Reddit needs to be privately owned, or commercial at all.

As a user I deleted my entire comment history. About the best I could think of to do.

It will be interesting to see the eventual outcome of this saga. I have already seen backlash against the backlash in many subs. /r/NBA, which was mentioned in the article, had a poll one day before the blackout and made the decision based on 8000 votes (out of a total 8+ million members). Casual users were not happy to find out that they would have nowhere to discuss the most important game of the season, and the mod announcements were very heavily downvoted (the blackout happened nonetheless).

Will a chunk of users stay off the site permanently? Maybe. Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.

>Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.

Casual participation doesn't get the job done.

The idea that reddit would benefit without these users is just a complete misunderstanding of what reddit is and what creates reddit's value.

Moderators _seriously_ underestimate how hated they are. At this point I'd rather the admins just take back the subs and let the voting system sort it out. Like how it did for the first 10 years of the site's life.

It will be overrun by nazis pretty fast. A lot as changed in 10 years.

Yes, like the definition of Nazi and the fact that Goodwin's law no longer means you lose the argument.

It's not that Godwin's law meant you lost the argument. Godwin's law was just an observation, that a common evil, is an easy thing to reduce someone who disagrees with you to. So you have to avoid doing that, if you want to be able to maintain any level of discourse.

That, of course, goes out the window when the person you're arguing with legitimately identifies as a Nazi.

you or any other user could create your own subreddit. it’s not like reddit can’t discuss nba games.

there clearly is a gulf between people who actively wish to make it so and those who consume the byproduct of their effort.

The same way moderators could go create their own version of reddit. Or you an I could just start a new basketball league. Or create a new internet if we are unhappy with the existing one.

This line of reasoning goes nowhere.

Sure it does. If "casual users were not happy to find out that they would have nowhere to discuss the most important game of the season" (an assertion that is incredibly laughable) and were really that upset, there could've been an r/NBA2 in half a second - far easier than recreating Reddit itself or making their own league. And yet, nobody did that...

> And yet, nobody did that...

/r/nbacirclejerk, /r/basketball, /r/cfb, /r/heat and /r/denvernuggets hosted the game threads for last night game.

Honestly really digged the experience on the /r/nbacirclejerk game thread.

damn i had no idea hah. but im not missing reddit, never will go back now. fuck em

/r/nba2 exists. It was created 10 years ago.

I mean, I guess I assumed nobody had created an alternative NBA subreddit during the drama that OP highlighted - my fault for being flippant. If anything, the fact that r/NBA2, and a bunch of other similar subs that a flagged comment mentioned in response to me, already exist only further highlights the absurdity of the claim that there's nowhere to discuss the game if r/NBA is blacked out.

A thousand people create alternative NBA subs and discussion boards every day. How will everyone know which exact one of them to go to?

If you think the solution to blocking a sub (or all of Reddit) is "a hundred million people can just all decide to go somewhere else the next day", you fundamentally misunderstand how the community and network effect works.

I mean, it's really not at all that difficult to search for subs on Reddit and see how active they are, and then subscribe accordingly and join in on the convo. Who cares if everyone goes to the exact same one? If people spread out to a few active subs, then the discussions will continue there. A few million here, a few million there.

Some of that hundred million would disappear, sure, but hey - what percentage of subscribers are relatively inactive anyway?

people complained just about as much about moderation on reddit in 2010 as they do today

You are seriously underestimating how much garbage is in the mod queue.

This is about the transition from a site mostly about engaged focused discussion by enthusiasts to a more mass market generic social site.

I bet most views at this point are just the generic popular view, not driven by a subscription to a sub.

Ok, but why can't reddit serve both types of user?

Split old.reddit off into an "old school" version that has 3rd party apps, but needs a subscription to access. Then keep new reddit as their tiktok Instagram clone.

The old school version has never made a profit

> It will be interesting to see the eventual outcome of this saga.

For sure.

Knowing there’s a backlash against the backlash, I wonder if Reddit triples down and forcibly flips back to public all the top subreddits that went private.

There’s the problem of real quick finding new mods for like 8,000 subreddits. I’m sure the tail is long, but they’d probably start with the biggest and work their way down.

Ultimately all the data and code lives on Reddit servers. They can do whatever they want. The way they’ve acted so far I don’t see them backing down.

>Casual users were not happy to find out that they would have nowhere to discuss the most important game of the season...

... what? Reddit is absolutely not the only place to discuss an NBA game.

/r/nba would have seen a huge drop right after the finals anyway.

that subreddit is great because of the off season s* posts actually haha

I hope this unleashes a wave of tools that allow you to exfiltrate content from these systems and put them in longer lasting storage that can be searched even when the original goes down.

Then we can just let all these services die every few years.

