Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

old.reddit.com

1,776 pointsJimmc4141,060 comments

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the Internet, to the rear end of the internet. You killed your babies, man. Antagonising your most loyal users, for what? Bit of cash? Are you guys starving or what??

Man idk. I hope San Francisco is doing good. This is supposed to be the city of hippies and love, but lately not so much good news coming out of there. It really makes me sad to see Reddit explode like this.

its the death of reddit, just like digg before it. And google circles or whatever it was called its been so long. and myspace and friendster and orkut and aol and msn and Usenet and Dubsmash and vine and literally more sites than Wikipedia fits on one page

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_netw...

Funny i was part of not one of these. B/c every one of these were full of social media zombie sheeple along with gamers, dorks, geeks and techies. Decent, fun people you find IRL. Not arguing / chatting online.

I was thinking about the connection between the death of digg and now the death of reddit. It's similar that they destroyed engagement by not responding to feedback. Social communities can be forgiving for missteps with acknowledgement and accountability, but Reddit seems to have just shifted its focus from being a community space into a data product.

Had an account for 14 years that I plan on 'deleting', whatever that means with the fast and loose intentions around customer data that reddit seems to have now.

This is more like the death of Twitter - highly exaggerated and no alternatives. Nothing changes.

Lemmy is relatively thriving. I doubt this will be the "Great migration", but if Lemmy was able to hold enough users, the next time Reddit makes a big mistake, Lemmy will be a viable alternative by then.

Just tried Lemmy.. are you serious?

Killing geese that lay Golden Eggs is old and enduring Silicon valley tradition.

Maybe, but in this case there was no golden eggs, Reddit had users but no way of making any money out of it other than by selling the data (which is exactly what they seem to be doing now).

I've seen a lot of companies go far by "selling the dream" instead of actually booking rev. If this continues to go badly reddit won't have rev or a dream. At least with users making content other users want there is always a chance.

Reddit is a forum. It should not be hard to make money selling ads on the most popular forum on the internet.

Hosting costs should be jack shit, developing costs should be pretty low, etc. Reddit must be funking up in a pretty fundamental way to not be making money.

Easy to say from the outside, isn't it? You think they just never thought of that...

It is easy to say from the outside.. but everyone else seems to make it work.

What makes reddit so special it shouldn't be able to afford to pay for itself? It doesn't make sense. Every social media company with this kind of massive userbase appears to be able to make good money, why not reddit?

Sure, maybe they cant make Facebook levels of cash - but 10th most visited website, with what should be low hosting costs (mostly text), should be more than sufficient. If they can't make it work, they'd need good reason to explain what makes them different, IMO.

It's easy to correctly say that they're not using 2000 employees to keep the site running.

I'm sure they've thought of keeping costs low, and I'm sure they could lower costs by a lot and know it. They choose not to.

They're not forced into their current path.

But it makes sense when you look at that VC money. Just being profitable would be a failure. Chase billions of revenue or die trying.

Or to put it a different way, if reddit spent $100M a year on employees and offices and $100M a year on servers, they would have amazing profit margins already.

I don't think you work in large enough company. Everyone always does this type of napkin math, and then hand waves away a lot of the details. I mean, why does Meta need 70K employees to run three apps?

I'm sure the VCs first playbook was to start cracking down on expenses, since it's typically easier to get results from than improving revenue....

Meta is very different than Reddit on complexity, scale and also that it is profitable

Meta is one of the clearest examples of a company that is spending most of their budget outside their main product, so I'm not sure what you're trying to show.

You saw their VR division, right?

They aren't spending most their budget on VR. What do you think the budget is for the rest of the company? Far as I can tell with a 10 second glance at their financials: 60B year operating expense vs 10B year in their VR spending?

Good thing I didn't say that.

VR is just one of the places the money is going.

They didn’t, in case you aren’t in the industry of VC, they all want to go big or to go bust. There’s no culture of reasonably sustainable business model

I would have happily paid a few bucks a month for Reddit premium if they had decided to tie api access to that.

They don’t care about the old guard of mostly geeks and techies. With Covid and moments of Twitter/tumblr exodus, Reddit has picked up a ton of users that just want generic social media.

It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.

Maybe I'm imagining things but i feel like the content on reddit is very regular, average and safe lately. Like you can't be werid in the comments.

It's going to be even more regular, average, and safe when they block NSFW subreddits in the API.

Will it? Who will be using the API at all going forward?

My home page turned into this at some point in the past, after which I unsubscribed from a bunch of dopamine based subs and subscribed to more substantial subs of my interest. That really helped, but over time the rot set in again as a few subs grew in size and turned into a meaningless dopamine fest (probably fuelled by karma hungry bots / farms).

Based on this experience I won't be surprised at all if your prediction became true. It is as if that's the natural end state and it requires constant effort (org, mods, community) to steer away from it.

This was exactly my experience too. Their app is also optimized toward that end, ad-riddled, laggy, and privacy-invasive (the green online dot, bombarded my pi-hole with requests). Their web is the same, just pushing for the app and slow. I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.

> I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.

This is the way.

The constant of reddit is that user protests come in waves again and again. If this wave will be over soon, the "geeks and techies" will be focused on polishing the alternatives. Even if this wave doesn't break reddits back, the next wave of user protests will have polished alternatives (due to the current influx of users and their demands) with way less friction ready.

Yep, Reddit an alternative to "every other shitty forum on the web" but now they're the big poop.

All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.

    All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS 
    for developing third party apps,

Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully?

It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned.

One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads.

That's just a wild guess on my part, though.

Can you really make that much money with behavior data? If that was the case, wouldn't we see more sites with few ads?

I believe ads bring in the vast majority of money, behavior data helps ad targeting and can maybe sometimes bring in insignificant amounts as well.

    Can you really make that much money with behavior data?

Good question. I don't know if companies sell behavior data directly or if it just helps them to target ads better and therefore theoretically improve conversion rates.

> Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully?

Telegram does this, and I think they're successful with it.

Telegram? But there's no ads in the official app - are you saying they require them in third-party apps in order to make them a worse experience and push people back to the official one/make money from them if they don't? That'd be.. interesting, but I think I assume you meant something else, not Telegram?

There are ads in the official apps - they appear similar to regular messages in large channels (telegram's few-to-many/broadcasting offering)

> So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads.

Yeah, and this is them being unreasonable. The insistence on all the large platforms on doing that even when all of their users revolt is childish and killed a lot of platforms already.

So easy to fake those conditions, though, and then you’re right back where you started only with a fun new game of whackamole to play.

Fully agree:

First exempt personal paid premium accounts from the api limitations & ads. Then the goal is to benefit from the already existing and thriving 3rd party app ecosystem. Make your API serve ads in non-premium API calls and profit share the ad revenue with 3rd party app developers. Optionally allow 3rd party apps to remove ads (paid API calls) and show their own ads, however make your ads more attractive & lucrative for 3rd party developers.

In the future I would also like to see that subreddits can gain control of the ads shown in their subreddits (subreddits already understand their audience far better than reddit corporate ever will). Then eventually profit share with moderator teams and content submitter, basically copy youtubes model to incentivize content submitters & good moderation.

This wouldn't solve the problem of their API being used to scrape Reddit to train LLMs.

Then have different terms for different purposes. Charge LLM trainers and request that 3rd party apps show ads.

How would Reddit be able to tell the difference?

Users don't browse all of Reddit, and they don't browse from wildly varying IP addresses, from multiple ips simultaneously, or from datacenters.

Why not instead charge 3rd party apps for the API and let the 3rd party apps show their own adds to help pay for the cost of the API?

Or just require a Reddit Gold sub to any user who wants to use another app.

Indeed. The fact that they didn't do this and the extremely high cost of API access is good evidence that they wanted to kill 3rd part apps outright.

It's not even about not just "liking" them, like if it's only about resistance to changes.

My way of browsing reddit on desktop is to scroll and open lots of stuff I find interesting in tabs. With new reddit this is "holding it wrong" I guess, because that amount of tabs absolutely destroy the performance of my browser. Scroll is janky etc. And multiple subreddits have features and stuff that never got ported to new reddit, making new reddit a subpar experience as well.

As for the app, I just can't figure out what to press. I want a list of posts, and pressing them to take me to the comments. It keeps injecting other stuff everywhere, though. Avatars, coins, huge ads, lots of posts from other communities I don't want to see in my list, defeats the purpose of following a subreddit. I have to use the app once in a while to post content as other apps aren't allowed to upload videoes etc, and it's a confusing experience every time.

Reddit is trying to flip loss to profit. They have a wealth of data for AI models and AI is going to be big. They are trying to cash in on it.

What they should have done was make a free model for general API use like most companies to develop against.

And after that tier the model accordingly. Data is expensive, even though it is getting cheaper per byte we are producing more of it per volume.

I don’t get the AI angle. The data already exists in dumps. How does restricting access to the API stop that?

Sure, you don’t get access to new data but I doubt anybody cares about that given that there’s 15 years of existing data already. Especially if they kill all the interesting subs and turn Reddit into cat picture central.

True, but old data is not what companies want since it is readily available and probably already in models. Reddit produces more data than any other social media website in the text and picture format. I think Tiktok is relatively close but with videos.

Reddit is still also open to indexing, so the data is still currently available with no authentication required to anyone interested in crawling it. The training data for AI theory doesn't hold water.

The other thing to also consider is that Reddit funding is partially attached to investments. Investments for Reddit and many other investment based companies dried up over the government pulling back interest rates to deal with inflation.

reddit has been around for nearly 20 years, the AI thing just seems like a hype train they're trying to jump on to.

Hypetrain like crypto. But AI has potential unlike crypto. Not part of the hypetrain as you really need to get it behave properly. The biggest loss in AI right now is the data needed to for an AI model to work. Not only does it need source data but it needs to store its model, those models can be MASSIVE. Which means expensive, to make it accessible you need to store it in memory... to make it better it needs to be faster... faster larger memory is $$$.

All this suffering so some jackass can get his third comma.

Reddit would be better for everyone as an open source nonprofit.

Reminds me of Russ Hanneman's obsession with the three commas and the 'Tres Comas' tequila from HBO'S Silicon Valley.

I'm hindsight, it's crazy how accurate that show was in portraying a lot of the VC and Silicon Valley folks in general.

It was the same with Digg and Slashdot.