I actually think I would have been pretty bummed by this week’s events if my long-time Reddit account hadn’t been banned last year for literally no reason. (I know everyone always says that - and then it turns out that they’re inevitably extremely enthusiastic posters about, like, early/mid 20th century German highway engineering or something similarly Hitler adjacent. The only not-nice thing I ever wrote on there was in an AMA by a westerner who ran a North Korean travel agency to ask him how it felt to literally be one of Communism’s “useful idiots.” He never answered. But that was also years ago, so presuming that probably wasn’t the cause of my ban.)

I thought, ah, surely this error will be cleared up upon appeal. I submitted my appeal, and nope, ban remains. It was actually kind of upsetting (I guess due to the seeming arbitrariness? certainly no content of any value was lost), but it was good to have that nice, clean break.

Anyway, I mention any of this not because I care about getting that account back, but because it occurred to me that I’d really like to get back on that account and delete all my messages, but with the way their ban seems to work, I don’t think I can do that.

And while I’m sure their 2023 TOS makes it purely my problem if I got myself banned and thus lost any ability to control the content I contributed, I do wonder if their TOS was as robust (it was a pretty, pretty informal place when I started posting, and rights to contributed content can be pretty nuanced based on how the license/TOS is worded), or how their stance interacts with any of the privacy laws passed in the last 10-12 years.

Oh well. This is why my default rule is “never post” (as I elect to override that default at this very moment).

On Reddit, you can say things that would be normal anywhere else, but make a small group of terminally-online individuals very upset. Something as simple as asking 1 question in 1 subreddit. That's how I got my first ban. It's what made me completely apathetic to reddit.

The other bans were my fault (as in, I knew it was likely at that point) but I was apathetic at that point. Still, I appealed because they were silly bans, and my account was reinstated each time.

I believe it. That said, even when trying to adopt that frame of mind, it was still basically impossible for me to identify anything I had said that would have been at all offensive or upsetting even to an extremely sensitive person.

Who knows. I still kinda think it must have just been a mistake, or maybe something I said was taken extremely, extremely out of context (and if I lack the imagination to see how, well, shame on me). I mostly just find it humorous because this is the only ban I can remember getting in almost three decades online.

> how their stance interacts with any of the privacy laws passed in the last 10-12 years.

You’d be surprised how big players work around those.

I asked GitHub to remove an issue from a repo whose owner blocked me. Being both I and the owner EU users, I sent a GDPR removal request. They just said they’re a “controller” and that the request would be forwarded to the owner.

Nothing came of it.

GitHub even has customer support, Reddit does not, so you can imagine how little chances you have in doing so unless you fire up your lawyers.

Fascinating. Thanks for answering that aspect of my post. So similar excuse if you were to exercise a right to be forgotten? (Would that even apply in this context? Or is that what you’re describing?)

I think that right only applies to search engines and "directories," the actual content would not be deleted. I suppose I could ask Google to delist that issue, but not GitHub to delete it.

The more recent GDPR on the other hand should allow me to ask the "owner" (I forgot the exact name) to delete all the data related to me. He however declined to follow my request. An option at that point was to pay something like €50 to file a complaint to the governing body (some EU entity), so I gave up.

FWIW, you can get an archive of your own content--a zip of CSVs--here;

https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

I used it last month when Reddit randomly ruined my 13-year-old account and everything I ever posted, so this recent set of blackouts just feels like icing on the cake. (In short: Some Kafkaesque process flagged my account as spam, I appealed, got an automated "it was a mistake, fixed" message, but it wasn't fixed at all, and now I can't contact anyone because the system falsely thinks my account is in already back to working-order.)

Tools don't seem very interesting. They already exist. I want a mirrored copy so I can find the information I want that was posted on reddit without having to visit reddit.

So, in other words, you want "longer lasting storage that can be searched even when the original goes down"? What's the difference between that and what you are imagining?

No difference, I'm just saying the tools to make such copies are not as interesting as a findable place with those copies.

Try teddit.net

It seems to me like they could pass this cost to users instead of developers and just have API access an option on some subscription tier. Then allow third party apps to auth with users credentials. And then everyone would be happy? Maybe.

Yes, I've no doubt they know this and have opted for the "more control" route. They seem to fully expect to weather the storm and be able to do whatever they want with the API and anything else.

I guess it remains to be seen if that is true, but unlike Twitter and Mastodon, where I didn't think Mastodon was a good alternative, I actually could see https://kbin.social being a good alternative for reddit.

The longer this protest goes on the more the alternatives will grow and be viable. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

>a commenter let me know that some members had already set up shop on Kbin, a decentralized Reddit alternative that is interoperable with Mastodon and other services on the ActivityPub standard. While the interface is rough even by the standards of Reddit, it works just fine.

Works just fine for who, though? Not for non-technical people.

The FOSS community, especially the Fediverse community continually disappoint me by being so dismissive of, or even hostile to design critique. Nearly universally, trying to engage a project community in rethinking an interface is received like unsolicited criticism of someone's physique. Even as a software developer who's put many thousands of hours into FOSS development, AND a professional designer, And making it clear I'd be willing to research, design, test, and implement myself, the results are usually just as discouraging. I've stopped trying.

Without significant designer input, FOSS social media initiatives will always be two steps ahead technically but 10 steps behind in UX. After the November bump, Mastodon had lost the majority of the active users it had gained by February. I think that if something even comes close to a commercial social media UX, they stand a chance at being a real turning point the world's conception of how social media 'works.'

I am very critical of mastodon when it comes to UX. Kbin on the other hand was no harder to sign up for than Reddit, and it was equally as easy to find subreddit equivalents.

Your post cites no specific reasons why Kbin is worse than Reddit from a UX perspective. Have you even tried it?

Nope. I was basing what I said entirely on the article. Based on my extensive experience in open source projects, I think that's entirely reasonable. If a tech blogger thinks the experience is 'rough'— which includes a whole lot more than user flows in sign up and resource discovery— you can be quite sure it's going to look a whole lot worse to your average person.

Is it common for professional designers to bash a design before even looking at it? Maybe this is why FOSS projects aren't very interested in your feedback.

If I said that their handling of callbacks for http requests was rough would you consider that 'bashing' it?

Every website, including Reddit, already has an API you don't need to pay extra for. It's called HTTP and HTML. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that you need permission to choose what user-agent to access a site with; that's what the truly open Web is about.

Reddit was literally running an experiment on disabling their mobile web site for some users: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/135tly1/comment/jim40...

I would not be surprised if there are people on reddit who are thinking of closing down the garden and removing reddit from the open web.

reddit hides a ton of data unless you also run javascript.

The post by the Apollo dev made it sound like they had gone back and forth for a while before the final pricing was laid out. I wonder why reddit didn't come up with a price that worked for all parties. Isn't some money better than none + ill will from the community?

They don't want the money, they want the 3rd party apps gone, and for users to use the offical app.

In the recent AMA, they claimed that the average cost per user would be around $1/month. Apollo dev believes it will be much more than.

I feel Reddit could have easily come up with a model where the API usage gets tied to premium account and that decouples apps from API charges.

Reddit has now created a new problem for itself which is that a huge user base that previously didn't bother to look at third-party apps has suddenly become aware of third-party apps. So now, they will start bypassing Reddit's official apps that generate revenue for Reddit in favor of third-party apps that seemingly have a better UX and are ad-free.

Well, maybe, but the API is free only until the end of the month, so… seems like a very temporary problem for Reddit (assuming that the mods generally fold, as I assume they likely will).

I highly doubt a different dollar amount would have changed the outcome. Reddit wanted $2.50 per user from the Apollo dev. Would $2 have been more palatable? Or $1.50? Would the extra few cents per month really make the difference between a user subscribing or not?

The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.

Eh, at some threshold, of course a lower price would have changed the outcome. It sounds like the Apollo dev thought API costs came in at 10-20x what he’d been expecting. I think there’s obviously a huge difference between paying Reddit, say, 50 cents of a $3 net payment (assuming a sub for the app is $5/month) and having a $5/user/month cover charge to Reddit as the price of admission, and then having to build a viable app business over that. Seems dubious.

The average user doing ~300 api calls per day would do about 9000 calls per month and at $0.24/1k calls would be $2/user

Apollo also does polling of the message box for each user for push notifications ( https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/main/i... ) which currently has a rate of 1/minute/user. This is another 1.4k calls per day and changes the price that would be paid.

Current rate: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

March 16th rate update (6 r/m to 1r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/74a8...

Nov 22nd rate update (12 r/m to 6 r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/7582...

OK, so whatever numbers you want to use, whether it’s $2 in direct Reddit api access charges or $5, same order of magnitude, probably neither moves the needle that much relative to the other.

But I think there’s a huge difference between that charge being 20 cents and $2 (or 50 cents and $5).

From the API calls that you'd need to pass on to the user, this is a difference of $2/month for no push notifications (9000 calls) vs $10/month (9k calls + 30 * 1.4k calls is about 50k calls). Add on top of that a 30% Apple subscription cost (15% after a year), and we're to $3/month and $13/month and a bit of padding and a slim profit and you're at $5/month and $15/month.

If Reddit is saying "it's $2 for the 300 calls per day" that is claimed for the mobile app usage they're correct looking at what they charge for API calls based on the developer saying that the average user does 345 calls/day from the mobile app.