Unless there's an realistic alternative to Reddit that users are actually moving to - then no it's not.

There are loads of reddit alternatives. The only thing reddit has going for it is network effect.

Post a few, maybe I'll switch.

Given the number of blacked out subs that link to a Discord, it seems like an alternative is already there. For sure it's not exactly the same, but it seems to serve a similar purpose for a lot of users.

Yea Discord is not an alterative.

In practice it's serving as one though. For sure it's not a 1-1 replacement, but alternatives often aren't. Reddit doesn't work exacctly the same as Digg, and neither work like a PHPBB forum.

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but:

> To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this?

Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. So people dont mind it and probably never experienced the old layout. Additionally, the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2]). That also tells me that a huge amount of users are perfectly fine with the reddit app.

So, knowing those basic facts, is it at all surprising that reddit is reacting this way? They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy. The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care.

disclaimer: old.reddit user of 13 years and only recently switched to apollo from alien blue. just calling it like i see it.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828 [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

> They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy.

But there's a very simple way to do that... sit down with people, figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like. There's multitudes of ways this whole thing could've been solved, they clearly don't wont to solve it.

Paid API is NOT going to make reddit profitable, especially at this price. It's funny to me that anyone actually even believes that. Hosting costs are not the problem, they have 2000 employees. For a site that can't get any feature fully functioning, has one of the worst ads in the business that noone wants to buy and is almost fully maintained by community for free, it's quite a lot of employees.

100% agreement with you here. You have one of the first logical arguments for any push back.

> figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like

Absolutely, I was hoping that would happen when I saw the first Apollo thread(s) a few weeks ago. But Christian took this very personally, and he decided to take his toys and go home. reddit is not at all innocent here. They definitely had many missteps, but I think both sides did. And now that talks have broken down, reddit has little reason to come back to the table.

> Paid API is NOT going to make reddit profitable, especially at this price. It's funny to me that anyone actually even believes that. Hosting costs are not the problem, they have 2000 employees. For a site that can't get any feature fully functioning, has one of the worst ads in the business that noone wants to buy and is almost fully maintained by community for free, it's quite a lot of employees.

This is the heart of it for me personally. reddit has much bigger problems than just the API hosting/pricing. Drawing the line in the sand about the API and profitability doesnt make a lot of sense. Having 2000 employees (why?), hosting images and videos (value?), nfts (why?) and not following through on features is their actual downfall. They pivoted away from their core competency -- content aggregation and easy to use forums. I think they will survive though.

Why shouldn't he have taken it personally? He got 30 days notice from Reddit that they will change the pricing in a way likely to kill his business? With more advance notice he could have investigated ways to adapt his business or tried to lobby politely for a different pricing model. With this short notice he basically was forced to shut down.

I do not fault Christian at all for taking it personally, Reddit handled it very poorly.

And to add insult to the injury, u/spez was caught red handed lying about the conversation and what took place, and then when that surfaced, doubled down.

> With more advance notice he could have investigated ways to adapt his business or tried to lobby politely for a different pricing model.

It seems insane on Reddit's part. If someone's referring that much traffic to you, choosing to cut them off entirely instead of negotiating monetization of that channel seems irrational.

Then to take an adversarial stance against public outcry as well...Reddit really "hates teh fans."

Tech leaders really are starting to out themselves as Nouveau Riche Narcissists instead of the visionaries they pretend to be.

> But Christian took this very personally, and he decided to take his toys and go home.

I mean wouldn't you? He's built an app that brings him a decent income, he can work on it full time, he based his career on that application. What reaction would you expect out of f.e. youtubers when youtube made it suddenly unable for them to sustain themselves? I mean basing your life/income/business on another business is never a good idea, but this is how a big chunk of the world works. I think he has all the rights to be angry about it.

Im not sure what I would do. But I do know that if I reacted similarly, by posting all of the private meetings and communications to the public web, where I knew a hornet's nest would be stirred up (his subreddit obviously), I can't expect much of a relationship with reddit to survive after the fact.

I can understand how he feels, but he had to know that this would happen.

> I think he has all the rights to be angry about it.

Yup, I totally agree, and I sympathize with him. Hes in a bad spot, but unfortunately, theres not much he can do anymore unless reddit changes their mind.

To be fair from what I understand he only posted the private conversation because Huffman was intentionally lying about him to a large audience and he was forced to defend himself. I'm not saying he's handled this amazingly but Reddit absolutely dug their own hole in this case.

I don't think even Alastair Campbell could teach them effective crisis management.

I think this definitely could have been handled much more tactfully on both sides. Im not sure which large audience you are referring to, but Christian references a call with some moderators that seems to have sparked all of this[1]. Prior to the horrendous AMA, spez hadn't posted on reddit for 11 months. Christian was definitely the one to bring it to the public eye. Either way, both sides should share some of the blame.

I think this was definitely a case of the little guy not knowing how to navigate such a volatile situation. Some people might even find it pretty unprofessional to joke about reddit buying him out for half-priced at $10mil during an important discussion. Which, btw, would have shutdown the app also, except with a large windfall. How much of that was actually a joke vs testing the waters?

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

Christian’s one dude. And he’s a dev. Most of us here are devs (or at least have technical backgrounds) yeah? Ok now imagine any of us get on a phone call to negotiate terms and defend our work on a business call with another idiot (spez). Yeah…

So you’re right neither side handled it the best. But Reddit has no excuse. They have a team of business so-called experts and have resources to handle this correctly. At this point it’s clear that they are intentionally choosing to go this route of being hostile to 3rd party apps and alienating their users.

Considering the importance of the negotiations for Apollo’s developer he could have considered hiring a middleman for the call, that would probably have prevented some misunderstandings

> Im not sure what I would do. But I do know that if I reacted similarly, by posting all of the private meetings and communications to the public web, where I knew a hornet's nest would be stirred up (his subreddit obviously), I can't expect much of a relationship with reddit to survive after the fact.

I mean, in his message he said as much. But at that point, r/spez was slandering him anyhow, so he knew he was out either way.

Might as well set the record straight first.

> Yup, I totally agree, and I sympathize with him. Hes in a bad spot, but unfortunately, theres not much he can do anymore unless reddit changes their mind.

It's a hard lesson that's been learned over and over. If you don't control your platform, ultimately you're at the mercy of the people who do.

Something iOS and Android app creators, and Windows application developers have had to learn over the years.

> It's a hard lesson that's been learned over and over. If you don't control your platform, ultimately you're at the mercy of the people who do.

The lesson hasn't been learned at all - most of us depend on systems we do not control, and show no solidarity when one of us is debased with an arbitrary and capricious decision.

> private meetings and communications

Private meetings aren’t private after the CEO posts a completely mischaracterized version of said meeting already. Canada is also a one-party consent state, so he was fully in his right to do everything he did.

> I can't expect much of a relationship with reddit to survive after the fact.

It’s funny that this is the straw that caused you to think the relationship was over, and not the obvious and easily disproven libel that the CEO kept doubling down on.

Anyone that looked at the situation objectively could see who was clearly in the wrong, and it wasn’t Christian as you keep implying. Reddit completely torpedoed their relationship at every single turn and at this point has quadrupled down on it.

> posts a completely mischaracterized version of said meeting already

Do you have a link to that? Ive been looking. I can only find Christian's account of the events [1]

> one-party consent state, so he was fully in his right to do everything he did

And I fully support his decision to do so. Ive even done the same in Japan when I was against a very hostile CEO. But posting publicly moves into very different realms (also not illegal) outside of just recording discussions.

> as you keep implying

In fact, I dont. I keep acknowledging blame on both sides of the equation. Go back and objectively read the discussion. Ive been much more critical of reddit. Emotions are pretty high. And those are much easier to use in discussions than deferring to unknown facts. So, I understand the weird flip-flopping of down and up votes.

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

> But posting publicly moves into very different realms (also not illegal) outside of just recording discussions.

It really does not, even if it hurts spez's (and your) feelings.

> Ive been much more critical of reddit.

You literally pretend things they did didn't happen. You can say you've been critical, but you have pretty much shifted the blame entirely on Christian the whole time.

> It’s funny that this is the straw that caused you to think the relationship was over

Are you kidding? Christian posted in public to reddit about his failed negotiations. That was definitely a scorch the earth policy. reddit and/or spez had not posted about Apollo prior to that.

> Apollo

> Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.

> Prices we released work out to one dollar a month per user; if Apollo doesn’t put effort forth, it hits three dollars per month.

> (As mentioned in Mod Tool section above) Pushshift will come back online for mod tools within a week or two.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

Are you kidding? It took literal seconds to find.

Thanks for the link. That definitely adds some extra context to the situation. I don’t subscribe there; so, that’s an easy one to miss. It got buried pretty good.

But I admit it’s an important one. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it pop up on popular last week.

Not to mention he has another business which can support him. So why would he take on a massive liability risk to try to keep it going when he can afford to just walk away?

they were going to force him to pay 2million a month starting in a month. what else could he do other than "take his toys and go home" which is a very reductive statement.

they could have served ads to the api. they could have had some profit sharing agreement. any routes it could have gone but they chose the most antagonistic one.

"Core" user base != tyranny of the majority. Alienating a huge amount of clearly passionate reddit users in favour of Joe schmoe browsing on the train home sounds like a dangerous decision - reddit sti needs all those people who provide the content people browse for, etc.

In any case, at this point the bigger issue for a lot of people is just the total disrespect reddit has publicly announced, repeatedly, towards its users. That some people don't care about this disrespect doesn't make it nonpresent.

> reddit sti needs all those people who provide the content people browse for, etc

Seems like they are betting their future on commercial content producers. If you're on /r/all a lot of the content is already reposts, disguised corporate posts, professional reshufflers and karma hoarders, etc.

I think it's also worth noting that the actual contributing members on message boards is a tiny minority[1][2][3]. Activity appears to follow a Pareto distribution. The members that not only contribute, but regularly contribute quality content is a minority within that minority.

The vast majority is scrolling and blowing air out their nose, maybe voting, maybe very occasionally leaving a comment. From a monetization sense, it may look tempting to focus on retaining that passive minority, but what risks happening is a dead sea effect where it enters a cycle of contributors leaving because contributions are deteriorating in quality. That can be nearly impossible to reverse.

[1] https://jennchen.com/blog/business/were-all-lurkers/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222436334_The_Top_F...