From the app develop perspective who also has a polling back end and an apple subscription cut and maintaining the same profit as before on top of it all, they're likely looking at closer to $20/month for that same user (noting that previously they were charing $4.99 and it was almost all profit for that user).

I think we are possibly just completely talking past each other, or perhaps just merely in violent agreement with each other.

Not sure why you're making up stuff still and cherry picking constants to try and pretend you're right.

Those rates are BEST CASE. I linked the code directly to you that actually does it in your previous comment.

They queue 100[0] users every 5[1] seconds to pull their status, they then update the next check timestamp in the db to be at now + the constant you quote[2] which they use for rate limiting, so at most once per minute.

So unless they have under 1,000 users, then it won't ever be "every single minute."

[0]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

[1]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

[2]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

A change in start time would be more impactful, so that he could ramp up charging his users

I always thought reddit was smarter than this. They were really born out of the ashes of digg and for a long time they remembered that. At this point they're in decline I don't think the bleeding will stop. Lots of young people already had a negative view of reddit and now redditors have a negative view of reddit too. I hope we can make a home in the fediverse I'm tired of giving my data to large corps with no recourse.

I believe the plain theme put a lot of the shitmunchers off for a long time. But we can't have nice things, so the reddit owners had to try to make it like all other shitty social media (starting with the redesign - echoes of Digg there).

I highly suspect anything critical of Reddit is being flagged to death on HN. This post was #1 with more than 100 upvotes in 39 minutes. Now it keeps going lower and lower.

Now it's #6. How's this even possible?!

I've noticed this place seems to have a really high churn rate. I often find myself replying to comments that are only 5 minutes old. :P

Inciteful posts rank lower. Incitefulness being ranked as some function where upvotes increase the score and number of comments decreases it.

Yeah, dang's discussed that in the past. Among other factors for ranking is the comment:upvote ratio. And I think quality of comments and discussion, they have a flamewar detector (speed of replies and depth of comment thread nesting) which can also impact ranking.

That's most probably based on member flags, not moderator action.

Note that HN also deprecates stale stories, where "stale" includes "ongoing discussion of some present drama", e.g., bitcoin and NFCs last year, or GPT currently.

dang's discussed this occasionally, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463948>

HN specifically doesn't moderate posts critical of YC company down, though Reddit's so long out of the gate I'm not sure that still applies. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35463948>

There've been 116 stories mentioning "Reddit" with > 20 votes between 2023-5-13 and 2023-6-14.

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1686720501&dateRange=custom&...>

I'm doing analysis based on HN front page listings and could update that to see what the actual surviving front-page story count is. It's been ... fairly substantial.

Fewer than 3% of submissions make the front page, and that's exclusive of spammed or moderated content.

Update / Edit:

There've been 16 front-page stories on Reddit since 31 May beginning with "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083>).

As compared with prior years, the 2023 mention rate is well above both the 5- and 10-year history (showing year and HN front-page mentions of "Reddit"):

(Source: own data & analysis based on a crawl of all HN front-pages through 2023-06-13.)

FTA:

> the number of Reddits that have gone dark expanded from around 7,000 to more than 8,400

Annoyingly, there's no context for these numbers. Is this 10% of all subreddits? 90%? Does it cover half of all users? They're meaningless numbers that "sound big."

There are millions of subreddits, but with the volume of subreddits "dark" and some of the largest ones joining in, it's likely to have had a significant effect on a majority of Reddit users, and a decent part of the wider internet. Cumulatively (adding up the member counts), 3 billion "accounts"/subscriptions have been effected.

8k is very significant

All I know is that the home page for me suddenly showed subreddits I didn't even know I was subscribed to lol so I can only assume a lot were and still are absent.

I hope I’m wrong, but I do not believe the blackout will be effective. Mainly because there is not a clear alternative to Reddit.

Reddit was not a clear alternative to Digg, but it only took a short while for the transition to occur. it's not the consuming user base that needs to transition, but the moderators who are willing to manage subreddits and users who spend the time find and share content. If they move somewhere else because Reddit becomes too difficult to use, the rest will eventually follow.

Reddit itself isn't a terribly complex site to implement as is shown with the relatively small staff they have for a very large user base. Until relatively recently you could download the source code from Github and spin up an instance yourself. The actual "work" is being done by the unpaid moderators and contributors.

If there was a clear alternative they would have not had the balls to try this.

For me the blackout was effective. I'm done with reddit. Fuck em

"There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well." (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...)

Unfortunately dead on...

It would take a lot more than 2 days to see a response, and even then there was enough subreddits still active that /r/all honestly looked about the same.

Isn’t there a centralized alternative to Reddit somewhere? This decentralized stuff just doesn’t seem to work.

There was Voat previously. I think you can actually download the source code and spin up an alternative if you wanted. The issue is getting people to switch.

I'm confused by this whole thing, do the mods not realize how easily they can be replaced? Without any leadership or strategy moving forward this "movement" is doomed. Who decided the winning strategy was to basically quit? What are they hoping happens here, reddit opens up negotiations? LOL, you're handing them the keys to your subreddits DERP. Pretty much par for reddit mods though so why am i expecting some kind of cohesive plan? I'll see myself out now.

You forgot to recommend an alternative approach

The thing is, the mods work for free. If reddit wants to replace them, they'll have to hire people moderate these communities (no chance).

I wonder how long until Google delists them in search results.

Why would they?

A lot of the Google search results for reddit lead to a error page or subreddit is now private, not the content Google originally indexed.

Wow, Reddit is going to lose a lot of pagerank.

Because when you visit a search result you get a page saying the page is private instead of content.

But are they serving a 410 (or other eeror code?) ? Looks like no to me. The algo may not respond as fast

Google knows if you follow a search result, then quickly go back to the search page.

Which has always been the case for anything tagged NSFW, or anything at all in a mobile browser. Every piece of SEO advice says this will get downranked from Google, but Reddit demonstrates this isn't true.

As a tip, if you just need to read the content from the search result then they seem to be commonly available in the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org

It does mean you need to cut-n-paste the Reddit url there, but it's been working for the content I needed to look into yesterday.

An absolute ton of search results can't be viewed right now because subreddits are locked down.

That might be better for Google. Now, when I google for reviews or brand recommendations, I won't get reddit anymore. Could reddit be biased? Absolutely. Is the entire first page of google full of bias, ads, and outright lies? Absolutely. But those ads pay Google; Reddit doesn't.

To add it to killedbygoogle.com

Google should buy Reddit instead. Not that different from owning Youtube. And they'd ensure their search results remain full of good, text based content.

Lot of people have complained that Google search is worse today without Reddit. If Reddit management kills the communities which produce the text posts it could have a real negative impact on Google.

Meanwhile Google's text and video ad network could probably monetize Reddit way better than Reddit can.

All true, but I find it unlikely that they would be allowed to buy it. Even if the US approved (by no means certain), the EU probably would not.

This is an extraordinarily good idea and I'm surprised I haven't heard it discussed before.

Having more concentration of internet services under Google doesn't sound like a good idea at all. Or maybe rename it GAOLgle?

Google destroyed its own search engine, it would do the same to Reddit.

The fundamental problem is that reddit's primary strength, it's biggest point of value, is antithetical to the type of monetization that Google would implement.

> Lot of people have complained that Google search is worse today without Reddit. If Reddit management kills the communities which produce the text posts it could have a real negative impact on Google.

That is actually really true.

Also reddit is a great (if not the actual best existing right now?) source for training AI models.

They already bought Deja News, and then virtually killed usenet so no, thank you, google can go DoBadThingsToThemselves...

I see. You want to see Reddit shut down somewhere over the next 3 years.

Youtube hasn't been great at dealing with controversial topics or sexual content. We'd basically see a Yahoo/Tumblr situation all over again.

I wonder how long until reddit allows search engine origin to bypass the community locked. my guess is very soon

Reddit would finally have search that works!

I hope Apollo is talking to several reddit competitors with a sustainable business model and working on integrations. At the end of the month, when they get shut down, they just rebrand the app with the new backend and everyone is happy. All users migrated to a new platform with new communities.

It's almost like we have a problem with the workers (producing the UGC) being separated from the means of production where the owners of reddit are simply trying to extract more and more money from the users who produce the content.

I, for one, am shocked and surprised.

I'm not a big fan of boycotts generally. Most of the time they're performative. But this one seems to have teeth. I hope this goes on indefinitely rather than than having an end date that the owners can simply wait out.

Reddit should not be an expensive site to maintain. It's text and some CDN media, basically. There's no reason it can't run profitably but the owners simply want to extract as much value in the short term to increase the IPO price. Short-term profits.

I am a bit confused about this, do a lot of people access Reddit through a service that uses the API?

To me Reddit is a website, people keep referring to it as an app, but I have never used an app for it. It works best in the browser.

From what I’ve read, they’ve been running an A/B test blocking the mobile web surface from working so would not be a leap to suggest they want to drop to be an app only product.

Yes, there’s a large group of users that use 3rd party apps like Apollo

Really? Maybe I'm in an A/B test but on mobile for me every page load pops up a dialog that says "this looks better in the app" and they only load a limited number of comments and gate the rest behind the app.

Apollo was by far the best reddit browsing experience on mobile and it seems like the API price was a direct action to shut these third party experiences down knowing their experience was sub par.