[3] https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000129213/10112828...

Yes of course. And that tiny minority of course shares your preferences about UI design.

That minority makes the different demands on UI, since they use the site in a different way from the passive users.

Case in point, if you're rarely ever contributing it doesn't really even matter if the entire website crashes when you paste into the rich text editor so you lose everything you've written. Which I guess is why this bug is still not properly fixed on all browsers after being broken as hell for 4 years, including for long times on Chrome(?!) [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1

I think this is one of the big reasons TikTok has a completely separate app for creators (CapCut)

It allows them to continue to add creation features and a creators experience, without bogging down the main app consumers are using to mindlessly scroll while pooping.

Wait, is that why that awful editor locks up on me? Pasting? I always just give up on using it after it locks up and hadn't done it enough times to make the connection.

Perhaps this is also one of the reasons Reddit doesn't take action against spammers and repost bots that take popular posts and comments from <time> ago and report them verbatim later and get thousands and thousands of upvotes.

Nice way to fake content creation long enough to shove your IPO out the door and exit before the house of cards starts falling apart.

Let's hope so :) I now actively want Reddit to blow up.

Ah yes, all redditors are equal, but some are more equal than others. Content contributors just matter more.

And if joe schmoe browsing the subreddit wants to vote in favor of the blackout, you're naturally gonna count that as a vote of support, even though they're not a content contributor, right?

Why, how would you count it? Because either they matter, in which case they support the blackout more than they do not as the votes have overwhelmingly demonstrated, or if you think they don't then who is left to pin the "most people like things the way they are" claim onto?

It would be pretty hard to do a fair comparison between the users of the Reddit app and Apollo.

Accessing reddit.com on a mobile will bombard you with pop ups to get you to access through the official app, while Apollo would only be found via word of mouth or actively seeking an alternative.

Review score average might be a better, where they're pretty on par in that regard, but again hard to tell if that's an indication of each app or a review of the content served by reddit itself.

I don't disagree with your line of thinking here.

But the big difference you're missing is that the kind of users that use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users.

Sure the Reddit app sits in its position in the app stores, but you ask most frequent users on reddit, and they all say they transitioned to a third party app.

So my point is i see things like the app as entry points for new users, and then those users either churn or end up transitioning to third party apps to make their experience better.

> use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users

Are they?

> they all say they transitioned to a third party app

Have they? Who asked?

Im inclined to believe a lot of these things. I used to work for a large network of forums in the late 00s. We had a lot of traffic but didnt require 2000 employees (literally only 5 dev to manage 250mil monthly pageviews). In all reality we might been reddit if we got lucky, but we didnt. Oh well. So, I tend to side with the users, but I do understand the behaviors in play. Im not trying to be argumentative just to blindly support reddit, but so many people are just throwing out stats as if they are correct with zero proof. Its almost impossible to have an honest conversation when the facts are being made up on the spot. This whole situation has become so emotional.

"the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2])."

Lots of people probably install the official app, just to try it out, but that doesn't mean they actually use it.

I installed it myself a long time ago, but I never use it because it's garbage compared to Boost (my preferred 3rd party app).

Youre absolutely correct. Thats why I didnt mention install counts. Apple doesnt publish those numbers, and I didnt want to make any assumptions about them.

But I am comfortable assuming that those reviews come from users that did install and use both apps. The opinions seems to be very positive for both.

I do find it interesting that Apollo had such a steep popularity increase in the last couple of weeks[1].

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-store/979274575/statistic...

Many people reviewing the Reddit app will be reviewing Reddit the platform, not the app as a means of accessing the platform.

Im curious about your source on that one, but let's suppose that that statement is true. Couldn't you say the same for Apollo?

So, the large amount of positive reviews for the mobile clients also speak positively for the platform. Is that what you are theorizing?

Just anecdotally from my experience glancing at reviews occasionally on apps like that, that have a physical presence or a website. In the latter case I think it's inevitable and completely fair, the app can be the primary way you interact with it, how you discovered it, how someone else may discover it, and a review of the thing itself might be perfectly useful.

I think it's less likely to happen with Apollo if at all, because those users are clearly aware of, and even have front of mind in the moment, the distinction between Reddit the platform and Apollo the client. The number of people who discovered Reddit via Apollo must surely be extremely small?

You may be right, but keep in mind that the comparison with Apollo isn't a fair one. There are many third party Reddit clients. Red Reader (which I use), Reddit Is Fun, Stealth, Infinity, Dawn, and many more. You'd have to combine all of those. You may still not reach Reddit's official app's numbers, but it is probably not a negligible percentage of Reddit's userbase.

There was the old adage for Excel that:

- 100% of people view spreadsheets

- 10% of people use something like SUM() or similar

- 1% of people write VB macros

You can create a product which works well for the _average_ viewer, but if it sucks for the 1% of 10% (maybe mods or contributors in this analogy), you're going to create a bad user experience for everyone.

Loads of Excel users aren't really doing "spreadsheets" except in the sense that it's Excel and that's a spreadsheet software, so arguably this is a spreadsheet. The same way arguably if I type this novel into Visio now that's a diagram. Like, is "An Oak Tree" a sculpture?

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

For many Excel users it's like computerised graph paper, they can write stuff in boxes, maybe use it to make a calendar, they can colour the boxes in - yes, they can do arithmetic on the boxes, but many of them are surprised to find out that's what it is actually for.

The point is that those people wouldn't be using Excel if it didn't support the advanced usage. They would be using some other tool, that supported it.

And yes, even if all they want is to paint some squares by hand.

Just as a side note: > It was once barred by Australian officials from entering the country as "vegetation".[13][14] Craig-Martin was forced to inform them that it was really a glass of water. He said, "It was of course a wonderfully funny incident, particularly because it extended into 'real life' the discussion about belief and doubt, and fact and fiction I was addressing in the work."

I'm somehow really let down by the guy's failure to commit to the bit. It's not an artwork unless he commits to the bit… far as I can tell, he should have gone along with it as the customs officials were doing. What a killjoy :)

The "bit" is Transubstantiation, a key Miracle of the Catholic faith. Catholics believe that the Eucharist blessing, a ritual often performed in Churches on a Sunday, literally transforms the bread and wine - they aren't just symbols, they literally are now Christ's Flesh and Christ's Blood. Now, you may observe that, just as "An Oak Tree" looks, and in every way seems exactly like a glass of water, the bread and wine still looks and in every way seems exactly like bread and wine, but Catholicism teaches that nevertheless they are the Body and Blood of Jesus.

(Roman) Catholics who care will be told this is because all observable properties are just incidental whereas the substantial nature changed, just imperceptibly.

Now, the exact details will vary outside Roman Catholicism, but you should generally expect that either they're deliberately vague (Eastern Orthodox and Anglican traditions) or they have the same sort of dubious philosophical out, and that's what this artwork is about.

So, it's not really necessary to the "bit" that you insist it's actually An Oak Tree at customs. Catholicism works around this question (obviously it's not OK to import thousand year old flesh or blood without a very difference license from bread and wine) because the bread and wine are just bread and wine up until the ritual is performed, you could do the same by just deciding a different glass of water on a shelf is "An Oak Tree" to skip the customs check.

Apollo is also ios-only

I get what you're saying, and somewhat agree, but Reddit has shown they're willing to fill their own communities with bot posts to pad their numbers. What makes you think they're not buying reviews?

Full disclosure, I use the main Reddit app. I don't think that I've ever installed a different app. That being said, I think it's actually pretty crazy that Apollo is #10 (in News). It's not clear that being 8 spots higher is that much of an accomplishment considering the site itself is constantly pestering you to install it, and the Reddit app can be used completely for free vs. the Apollo app requiring you to pay (which may by itself explain the .1 difference in reviews). Actually, I just went to the AppStore to read the bad reviews, and sorted by "Most Critical", and from a very short cursory glance it seems that most of the new bad reviews are from people who are angry that they bought a lifetime subscription and the app is now shutting down. It's kind of impressive that it is still at 4.7, honestly. But more importantly, I think this also means that the 4.8 vs. 4.7 comparison isn't necessarily representative of the sentiment a month ago.

I am in basic agreement with everyone that the core app sucks. It just means that I use Reddit less in general instead of going out of my way to fix their problem for them by finding an app that works. That is another failure case that isn't really considered: there's a bunch of opportunity cost just in people who have a bad experience and then switch to YouTube or whatever.

> and the Reddit app can be used completely for free vs. the Apollo app requiring you to pay

I've been using Apollo for free for years, you don't need to pay for it.

they seem to be cooking the books wrt the reviews. there are a ton of one word app reviews that are 5 star

Apollo does not require you to pay.

But note that it’s up from #30. So this debacle is inflating the importance of Apollo way beyond what it normally would be, at least with regards to its placement in this chart.

Not that that’s a good look for Reddit, to throw Apollo under the bus, then to find the bus they threw them under was Reddit, and it threw it completely off course.

It is mind boggling that they could not anticipate this response. That memo they sent out after this and which got leaked was such an example of poor leadership, it would really be a shame if this doesn’t lead to some changes there.

> keep the main, core userbase happy

I think you're mistaking the apathetic hordes who don't contribute much with the power users, power posters, and moderators. I consider the latter to be the "core userbase". Not the big numbers that look good to an mba. If a team built a reddit replacement, they would want that 0.1%, not the rest.

> I consider the latter to be the "core userbase"

How do you measure this? I see this a lot, but no one can ever quantify it. Is it just a feeling that people that make most of the content use old.reddit and 3rd party apps? Are we just hoping thats the case?

Or maybe the "power users" are constantly changing or are actually corporate accounts? On a massive site where moderators get to decide what content makes it to the masses, it might make sense that the corporate/commercial users are the "power users." But Id have to put on my tinfoil hat to believe that.

This isn't a good take because the evidence is contextual. Joe Average users typically download the reddit app because they are forced to or face the dysfunctional mobile site. I watched my own partner do it. She doesnt like the app or care for reddit at all, its simply next generation facebook style walled garden garbage, including reddits fucking terrible video hosting format.

The business has abandoned its once core userbase in favour of cheap eyeballs. It's sheer modern tech laziness and an embarassment to the "innovation" culture that it lazily still staples itself to.