Are you using old.reddit.com by chance? If so I have a sneaking suspicious that's going to go away in due time.

You're right, but a lot of people do use third-party apps on their mobile phones since the official Reddit app is crap. From what I've read, third-party apps are also the only way for moderators to perform while they're away from their desktops since the official app is extremely limited in that regard.

Even on desktop, a lot users and mods use Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) [0] because the "default" Reddit is crap too, lol. I'm sure other HN users would also be using the "old" version of reddit, old.reddit.com [1] since it still performs better somehow. RES has also mentioned that it should continue working fine, but they're not entirely sure about it either. [2]

[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/141hyv3/a...

There's some third-party clients similar to what Twitter had this time last year, with Apollo being the most popular to the point of having its icon/screenshots in Apple's WWDC presentation last week.

I think the biggest impact, though, is some moderators rely on tools/clients to make their (voluntary) jobs easier. If those tools disappear, then a lot of these subreddits will probably shut down for lack of moderators. And I heard that /r/blind mods literally cannot use the existing Reddit site/apps.

The simple answer is "yes". Many many many people use Reddit through native apps and not the website.

What's funniers is that people that use an app are more likely to pay (pay for the app and by extension pay for reddit)

Have you tried any of the third party android apps? Definitely a step ahead of old.reddit and many times better than the current default...

It's best at a desktop with old.reddit and res, but the better apps are a close second.

I deleted my account and my contributions. I'm very curious to see the change in user numbers from this as well.

If the number isn't very large, I'll concede that I either over-reacted or the total number of bots is way larger than I imagined. If the number of bots is large, this affects their valuation.

If the number is large, it shows that the primary asset, the user base, has reduced and this also affects their valuation.

I can't see how they can come out of this looking as valuable as before.

I wouldn't like to be an investor.

He's reading it totally backwards. Most general subs I look at are hating on the mods for blacking out. People are creating alternative communities, but on reddit.

There’s also a filter where lots of users in favour of the blackout are not commenting during the blackout, so you’re only seeing one opinion amplify itself.

Numbers are probably closer to 20% care than 50%, but the effect would be visible regardless.

Signaling that the blackout would only last 2 days for most subs, was bad strategy. Similarly, signaling that you think you can wait out the blackout is bad strategy.

If Reddit continues to double down on their mistakes, I wonder if they'll go as far as to forcibly reassign control of major subreddits in order to reopen them. They certainly have the technical capability to do so, although I'd expect such an action to result in a mass exodus from Reddit and a massive loss of trust. At the end of the day, Reddit has the final say over what goes on in their website, but playing that card seems risky.

They can easily do that to the major subreddits without losing much trust at all. How many users do you think really care about the mods of /r/videos? I doubt very many. They should probably make the generic default ones like that admin moderated anyway. The amount of users who actually care about this is shockingly low. Something like 0.5% of users use third party apps? I saw surveys on subreddits with millions of subscribers about participating in this getting ~1000 votes in total. The number of users currently having their Reddit experience ruined by moderators far exceeds the number having their experience ruined by Reddit api changes.

I've only moderated small subreddits and even I know the chaos that results from not having bot-driven subreddit management tools. You may hate Automoderator when it deletes your carefully crafted post for whatever reason, but I guarantee you will hate Reddit itself when your favorite subs become overrun with illegal and off-topic spam.

The race will be between Reddit admins recognizing the degradation of the user experience and the outflow of users who don't want to visit their favorite subreddit because they keep seeing decapitated heads and underage pornography and every conversation is off topic.

This is really tangential to the core issue of charging for API access, as it’s essentially just an implementation detail. Losing moderation functionality is a valid complaint, but Reddit doesn’t need a free API for that to exist. There’s no reason to think that the required functionality won’t be implemented into the service. Your complaint here is also, rather obviously, massively overblown. The free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn, so there’s really no reason to think your claims about that content have any credibility.

> the free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn

I have no idea what subreddits are using these days, but I'm familiar with spambot, that compared any submitted image against blacklists. For anyone managing a NSFW subreddit, such a tool is an absolute necessity to avoid getting sent to the penalty box by Reddit admins.

https://github.com/4pr0n/spambot

I don't know what's being used now, but when I was familiar with it, spambot was monitoring dozens of NSFW subreddits that had tens of thousands of subscribers. This is only one of thousands of such customized moderation bots that use the free API.

I used to spend a lot of time on Reddit. This blackout has helped me realize there is more to life. I used to be pretty active averaging a post a day and 10+ comments. But, Reddit lost me now. Of course, not a big deal for them given how little impact the blackout is making in terms of revenue and so on, but this one was necessary for me.

> More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday

Why open again on Wednesday?

Is it possible that the quick spread generative AI is forcing reddit (and twitter) to batten down the hatches?

I think it's tripling down at this point. Announcement, maintaining it during the AMA, and not saying it's going to pass.

Its interesting because I'd say the Endarkening only affected the members of those communities that went dark.

I've gone back to reddit during the dark period and there is still plenty of new tidbits to read. I barely noticed anything unless I specifically went to a community that went dark.

All in all I'd say it was very ineffectual on the face of it. But these things tend to snowball so I'll keep watching this space.

I gladly quit using Reddit over this. The site and its CEO are a mess anyway.

Man....I remember when reddit was fun.

A while ago, I was moderator for a small community of subreddits and decided that the leadership shenanigans had gotten to me, so I left all those subs behind and just became a lurker. Nothing reddit leadership has done has made me regret that choice.

But it's sad, anybody remember Team Periwinkle? Cake day? Getting trophies? Reddit used to distribute their source code, and have real hackers running it. Now it's just another shitty business model looking to be exploited. I get it, Reddit isn't a charity and isn't free to run, it is a business, but now it's just going to be a shit one.

You know what would have still sucked but still ended up working?

"Hey 3rd party app makers, you're part of the Reddit community. Running this site and service is expensive, so here's what's going to happen. In 12 months we're going to be reworking our revenue model and it will impact how you connect to us. Let's start to chat about it now and decide what's best for this part of our community.

Be prepared, we're going to have to figure out how to make money but we want you to be part of the solution. Anything is on the table but here's what we're thinking today:

1. Limit free API access to a cap per day - easier to implement, but will not create revenue for anybody and will cause us to have to build anti-abuse systems.

2. Run more ads. We think we'd probably have to figure out a way for your apps to be part of our ad network. So possible terms of service (TOS) for you might be that you'll have to pass ads through according to some yet to be decided display standard. You won't get any money from it, and it might make your user experience worse. We might consider extending our TOS to also let you run ads in your own apps and mix them in with ours. It's your app, and it would be your decision.

3. Charge for API access. We want to target making $x/million API calls. You would have to figure out how to pay for this. One options is to charge your users a monthly fee and pass it through. Our experience say that while this would reduce your user count, it would also reduce your support load. We'd be open to letting you charge $x+y/million and you keep the $y or perhaps we charge some fee like $x+y and you keep z% percent. On our free site we'd probably still run ads, which would encourage users to your apps for a "premium" experience. There's several models here and we haven't decided yet -- but it could be win-win for everybody who acts as a "portal" into our service. As a show of good faith, we'd probably kill our own organic mobile app to further let you differentiate yours.

4. Some mix of the above, maybe with tiers.

Contact us, we're going to start setting up discussions for the next 2-3 months, make a decision within 6, and then give you 6 months to modify your apps and work out payment methods and so on."

> and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.

Exactly. Reddit holds all the cards. Time after time, no great migration after a "revolt".

> Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season.

The NBA championship just ended and the season is over. It's the least important time of the NBA season.

This is nothing but an annoyance at best for reddit. If things got serious, they'll just take ban the revolt leaders and take over the subs. Frankly, I despise the "power" mods as much as the reddit admins. Hope there is a mass culling of the mods on reddit as these privileged mods are who made reddit unbearable and turned it into a propaganda cesspool.

I’m just annoyed the local community group I primarily use Reddit for is dark. I don’t see why this helps anyone. Reddit is a private company, go someplace else. I think 99% of users don’t care, or don’t care enough to do anything substantial. Just move on.

This point has been discussed to death already. Reddit is extremely reliant on a small percentage of users who moderate and post content. Those are the ones being impacted and complaining the loudest. The majority of users just passively absorb the work of the few.

Not to mention most all subreddits had votes beforehand that were overwhelming in favor of going private or read only. This isn't a small group unilaterally deciding to take reddit down. This is akin to a union holding a vote and overwhelmingly deciding to strike.

But do we actually know that it isnt a small group unilaterally deciding to take reddit down? From all of these threads about reddit recently there is a lot speculatively statements pointing to heavy support of this boycott. But there is never proof provided to support these statements when requested.

What percentage of users actually voted in the polls? If its not a significant portion of the sub-reddit population, was the poll even valid? But a sub-reddit may have still taken action: "90% voted yes... but less than 5% voted" hmm?

I personally dont like the official apps or new.reddit, but I think Im part of the minority. It wouldnt surprise me to find out that most users dont actually care about the API price increase, because they use the default homepage and mobile apps. In that case, this boycott would actually be creating a degraded experience for them and negatively impacting their opinions of the moderators that are complaining and making polls to shut it down.

I really wonder how most people even conceive as what goes into community moderation?