> including reddits fucking terrible video hosting format

Yeah, include "why did Reddit insists on the cost of self-hosting videos if they didn't have the competence or the money to do it correctly?" on my list of reasons the CEO is an idiot.

> I watched my own partner do it. She doesnt like the app or care for reddit at al

But did she leave a review? I dont mean to diminish your anecdote; I was strictly referring to public stats. Millions of people download and eventually ignore the app, but clearly enough are downloading it and having positive feelings about it. Thats how we got to this situation.

> has abandoned its once core userbase in favour of cheap eyeballs

I agree. It really sucks, but it is happening.

Who knows how many of those reviews are fake or low effort attempts to make the "leave a review" prompt stop appearing

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-019-09706-9...

[I don't have stats, but one anecdote:]

I was originally a desktop user of Reddit, before the redesign. At some point I also installed Sync Pro to read occasionally on mobile, but it wasn't my primary interface to Reddit.

I'm generally pretty open to redesigns. I don't have the dislike of change, and am ok with taking a little while to adapt to something new. Its usually an investmet in a better approach (e.g. MS Office introducing the Ribbon). So when the Reddit update happened I wasn't one of those people who rigorously stuck to Old Reddit - I just waited until I got used to it.

What actually happened is that I stopped using Reddit online at all. Everything was so slow. It just became a chore to read threads. I didn't make this decision consciously, it's just what happened over time.

It's crazy the amount of people that seemed to be straining to support Reddit, it's almost, suspicious.

Stats? Come on. Reddit pesters every mobile user agent to install their shitty app every time. It's like Google pushing Chrome. How many people install their malware just to stop getting nagged about it? People even say they made reddit web bad on purpose to drive people to the app.

Show those users better third party apps with no ads and then ask them which they like more.

Why do you deserve to have no ads? Reddit isn't a community service.

I do think that for moderators, they could have some special app to help them do their jobs easier, but for regular users, meh, the ads are easy enough to scroll past, like in other social media outfits.

I also don't agree that the mobile app is shitty.

Because ads are worse than cancer. The fact companies are allowed to jam them into your eyeballs without consent is absolutely ludicrous.

how so? I just slide by them and move on with my life.

It's absolutely mind-blowing to me the entitlement people have thinking they should get things for free.

Oh please. They're the ones who are entitled. They literally think they can sell our attention to advertisers. It's not theirs to sell.

They chose to have a free site. Don't want to give things away for free? Charge for access then.

This is must be a parody, right?

No, they chose to have a site funded by ads. If you don't want to be advertised to, get off Reddit.

No.

The shareholder need their profits!! won't someone think of their needs?

the site isn't free, the cost of using it is the ads.

We're under no obligation to look at ads.

Correct.

Bro, you're walking into their property and getting pissed at their decorations. They need to make money, and Americans at least have shown that they vastly prefer to pay for things and services by looking at ads, rather than by paying with money.

If you don't want ads, pay for the privilege and get reddit premium. If you don't want to pay and you can't handle ads and you refuse to use an adblocker but MUST keep visiting for some reason, then stop whining - you've directly refused every solution.

We're walking into nothing. Our user agents are making a request to their HTTP server. It's not our faults if it replies with a free web page. All they have to do is return 402 Payment Required.

But they want that mass media appeal that comes with giving things out for free, don't they? Guess they'll have to deal with it. If they send ads along with their free pages, we'll delete them. I used to rip out the ads from the magazines too. Same thing.

> If they send ads along with their free pages, we'll delete them.

IDK who "we" is in this sentence, but if you mean "the average internet user" then you're wrong. There are ads on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, PornHub... No significant percentage of the population has "deleted" these apps or websites because of ads.

It means people like me, like the users of this site. It also means people who know me personally because I make sure to tell them about uBlock Origin and install it on every browser I use. You bet they like the ad-free web.

I can't help everyone but I try.

I don't know who "we" is either. Which means I'm just extra confused by the large number of ad-blocker-blockers that exist on the internet. I mean, what disobedience surface are they even targeting? Literally nobody blocks ads, it's an urban legend! xD

> Why do you deserve to have no ads?

Because my attention belongs to me. Exclusively. It's not yours. It's not reddit's. It's not Google's. It doesn't belong to anyone other than I, certainly not a corporation. It's not a currency that can be used to pay for services. They do not have the right to sell it off to the highest bidder.

I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped: basic human dignity. I don't consent to it. I don't consent to their forcible injection of their silly little brands and taglines into my mind. As far as I'm concerned it's mind rape and anything I do to kill ads is legitimate justified self defense. I couldn't care less how much money they lose either, find another business model or disappear.

That is an absurd and frankly insulting comparison to make.

Rape is an act of physical violence, and you're arguing about a small price to use a free service.

Oh is it? Your mind isn't part of your body? In civilized society, people can't even touch you without your consent. Why do they have complete freedom to inject disinformation and spam into your mind with complete impunity? I won't accept it.

I don't know about you but I consider my mind even more sacred than my body. It's not some advertiser's playground for them to spam their bullshit with complete impunity. I will resist that abuse. I don't need to "deserve" it. I'm not alone either. It's hard enough to cope with attention deficit without these spammers around.

So don't use reddit.

I don't have to abstain from using reddit. They're the ones who need to stop sending me free web pages. If they care so much about getting paid, all they need to do is have their web servers return 402 Payment Required and only resume service after payment is confirmed.

Their advertising bullshit though? They're knowingly sending me stuff for free. They chose to do it. I won't be guilted into accepting abuse based on that. They did so hoping I was gonna look at the ads but the truth is I'm under exactly zero obligation to actually do that. So I won't.

I can only hope that your level of sanity is more commonly adopted because judging by the replies to you it appears many have just given into the machine. Unwitting servants of Moloch.

Wow wtf. You have some serious issues. First, I agree that your attention belongs to you, and you are 100% in your right to go elsewhere. Reddit is not forcing you to view their ads.

But second, you are unhinged if you think this is a reasonable comment:

> I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped

Wow

I'm glad you agree. I don't really mind if you think I'm unhinged. I don't mind the downvotes either. The exact same moral issue of consent applies. As a human being, I deserve to be able to consent. It's part of what it means to have dignity. I don't consent to my mind being violated, it's that simple. If that makes me unhinged, so be it.

If you want to discuss the matter further and hopefully understand why I said what I said, I'm happy to do it. Provided you approach the matter seriously without name calling.

Wait.. you can downvote? Sorry, Reddit expat exploring other sites and all I see on HN is upward-pointing triangles.

Welcome, it's very nice here. You need karma > 500 to downvote, you can't downvote direct replies to your own posts and you can't see how many votes other people's posts have received. It's pretty reasonable in my opinion, downvoting is much more rare on HN in my experience. I think it's best to just ignore things instead of voting.

What's unhinged about it? It's the same principle, the only difference is severity of the violation.

Of course being raped is miles ahead of the weak form of mind control attempt that is advertising, but it's the same damn scale.

>the only difference is severity of the violation.

the difference in severity is huuuuuuge

Just FYI it's impossible for me to read this without mentally running s/huu/yuu/ first

The moment you log into someone else website, your attention no longer belongs to you, FYI. Not sure who told you it should work differently.

> The moment you log into someone else website, your attention no longer belongs to you

It absolutely does. What nonsense. My cognitive functions don't belong to some corporation just because I visited their website. They are inalienable.

i wish more people would stick up for themselves like this, and i hope you inspire others to do so. i think this spamming into the mind actually contributes to this mindset where the person sticks up for that abuse itself rather than their mind and self. like a stockholm syndrome. thanks mate. keep on truckin'!

Thank you. The reason I go out of my way to post my opinions on this matter is I discovered I wasn't alone over my years here on HN. I've interacted with like-minded people many times here, discussed these matters plenty of times and refined my thoughts. Plenty of what I said in this thread, I learned from talking to others here.

It's really difficult to say these things because people come at you to call you entitled, unhinged, a freeloader, downvote you. I always say it anyway. I hope it inspires others too. We're not alone.

You are choosing to use an ad based service. No one is forcing you to view reddit. Your attention belongs to you and you can choose to direct it where you want. You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads. Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”. If you don’t like penises, but consent to have sex with a cis man, it isn’t rape because he has a penis that you don’t like but knew he had. It isn’t rape because you want to have sex with anyone and everyone and want none of them to have a penis. The answer is not that no one is allowed to have a penis, the answer is for you to stop having sex with people with penises. It isn’t the world’s responsibility to only be populated with people you want to have sex with, it is your responsibility to only consent to have sex with people you actually want to have sex with.

> You are choosing to use an ad based service. No one is forcing you to view reddit. Your attention belongs to you and you can choose to direct it where you want.

True.

> You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads.

It's not really an all or nothing, take it or leave it proposition. Just because they sent me ads, doesn't obligate me to view them. I get to view just the parts that I want to view.

We're not some captive passive consumer audience that reddit can jerk around at will. We are in control. We own the machine and we decide what it's going to display. If we decide we don't want to see ads, we're not gonna see ads and that's pretty much the end of it. What reddit wants or needs has pretty much zero bearing on the matter.

If you send me a page with some annoying element and I decide I want to get rid of it, it's within my power. All I have to do is inspect the element and delete it. Alternatively, I can download an annoyance filter extension with a huge database of those annoying elements to do it for me. It's called uBlock Origin.

This is called adversarial interoperability and it's an essential freedom.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

If I'm handed a magazine and it has annoying ads on it, I can rip out the pages and throw them in the trash. Same thing.

> Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”.

I think it does. I don't consent to having information I didn't ask for forcibly inserted into my mind for someone else's profit. When I opened this post, I wanted to see the comments, not irrelevant brands of products I don't care about. If I wanted to see products I'd have visited Amazon or gone to the market.

It's really simple. If you add noise to your signal, I'll filter it. I don't care if you make money by adding that noise. Find some other way to make money or go bankrupt.

> It isn’t the world’s responsibility

I'm having difficulty understanding what you're saying. I think you mean "it's not reddit's responsibility to cater to your needs". Well it doesn't have to. I'll look after my own needs -- by blocking its ads unconditionally and with no exceptions.

>Reddit isn't a community service.

Who do you think creates all the content? The community is all there is, and Reddit the company adds zero value other than paying for servers to host the data. They managed to create one of the worst performing and buggy websites on the internet by burning through millions of investment money. It's more pathetic than anything.

Your quip about deserving no ads has precisely 0 to do with the comment you are replying to. Nothing does but the last tiny sentence where you voice your own unpopular opinion with no substance to back it. Really strange post.

I dont know. All I know is that at least 2.6mil[1] people were pestered into installing the app. And all of them decided to leave a positive review of it. Past that, I wont make any assumptions.

Ive never used it. I rather be using Alien Blue, but the auth stopped working earlier this year. So, I had to start using Apollo.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828

Minority by quantity or quality?

How many people visit reddit because they searcher something on google, how many do more than just read?

Mods are part of the power users, alienating them can have a large effect on the community landscape

>The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care.

What kind of nonsense is this? How is the blackout messaging received so well with large amounts of upvotes? It's not censorship either--any opposition message that occasionally appears is often voted down into oblivion.

I use the reddit app very occasionally. Mostly when I'm away from my laptop and someone DMs or replies to me. For actually USING reddit, browsing threads etc it is woefully shitty experience.

I used to exclusively use old.reddit but switched to modern as my eyes got worse. I use the official reddit app on my Android phone and modern reddit in Firefox on my desktop and laptop as well as in Firefox for Android in desktop mode.

I like the new Reddit UI for mobile web compared to old.reddit.

Both are inferior to reddit.com/r/.../.compact, which they nixed a few months ago, on mobile.

what are you talking about... i've used the official app since the beginning and honestly have no issues. I don't get this whole 3rd party app uproar.

Same, would love to know what is 'bad' about the official app.

- Pressing notifications brings up the wrong pages.

- Back navigation is very messed up and unreliable.

- Images, videos and posts often take a long time to load, and often just don't.

- No ability to copy/paste text from posts.

- Collapsing threads is unreliable.

- Barrages of spam notifications that are difficult to turn off.

just offhand.

Man I've been using the app daily for over a year and have never experienced any of these issues..

For me it's been a blessing in disguise. Reddit was a time suck for me, and spending a week without it has broken the habit. I don't need it, and a lot of it is honestly pretty toxic.

> Are you guys starving or what??

The CEO himself have said a few times that they are are not and were never profitable. They can't keep raising money, so yeah, from their POV, it's do something now and bad consequences don't really matter.

The thing where he disagree with any thinking human is on what that "something" may be (and about not acting earlier). But the desperation is reasonable.

Some of that disagreement is that Reddit should get paid.

The current blackout fiasco seems to be centered around avoiding all forms of payment to Reddit -- both api charges and ads.

There's something else odd going on. I think the easiest answer is the company is just poorly run but considering everything we've seen from both sides of the issue:

- Reddit believes costs to maintain their API are on the level of charging 3rd party apps upwards of $20MM each. A small handful of 3rd party apps between iOS/Android would be netting them $100MM annually? Does it really cost them that much to run the API? There's a lot of questions regarding those figures by themselves

- Reluctance to come up with alternative offerings. If this is about 3rd party apps not serving ads, why is the most obvious solution not just "3rd party app usage must be through premium accounts"?

- An absolute refusal to recognize how their site operates and the value of the free labour given to them through moderation and content generation. This one is where I'm most in the dark. They must've run the metrics to see that even if losing a sizable portion of the 3rd party users they won't be in a bad place. I'm assuming they're prepared to rework their moderation structure in its entirety? But at the same time, they seem unable to devlop/publish meaningful features that have been requested by those who know the site best

My gut reaction is the IPO is coming. They want short term numbers bump to justify these actions and damn the long term. A mindset of solve the immediate problem, ignore the rest and figure it out later. Most people see this as a bad strategy, they seem to believe in it...but have they had a good track record to date showing they're capable of making these measured decisions? I think not.

It's interesting to watch & experience at least.

What's a social media zombie sherson (is that the singular of sheeple?) and how are they worse than a hardcore redditor?

What are the reasons these so-called "tech" companies do what they do. For example, why does Reddit choose to ban free API access and encourage the use of a closed source app. Is it for the benefit of users. Really. Improved "user experience" or whatever. Maybe there other reasons that the companies are reluctant to share..

For instance, I asked someone I trust this question of why. His answer: "It's greed."

If someone asked me the question, I might answer, "Because they can."

Interesting to see Reddit moderators defend the company when faced with issue of Section 230 libility^1 now opposing the company when faced with issue of increasing company profits.

1. See Gonzalez v Google amicus brief.

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning.

The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

> Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting

Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.

Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.

Uhh, not according to mods as of two days ago...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...

https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

So, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided.

Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.

I can't prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.

Twitter was the same way. Then they kicked that community to the curb. It’ll happen again.

Remember when Facebook had a thriving app community? With that farming game and the Scrabble thing?

It's certainly a pattern.

That was one thing. I think the biggest thing was that in Reddit you got to chose the type of content you wanted to see. You more or less curated your own feed. The moment Reddit started shoving "You might like this" into the website, I knew it was soon to be over. Reddit no longer wants you to choose what to see, it wants to decide for you, like all other social media websites. And the reasoning is unassailable, all those other websites have made their owners obscenely rich, so why not /u/spez too?

The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry":

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

The mods in /r/anarchism are selected by voting.

That's amazing and wonderful. The only guys who use a vote are anarchists.

Makes sense, it's not that they don't follow rules/code it's just they do so randomly which breaks all rules

You should read up on anarchism. You're in for a huge surprise there.

Not really. It's usually twenty somethings that somehow think the world wouldn't devolve into chaos if there wasn't a structure to organise society and secure it.

That's as close to a correct description of anarchy as using North Korea to describe Communism. Or a republic for that matter.

Ah yes, because all these concrete implementations of anarchism are able to disprove my description. Classic dogmatism.

There's no need to devolve into Reddit commenting style. My comment is not defending any *ism and I won't reply with anything worthwhile when the tone is mudslinging.

I've read up on it and while the ideas are interesting, the wording is incorrect, you should not use a word that means exactly the opposite of what you intend. The moment you want to impose a system of any kind, you stopped being anti-system. But I guess that's the essence of anarchism, using confusing terminology to a degree reminiscent of doublespeak.

Anarchism is to its core, like, small committees voting on stuff all day. For some reason people think of Mad Max.

My understanding of the term "anarchism" changed drastically once I started reading sci-fi novels by the likes of Le Guin and Ken Macleod.

The Dispossessed is one of my favorite books of all time.

Anarchism is the absence of power structure. A comittee vote is a power structure.

>that is not democratic

Lol like he cares about democracy.

Out-of-touch CEOs and pretending to give a damn about democracy, where have we seen that one before: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-users-vote...

Charles

(You choose which one!)

> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

That is some hefty fucking projection from him.

It is funny and almost the same level of funny as CEOs saying WFH is not fair to people can't do WFH ( why won't you think of all the poor people, who are not laptop class you awful person )!

Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.

The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

I can think of roughly 100,000 people that would be better suited to run reddit than spez.

    The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

Land is finite and subreddits are not. You can fork off and make your own subreddit whenever you like

If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.

This seems like a broken analogy.

Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.

Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.

Subreddit mods abuse their power on the daily. 99.9% of the users just won't care about that as long as they're not the abused ones.

Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)

If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work.

(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)

If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.

For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.

Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.

Subreddits may be nearly infinite, but good, descriptive subreddit names are not. r/videos is going to get more natural traffic than r/ReallyCoolNewVideos, which is going to get more natural traffic than r/asdlkajflaksjf.

This is the same website where the "marijuana enthusiast" sub is for people who like trees, right?

Sure, but it's a reddit joke, because r/trees is devoted to marijuana(which exists because of a protest against bad mods on r/marijuana).

Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.

r/videos gets more natural traffic because it's a default sub. Regardless, making a subreddit isn't some competition. You don't need to be bigger than the subreddit you're forking from.

Good names that pull traffic by themselves are what is finite. /r/startrek is much more valuable than /r/startrek1234 or any other forked variation.

Now that's a solid analogy.

He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.

If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO.

Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.

Odds are exceedingly high that spez is doing the Board's bidding.

The Board is not your savior here.

The reason for spez to be out is less the decisions and more the execution and communication. He clearly sucks at PR.

But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.

CEO-as-ablative-shield.

Though usually that's a hired gun (e.g., Pao, Wong) rather than a somewhat-harder-to-replace returned founder.

In retrospect, I think Pao earned a bad and bum rap.

how do you think the board (any board) feels about a mod clique that is willing to turn a 2-day blackout into an indefinite closure, possibly followed by indefinite "touch grass tuesdays" or other disruptions to business operations?

you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?

no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.

And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.

https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...

Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.

It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.

The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!

Shareholders need to accept that either:

the mods and community have power and control over operations

Mods get PAID

Really.... Volunteers have a reasonable expectation of influence on how their work is used.

The board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead.

This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.

Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?

In the rest of the interview, spez goes on about how subreddits should be democratized, and be able to vote for/vote out mods. Perhaps he should take his concept further, and let the community vote for/vote out him and his ideas.

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.

If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.

There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.

Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?

And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

If the best person for a job is a habitual liar who abuses and defames people that helped grow the company, maybe that job shouldn't exist. And somehow, I don't think the CEO's childish attitude is what even the investors hoped for.

You think it's democratic if the investors picked him? That's not democracy, that oligarchy.

But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.

That’s not what an oligarchy is. It’s pretty close to the exact opposite, as an oligarchy is when the government gives individuals (oligarchs) monopolies over industries and enforces them with their monopoly on violence. Really wish people would actually learn the definition of this word instead of throwing it around in place of everything they don’t like.

Oligarchy != rich people existing and doing stuff

> The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.

Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.

Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.

I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.

>Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Yup. See /r/marijuana and /r/trees or /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties for examples.

>They merely got there first, finders keepers.

That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.

> What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it's for the people while it's really all about giving him power.

Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else's platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.

If the mods are the landed gentry, the regular users must be serfs, which would make spez some kind of untouchable god-emperor..?

Reddit (spez) created that "landed gentry"[1], and was more than happy with its existence until roughly two weeks ago. It is Reddit's policies, procedures, and practices which created a first-come, first serve, seniority-based moderator role. Not the volunteers who stepped up and assumed that role, uncompensated by Reddit.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they'd cultivated and created as "landed gentry" has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.

There's a first time for everything. I agree with spez. That is a very on point description of Mods, and it needs to be fixed. Just because you came first to /r/news doesn't mean you should rule like a king on Reddit. It is too open for abuse and politics.