Personally I’ve always thought anybody who would do the amount of free labor Reddit mods do is a stone cold fool - precisely because it is so time consuming and the monetary value is all captured by EvilCorp.

> Reddit is extremely reliant on a small percentage of users who moderate and post content. Those are the ones being impacted and complaining the loudest.

Sooooo why would I care that a small number of Reddit users are complaining?

Because Reddit as you use it every day wouldn’t exist without them.

it keep Reddit usable by deleting the spam you will likely to see.

But not only mods are going to be affected. If you are going to build a bot on Reddit you have now to think twice with the increase pricing cost

You missed the point here entirely.

The work those few do help people like you in ways you might not completely fathom. Reddit doesn't auto-regulate itself as much as we think. It's hard work but a small percentage of people who are paid nothing, and use 3rd-party tools to work best.

A subreddit is a group of private individuals, go someplace else. Just move on.

Reddit is a private company that runs on the donated labor of thousands of people doing moderation and policing.

99% of users rely on that labor. And it isn't a given some other forums will rise to the same level.

This dumb trope of "economics will ensure an equivalent product will appear" is a laissez faire fantasy.

I moved from Twitter to BlueSky and am much happier. Mastodon wasn’t for me. When I log into Twitter now it’s just to see how bad it’s gotten and I log out.

I’m sure it will be similar for Reddit - no clear “winner” at first, but the start of a gradual and irreversible decline for the incumbent.

Pity it's still closed for now.

To my understanding, it would be distributed and virtually independnet from central provider. It would be nice to have something like that for "communities" (slightly different from microblogging or chat/discord)... lemmy seems nice but it's somewhat akin to mastodon where each server is kinda isolated and while you can now federate, searching for communities across the fediverse is not the best experience yet...

At a certain point, some "private company" must be so important that it becomes an essential service. Maybe Reddit isn't at that point yet, but that you're frustrated it's gone suggests that it is important. If an essential service is privatized, then its owners have a huge amount of leverage over how we live our lives and how we engage with technology. For instance, Apple tries to prohibit apps not on the App Store from being used by iPhone owners, who constitute 20% of smartphone users world-wide. That's 50% for specifically the USA.

What if that number was 100%? What if all decent GPS programs only worked on iOS? Could we simply stop using iPhones? At that point it might be too late to protest. Imo, the time to protest is before a company has this reach.

Maybe Reddit isn't that big of a deal. They don't own 100% of all Internet discourse. But I think Reddit matters a good deal, since C++ language evolution is influenced significantly by Reddit conversations (yes, actually). But either way, the argument that Reddit should have total leeway doesn't generalize.

It isn't even close to being so important that it's an essential service, because it is 100% replaceable. It has no technical moat. The only moat it has is the network effect and that can turn on them, as it may very well be in the process of doing.

In my own personal opinionated mental wargaming, with which you are all welcome to disagree, Reddit is literally just a few dozen hours from making that outcome very likely, and the clock is steadily ticking. Wargame out their options if their communities don't budge and the stalemate extends past this week. If Reddit will not back down, they have basically only one other option, which is to lever away the moderator positions for all the private reddits and replace them. If they do, that may superficially work for a while (though IMHO even that is not guaranteed) but the end result would still be the fastest and hardest case of social media evaporative cooling history has ever seen: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...

Moreover, while the technical task of levering away the subreddit moderators is a single SQL query away (more or less), the job of resuscitating those communities is not. Even if we assume that all the non-moderators on reddit just shrug and get back to redditing, Reddit can't possibly find enough moderators of any kind to moderate that amount of content. At this point the wargame branches out into several options Reddit can take to try to solve this with their current personpower, but none of the ones I can come up with will actually, you know, work. (Closest is to try to query the DB for most active users and make them the new moderators, but merely "most active" is actually not a great criterion, and it will correlate closely with "people who got angry and left" so there is a LOOOOOOOT of manual labor in that process. You can just run the SQL query and surprise announce the new moderators but that really won't work either.) As many have pointed out, moderators are providing an awful lot of free labor. Reddit can easily throw that free labor away but they can not just trivially reconstruct it if they do.

As a moderator myself, I have my reasons for doing what I do, in the amount that I do, for free, and I am satisfied with the arrangement. However, if they do lever me off, I will not be lifting a finger for them. I actually won't be all that perturbed about it either... "oh, no, I can't provide free services to your company anymore gosh geewillikers whatever will I do", I know exactly what I will do, which is move on. I've been on the internet for over 25 years. Moving on is part of the deal. Someday I'm sure I'll move on from HN.

So, to follow your advice: go somewhere and find another local group, noone is preventing you from...

If you don’t like it, you’re free to go somewhere else as you rightly point out.

They are moving on. The mods who built the community are leaving, and inviting you to, as you put it, go someplace else.

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