Your argument belies reality, where moderators even on the very large subreddits turn over all of the time.

The oldest moderator on r/news has only been in their position for slightly more than 3 years: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/about/moderators

No, it really doesn't. Both what I wrote and what you wrote can be correct. A moderator on a single big sub can, for example, turn it in a red or blue political direction no matter if s/he is a mod for a week or a year. As Reddit is a Corporation we will never see a democratic style mod selection, but in my opinion it is one of the big changes Reddit needs.

I'm glad u/spez cares so much about "democracy". For a second there I thought he was trying to extract profit off the backs of the mods who built the communities for him.

> “and that is not democratic”

Whose fault is that?

Seems like Reddit administrators exact design.

I can't believe I'm reading this bullshit about democracy and "landed gentry" from a goddamn CEO of an advertising corporation who wants to literally monetize the eyeballs of every human being on his site, people who are only there because those "gentries" keep his site from turning to shit at no cost to him.

The king.

>Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need.

I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.

Good news, red reader was granted an accessibility exemption so it's sticking around.

The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less?

I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence.

The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it.

The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction.

Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.

What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.

Various sovereign wealth / fund manager types like the idea of a compliant userbase under their thumb. Taming the internet is the whole point.

That’s definitely the part I don’t understand. They have actively been stomping out the unique things they have that could make them a competitor, and are in the process of becoming a modern funnyjunk.com

As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.

>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.

It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.

The visual design of the interface selects different segments humanity for the user base. That's why HN looks like this.

A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.

Not the target market for a site who requires free writers with something to say

> A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.

That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?

If friendly UI attracts everyone but the other attracts specific type of people, then you will have different concentration of user types. It's a bit like casual games Vs games which are hard to master - completely different types of users.

The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist.

One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.

Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?

I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.

McDonalds is friendly, their workers all smile at you and wish you a happy day, may even give you three sauce packets for free. Their adverts are cheerful and positive, full of platitudes about how great everything is and how they contribute to your community... But can you honestly say McDonalds appeals to everybody?

Some people would rather eat at an expensive restaurant where the host with a fake french accent turns away underdressed plebs.

I think 'friendly' is the wrong way to look at it.

I'd characterize it as "text-dense" vs "spacy and image/video oriented".

The second is more immediate, it takes less concentration, so it attracts more people and more information that's not very meaningful.

By keeping things text-only, you keep the information more meaningful.

It's also important to remember they didn't just 'build an app for phones'

They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn't now exist, and should never have existed.

Alienblue was the first app I bought. Then reddit bought it and latter canned it for the offical app. They kept changing it until it became the monstrosity we have today. On mobile, I browse reddit through old.reddit.com - anything else is an awful experience

Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.

To be fair, it's all consistent with Reddit's entire historical record. Dishonesty and sockpuppetry is how Reddit got off the ground in the first place.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.

Mod tools isn't the only reason, rif is so much more usable then the official reddit stuff. Like imagine if this site suddenly had a format like Instagram.

No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords).

The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.

Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.

> ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

Its this. It starts at the top:

> Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]

If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion.

Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.

To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.

What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...

Well they just had to build out this completely ridiculous chat room feature and the sorta nice looking but slow redesign.

And the.. avatars with micro transactions and possibly some NFT nonsense

Yeah thank god the avatars are NFTs somehow.

With this in mind there’s still a viable business for third party apps; build an app so good for mods that they want to pay for it to cover the API costs. I know, it’s the undesired solution for regular users, but the goal of Reddit is to move everyone who doesn’t pay to the main channels.

I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.

What makes me really sad was there was a way around this. Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly , Reddits monthly revenue per user is $0.12 at best. They were demanding $2.50 per user per month from third party apps. A simpler solution - “users who want to use third party apps need to pay Reddit $6/month directly by subscribing to Reddit premium”. That would have raised way more revenue! And people would have understood as well. They can pay for the premium experience of using a third party client or they can use the free official client. Win Win!

Except, this isn’t about the cost of running the API for private users (the aforementioned lie). Reddit the company feels aggrieved that they aren’t being paid by OpenAI and others when they’re training models on some of the most high quality, up to date, moderated, on topic training data generated by Reddit users.

Which is fair enough, that’s worth waaay more than $6/month. But surely that could be resolved through rate limits and a licensing contract signed by the LLM companies.

I'm not sure how that would work for third party projects that are just front ends hosted on a github page, like reddit as outlook (https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/). The requests are made by the users themselves there, we can't give them an api key.

We can do a "login with reddit" button approach, show them an iFrame so they can enter their user/password safely and grant us the rights to use their premium to make requests on our web page and such. The iFrame would need to be passed a nonce so we can ask reddit for updates on the user's login process and get a session token at the end, but even then although we've offloaded all the user data handling to reddit, at minima we can leak the session token to some server we own, and get to use their account's session to do whatever the permissions we asked for allow us to do including scrap reddit on their dime

We used to just be able to get the read-only stuff for free and we never needed to ask users to log in or to have an account... I wish they could just load ads in their API responses and kindly ask us to load them in the middle of the posts. We would. But I have a feeling that no advertiser would be OK having their product displayed on third party pages

Wouldn't this be mitigated by having a generous cap on the requests a Premium user could conceivably consume for typical usage? Per your leaked session scenario, Reddit could build some protections if the cap is exceeded. If credentials are compromised a user could request they be cycled and prudent decisions made at Reddit to provide them.

The user still gets shafted for that month because I used all of its data for myself

User could choose "per app" how much data it can use too

They already have something implemented in their API to have permissions granted in your account for third party apps. "Now for reddit" has permissions for reading my dms, upvoting, posting, ... basically anything you can do.

That’s the egregious thing. They wanted 20x their own revenues per user. And mind you that’s comparing revenues and costs. So it’s actually like 40-60 times more.

I think they are pricing in the future value of training an AI on reddit data, which *may* very well be a 20x investment in the long term.

I don't really work in enterprise sales, but I always thought the idea was to lure em in with low prices. Going from free to $2.50 a user??

I also don't totally get why "by user" is how they wanted to charge. Wouldn't charging by request make more sense?

The API pricing was by request. $2.50/user/month was the estimate that the developer of Apollo made based on how many API requests each user of his app made.

They were charging by request. IIRC the $2.50 figure was arrived at by taking the total number of requests and dividing it by the total number of users.

ah I see. Too high a price then.

Yeah but the worst thing about it was the timescale. Most of the 3rd party apps would have choked down the cost if they had the time to transition. Reddit's true intention was made plain by giving them just 30 days to do so, while also removing NSFW content.

the actual price Apollo charged would likely have to be much higher. The average number of API calls for the users who are deep enough into reddit addiction to be willing to pay for it would be substantially higher without the casual user who views 10 pages a month to average it out.

The problem is casuals are not going to pay, only powerusers would pay and they're making hundreds of calls per day/thousands per month. Take that $2.50 number and 10-100x it, and then add in App Store payment processing costs.

Yeah I think they can set a general price, but for big hitters like Apollo they figure out what makes sense.

So yeah, I agree reddit is probably just trying to get rid of the app competition. I just can't believe any serious analysis led them to think this was the right pricing.

And Reddit already sells Reddit Gold, users could pay with it for the privilege to use the API on any third-party client. Everything so far points as Reddit deliberately killing third-party apps.

You aren’t even mentioning the NSFW poison pill they added. Even if the pricing had been workable, this was never designed to do anything but kill external API access.

I definitely would have paid $6 a month to keep using Apollo.

The percentage of their party apps, vs people using the first party app, just based on Google play downloads is very miniscule. It is like saying using youtube-dl to consume YouTube is killing it. I mean we all love sponsor block and uBlock origin, do we have the same sympathy for YouTube?

The other thing about this that is so crazy is that services like Facebook Twitter and Instagram have all had heavily locked down APIs for a long time. Like, you couldn’t just start using their API you had to sign up and get approval. It moated social media management software like Hootsuite.

I know this because at one of my previous roles they wanted us to build a simple version of software like that and integrate it into their content management system but we couldn’t without also paying the full ticket for third party SaaS so it killed the project.

They could switch to something like that. Where compliance is checked and revoked. It would kill bots but not apps. But this was never designed to work, it’s how disingenuous it is that pisses me off.

>NSFW poison pill

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Something that has gotten lost amidst all the pricing talk is that Reddit said their API would also stop serving any content marked as NSFW, essentially making it useless for any third party app (general use or moderator use) even if they could come to an agreement on pricing.

I see. Thank you. That is quite important information, and it is a clear problem for moderators in my opinion.

The NSFW thing is extra annoying because there are a lot of subreddits that use the NSFW flag to mark entries as something else with styles applied to change the appearance.

Yeah, a huge % (I have no way of getting a real number but I’d bet everything on >25% of content on Reddit is marked as NSFW. It would make any client unusable.

The only way these API change make sense if the rumor that Steven Huffman is actually delusional enough to think that companies building LLMs will pay to use Reddit for training data is true.

> Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly

compute isn't free man. it probably costs millions of dollars a year just to pay the cloud providers to support those apps. i doubt that's a lie...

Well simple logic would say that if they get $.12 per user/month, the costs to serve each user (in terms of compute) is probably below $.12 or else they would be losing money, no?

i thought they _were_ losing money?

Reddit likely could’ve taken profit in recent years, but was instead focused on growth. Reddit doubled its headcount in 2021.

There’s no reason to think that compute is a constraining cost for reddit imo. They produce what is at this point legacy tech.

$.12 is MAU, which visit sites few times a week.

Apollo devs claim his users make 250 reqs/d, which is very different users and there is likely huge gap in costs numbers between cohorts.

MAU as a figure cannot be a dollar amount, but instead only an integer no?

Silly.

Maybe you’re thinking of ARPU?

Even if the ARPU was an order of magnitude higher, it would still be half as much as Reddit is charging per user to 3PAs.

It’s not about compute cost, because compute cost is almost definitely below revenue and the fees being charged don’t seem to have any direct link to it anyway.

Compute cost per user must generally be below ARPU, right? So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute, at most that would be $.75 if they’re making no profit. Significantly less than the $2.50 3PAs are being charged per user per month.

tldr: reddit is charging significantly more for API access than is reasonable to expect it costs them even in lost revenue, let alone raw compute

> So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute

in case of apollo my belief is that it will be much more than 5x

it is also not just about pure compute, but also paying salaries.

> more than 5x

doubt. the backend was open sourced to dispel this rumor.

> salaries

Salaries are a fixed cost, so not super relevant to API costs given what we already know. ARPU is ARPU. The amortized cost of a user to reddit is below or around ARPU (including R&D), unless they’re making the decision to still leave profit on the table in exchange for growth. However, given recent moves I doubt that.

> doubt. the backend was open sourced to dispel this rumor.

how its even relevant? Now that backend with unproven track record and unknown quality needs to handle petabytes of reddit data under significant load and with low latency.

you can just do the math I proposed to do above: mau visits site few times a month, apollo users generate 250 reqs every day, how we can come to just 5x difference here?

> Salaries are a fixed cost

its fixed but significant and adds to final number.

> mau visits site few times a month

To you, does MAU stand for monthly active user (singular noun?)

> 250 reqs every day

Do you know the difference between a request to the API and a site visit?

> To you, does MAU stand for monthly active user (singular noun?)

correct.

> Do you know the difference between a request to the API and a site visit?

sure, you can incorporate your view on difference into you calculations of how you could arrive to 5x estimation.

> sure, you can incorporate your view on difference into you calculations of how you could arrive to 5x estimation.

Regardless, Reddit wouldn’t prioritize a singular monthly active user (MAU) mentioned in this context. It’s more valuable for Reddit to have users who consistently visit, whether through Apollo or the official Reddit app. As long as advertising is effective and API pricing is appropriate, Reddit can generate profit.

From this perspective, what matters is the ratio of calls per view between different clients, not the type of user. It’s absurd to compare an inactive user on the official app with an active user on a third-party app. The issue at hand is unrelated to the cost of serving views or the potential revenue loss associated with those views.

In my opinion, the motivation behind these actions is 70% in response to low-effort low-value moderators (LLMs) and 30% due to the convenient timing to remove third-party apps (3PAs).

I asked you several times to show your math how you came to 5x. Please show if you really interested in meaningful discussion.

> So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute ...

> I asked you several times to show your math how you came to 5x. Please show if you really interested in meaningful discussion.

Consider this: The Apollo app could generate significantly more requests (5x, 10x, 20x, ... ?) to serve the exact same content and still not justify the new pricing it is being charged. In other words, the app would have to be incredibly inefficient, which doesn't align with Occam's razor. It seems more plausible that Reddit has made allegations that are only loosely based on fact, rather than Apollo being so inefficient despite its high-quality reputation.

There is no specific mathematical calculation to present. I did not conduct benchmarks for you, if that's what you expected.

Your argument revolves around comparing an active 3PA user with an inactive Reddit user, which is fundamentally flawed and easily refutable. I focused on that aspect because it is not a valid comparison.

> The Apollo app could generate significantly more requests (5x, 10x, 20x, ... ?) to serve the exact same content and still not justify the new pricing it is being charged.

my hypothesis is that apollo users generate more requests because they are some power users like mods, or more engaged and active users compared to reddit MAU, so they bothered researching and installing 3p app.

> Your argument revolves around comparing an active 3PA user with an inactive Reddit user, which is fundamentally flawed and easily refutable.

no, it is people who brought that $0.15 per MAU number do such comparison.

I would compare daily active users, which are about 12x times less for reddit, and you would come to number close to $2/user.

> my hypothesis is that apollo users generate more requests because they are some power users like mods, or more engaged and active users compared to reddit MAU, so they bothered researching and installing 3p app.

Yes. It’s still silly to compare power users and non power users though in this context as I’ve pointed out.

I’m very confused about what you are attempting to say in the latter half of your reply.

However, to sum up, I wanted to reference this post from the apollo dev that came out today [0]. People who come to this thread in the future might benefit from the more detailed breakdowns and explanations with references provided there.

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

> Yes. It’s still silly to compare power users and non power users though in this context as I’ve pointed out.

sure, and that's people like you who constantly bring those $0.12 of reddit revenue per user doing such silly comparison.

I think Huffman is falling into a trap that Kanye and Mark Zuckerberg have fallen into: trying to prove he's special.

Kanye rose to fame as a young genius rapper/producer/designer and was acclaimed repeatedly. Zuckerberg rose to fame as a brilliant business twenty-something (according to the world around).

They spent half their life being praised and told they're important, brilliant, special, prescient, etc. So they are confident they can prove it again.

Kanye is doing.... something strange now. Zuckerberg tanked the stock price with VR/Metaverse and then juked it by firing a chunk of the company. They are so confident something intrinsic in them makes their choices special and 'right,' that they can see something no one else can.

Huffman et al. were at the right place and right time with a LAMP(?) stack when Digg imploded. Now he wants to prove that it's not "right place right time" but that he is special.

Look, I'm not the biggest Mark Zuckerberg fan or anything, but I don't think the thus-far questionable business decision to pivot to the metaverse is quite the same level as having an very public mental breakdown and making anti-semitic remarks

Yeah exactly. I have issues with what social media does to people and some of what Mark has done.. but he is nowhere near my level of despise for Musk, Kanye or others in that circle.

Kanye is suffering from mental illness and was off his medication while simultaneously having millions of dollars, adoring fans, and cameras in his face 24/7/365. I think most of us would do something stupid in that situation. I don't really get why you would "despise" someone for being ill.

I doubt most of us would support exterminating people if we were sick, but who knows

You'd be surprised at how easily otherwise intelligent people can get swept up into violent ideologies.

Bobby Fischer is just one example of a bright mind corrupted by ideology. There are countless.

I'm not sure you've got a solid grasp of mental illness and how it affects the way you think.

I don't know if you're unaware of the entire saga or if you've done some stuff you regret in the past but going on Alex Jones with Nick Fuentes is not something I'm giving a mental-health-pass on. I'm open to feedback that I'm an ableist jerk but I'm also not holding my breath.

I just want to remind you that of the three people listed only Mark took actions that exacerbated a genocide (Rohingya in Myanmar).

And Elon's lithium mines aren't similar? Or Kanye's open support of rhetoric linked to the Holocaust?

Musk melding on turkey elections and other countries isn’t too far off

This is an unfair take. Whatever you think of Meta as a corporation or Zuckerberg as a person, neither caused the Rohingya crisis, much less the conflict; and while it's fair to argue that FB/Meta could have done more to stem hate speech on the platform, your phrasing intentionally villainizes a single individual for an entire ongoing, complex sociopolitical situation.

I have intimate knowledge of FB during that period. Any voice of concern about abuses of the service were repressed as a "we'll deal with that when it's a problem."

Concerns about lack of global moderation and enforcement were well known before the massacre. Mark and leadership made a choice akin to what the major oil producers did regarding global warming: kick the can until it's a problem.

I apologize, I should have been clearer.

I don't mean Kanye's public antics and statements. I meant his questionable design/musical/performance choices.

Mark has lost over $30B on Metaverse supported by a stagnating ad business. Apple just launched an AR product that seems quite a bit better than the Meta options. John Carmack publicly complained about the reasons he left work at Meta which demonstrate a lack of vision at the leadership levels. It's unclear how the Metaverse will play out at this point but it feels like a solution looking from a problem rather than something people really want.

I think the problem Metaverse potentially (partially) solves is the conflict between resource consumption and available supply in consumer culture. In the 2000s there was optimism for the strength of consumer culture, ("for the first time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism."[1]) but we're now beginning to reconcile the desire for infinite growth against finite resources.

Digital consumerism is a potential lifeline, as digital products are close to cost free to produce compared to real luxury goods or travel, allowing much higher numbers of people to own them. As people generally become poorer and real consumption grows out of reach, the metaverse potentially serves as a second level of prosperity and success for the have nots in the real world.

Some early examples of this are Second Life, valuation of digital items like skins in games and travel and dining POV YouTubers. I think most would prefer the real deal, but if it's unavailable a fake version can be made good enough.

[1]https://cup.columbia.edu/book/an-all-consuming-century/97802...

There’s a lot to pick apart here. How much money do you think Apple spent on their VR product vs Meta? Sure Apple’s is better, but it also costs SEVEN times more. Do you really think Apple’s will sell more units any time soon? Meta has already sold tens of millions of quests.

Also Carmack is a great programmer, but there’s no reason to think he knows a thing about the market and business strategy.

Sure there’s the whole metaverse thing, but even without that, people are getting value out of the Quest right now, playing Beat Saber etc.

I'll reply point by point:

> How much money do you think Apple spent on their VR product vs Meta? Sure Apple’s is better, but it also costs SEVEN times more. Do you really think Apple’s will sell more units any time soon? Meta has already sold tens of millions of quests.

Oculus Quest has sold almost 20M units over 4 years of existence across all products in the line. The original iPhone was priced at a point at that point considered absurd. Note that oculus started off with the rift at $600 but requiring a multi-thousand dollar computer. I'm not an Apple fanboy/apologist but this is a straw man argument.

> Also Carmack is a great programmer, but there’s no reason to think he knows a thing about the market and business strategy.

This is disingenuous. John Carmack founded id which produced modern 3d and FPS as we know it today. He's not just a great programmer but he was a successful businessman before Facebook existed. One, he understands the market and business strategy at least as well as Mark given he spends more time on the matter as his primary focus. Two, his complaints were not about market and business strategy but about inefficiencies in development processes that no one in the company besides C-levels are empowered to resolve.

> Sure there’s the whole metaverse thing, but even without that, people are getting value out of the Quest right now, playing Beat Saber etc.

Let's be clear here: even if each quest was $500 and had zero CoGS that would be $10B revenue spread over 4 years when Mark spent >$30B in less than that. I'll eat a humble pie if he makes this make sense but it was not a sound decision given the way he structured the approach.

> Mark has lost over $30B on Metaverse supported by a stagnating ad business

We must live in different worlds. They invested $30B in research, have a clear advantage now that Apple is trying to enter the market, and is still printing money like there's no tomorrow via their ad business.

It was not a lamp stack for sure. Linux maybe but prototype reddit was in lisp

Common Lisp and then I think the current site is mostly Python.

If anyone is thinking they are bigger than they are it's these mods. Some of my favourite hobbies have been absolutely tainted by people who become mods of a community who put their societal/political/sexual beliefs with equal weight with the actual topic of the sub reddit. Say anything that mildly offends the mods personal beliefs? Banned. Or at the very least, find yourself limited in the role you can play in the community. Unfortunately, these mods seem to have the most free time to hijack the shared common interest in the sub-reddit topic to push their own version of community standards. I'm just speaking to my limited experience of my own personal interests but that's all I can say about it.

Stop pushing the narrative that the mods are the source of the protest. They're just acting on the behalf of the members of their subreddit who are upset at the direction of the company.

Agreed. I am one of the oldest active Reddit users and I 100% agree. I have voted in many subreddits' polls for this. I mod a handful of small subs myself and have done the same. My needs are not the same as some of those large subs, so I am not continuing the blackout, but I fully support those that are. I intend to keep using old.reddit.com and never installing their mobile app instead of my 3rd party client.

> I fully support those that are.

Fully supporting the blackout would mean continuing the blackout on your own subs, would it not? Just say you're "partially" supporting the blackout - like in ways that don't directly effect your direct, current use of the platform. I don't care either way, just be honest with yourself.

Hah. Fair enough. TBH I'm just kinda lazy and don't want to go and reconfigure all that crap again after doing it and then undoing it earlier this week. Those large subs have more resources at their disposable and a critical mass for disruption.

My couple thousand subscribers simply are not that effective in getting Reddit to listen, I feel like. Definitely if moderating those subs becomes actually burdensome in the future, I will reconsider.

> I am one of the oldest active Reddit users and I 100% agree.

I am older than you, and I don't agree.

Maybe. I started using in July 2005 and made an account around when comments were introduced.

Damn. I am older, but just by some days.

I'm sure the truth is a little more cloudy than that. Mods are the ones who can cut off a community (not plain users), no matter what the users think they should do. I bet most users don't give two thoughts either way. Mods in some of the communities I participate did the 48 hour thing, and now have the community set to read-only indefinitely. I don't remember there being voting for former - and certainly not the latter.

Precisely. It is cloudier. I was making the point that in my limited experience, the mods haven't represented the community of the topic. They represent a subset of the community of the topic which the mods have allowed certain opinions to prosper and others to perish based on non-topic related issues. And what you said actually aligns with that. Mods may have crippled communities without ensuring there was a consensus of opinions on the matter first.

I've seen this argument a lot on here and I don't really get it. I go to specific hobby subreddits to talk about specific hobby subreddit things, not to see other people make irrelevant comments or something that might mildly offend someone else. As far as I am concerned mods are well in their rights to shut that kind of stuff down.

This sort of sentiment usually comes from someone that can't help but argue about politics in an area for, say, houseplants. Sorry, but I don't want to discuss Grundrisse in a hobby subreddit. I don't want nazis yelling at me about jewish conspiracies in an analogue synth subreddit.

"Waaah I can't say edgy things everywhere I want" is such a weak complaint against community-led moderation.

Ahh yes. The classic anyone who sees any issue with the current state of things must be in line with Nazi conspiracy theorists. Such depth.

Did you notice that I criticised communists that inject politics into everything too? I suppose you do not know what Grundrisse is?

What I meant by "in line with" is an association with an extreme political ideology. I understand the confusion. Again, partially my fault But the point was a person who has a complaint on the current status quo shouldn't associate them with someone trying to say or stand for something extreme.

One moderator (who has since been removed) would regularly remove anything critical of gnome or systemd, and would hand out bans to anyone they considered to be "bullying" either of those groups. I think their standard for bullying were pretty low, it was more that they wouldn't tolerate any criticism at all, but your mileage may vary.

Stuff like that is the reason plenty of people browse anonymous imageboards instead.

You have my comment backwards. Partially my own fault I'm sure. But what I'm referring to is the mods bringing their own beliefs into the community and making it part of the topic, not the other way around.

The CEO of Reddit (and even the management team as a whole) can be fairly treated as a monolithic block. They generally speak with one official voice.

There are thousands of reddit moderators, most of whom have never met each other. You cannot possibly generalize across all of them.

See also: Comments about "black people", "white people", "tech bros", or any other large group of humans.

I didn't try to generalize. I even said at the end of the post it represented my limited experience.

I'm going to assume you genuinely aren't self-aware, so please don't be offended by this attempt to help.

You lead with this:

> If anyone is thinking they are bigger than they are it's these mods.

This is a textbook generalization, a "blanket statement". The next few sentences attempt to reinforce this generalization. A one-sentence disclaimer at the end doesn't change that.

If you want to talk about your experience with <some members of large group X> then do that. But please don't project that across <all members of large group X>.

Way to say you didn't read my whole comment before posting without saying you didn't read my whole comment before posting.

The whole Meta thing frankly seemed like a suspicious PR move. At the time the remaking was announced Facebook was being dragged into Congress. Suddenly the headlines switched from Facebook this and Facebook that to Meta this and Meta that. Even today reporters are constantly getting themselves into tongue twisters about it.

I've met Steve, and I have to disagree. In my view he is not ego-driven and is quite thoughtful and considerate.

Is it possible that he's right? That the damage done to reddit by these boycotts or the reaction to them isn't as bad as the media hype would have you believe?

I've met Steve, and I have to disagree. In my view he is ego-driven and is not really thoughtful nor considerate.

Is it possible that parent is right? That the damage done to reddit by these boycotts or the reaction to them is as bad if not worse as the media hype make it seems ?

(just pointing out how your message using a personnal connection appeal and chosen adjective to indicate good and bad sides essentially brings nothing factual nor argumentative besides trying to orient the conversation)

Steve edited user comments, denied he did it, and then admitted he did it. What is that other than ego-driven without thought and inconsiderate?

It's important to remember that Digg imploded for the same reason that Reddit is having trouble: a big investment, followed by demands to recoup it. Reddit was ready to take up the slack. The thing that will save Reddit is that there doesn't seem to be another service ready to absorb the outflow.

If someone can make Lemmy more resilient than Lemmy seems to be the answer.

Kbin is what you’re looking for https://kbin.pub/en

The death of digg was pretty anti climactic compared to this standoff. I’ve been going to Reddit less and less over the years to the point where I try to avoid it now. It’s a huge echo chamber and the voting system caters to the lowest common denominator.

I do wonder if Reddit will pass the torch to a third platform or will this type of site die off. I don’t see the community surviving a very profit driven site which the IPO will force on them. I’m not sure what their moat is exactly other than the large userbase

Reddit also wasn't ready to absorb the outflow, it was pretty small at the beginning. It grew massive with time, just as the current Reddit alternatives might.

> Zuckerberg tanked the stock price with VR/Metaverse and then juked it by firing a chunk of the company.

meta stock today is at $280.

Did you stop reading before the "and" in that sentence?

If you can lower your cost basis while keeping revenues unchanged it will juke the stock price. Mark has been laying people off trying to get the stock back up from his major mistake.

got it. I wasn't sure what 'juked it' meant in the sentence, looks like its sports related word. I thought it was a typo for 'junked' .

> Zuckerberg tanked the stock price with VR/Metaverse

Is that what happened? ISTR there was something else tanking the stock (Cambridge analytica? TikTok? Headlines become forgotten so quickly these days) and the metaverse thing was a saving throw.

Even if my explanation is correct, it was an overreaction (didn't need to rename the company) and didn't work.

I'm not convinced infinite growth is possible.

Give me calm and stability over growth any day.

I tell my company all of the time, that paying bills and wages IS success. But it gets a lot of grimaces from investors etc. They can shove off in my opinion.

> Huffman et al. were at the right place and right time with a LAMP(?) stack when Digg imploded.

That's incorrect revisionist history.

Reddit was a large part of the cause for Digg to implode. users had been flooding from Digg to reddit for years before Digg finally imploded. There was an entire series of "digg vs reddit" comics.

Both sites launched within a year of each-other. Digg always had the prettier website, which did a better job at looking professional and attracting users. But reddit had better algorithms for promoting content to the front page and the threaded comment system that attracted in-depth discussions. Digg's algorithms sucked so much that their front page always seemed to be links that had reached Reddit's front page 6 hours earlier.

Though, you might be right about the "trying to prove he's special" thing.

I'd argue we have different perspectives on the matter and wont undermine yours. My thoughts are that Digg sealed its fate with Digg 2.0 (or whatever major redesign they had) that made the site unusable and degraded content quality.

I think the lesson Huffman is missing is that quality content from your 2% contributors makes the site worth visiting.

While I was one of the many users who migrated from Digg to reddit in 2007-2009, I'm mostly basing my assertions off the perspective of the Digg engineer who launched Digg v4, and the article they wrote [1] on the topic.

From this inside perspective, it's very clear that Digg was already dying long before the launch of Digg v4; They explictly state that Digg v4 was pushed out the door early, as a gamble, because they only had so much runway before the remaining VC cash ran out.

They knew it was a disaster and decided to launch it anyway.

I'll admit, that from the perspective of the average Digg user in 2010 it would seem like Digg was perfectly healthy, then suddenly shat the bed by pushing out digg v4. But really, the digg v4 launch only served to communicate to the users that the site was dying.

[1] https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

Eh, it’s working out for Musk.

If this wasn't connected to the blackout, this would be great news. There are a few mods, who when reddit was young, decided to squat every existing country's subreddit, along with common words. Those subs now work well with active mods below them. But the squatter still has full power, and can override any other mod. Now it will hopefully be easier to kick those mods.

It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?

I moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy).

I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work.

And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits.

Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs.

The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other.

For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs.

The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.

Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. What are your thoughts on a mechanism to oust existing mods? Is there any path you'd be willing to see? Or a lesser of two evils? E.g. mods being able to kick each other out with some plurality vs community members holding that power at some high voting threshold

I'd be fine with some kind of election mechanism built into subreddits settings that could be turned on to allow community member to vote on mods.

With that said consider a subreddit for a podcast or youtube channel where the host/channel might legitimately want to have total control over moderation and I don't think it'd be appropriate to remove them.

Also consider that the vast majority of subreddits are moderated by volunteers who are only doing it because no one else will. You'd probably get more milage out of a way to force community members to take turns serving as moderators than you would having a mechanism to remove existing mods.

When someone says Reddit moderator you're thinking of /r/news or /r/funny not the person running the sub for their favorite book or local sports team or interest group. There are way more of those moderators and you almost need to handle the two use cases differently.

For the truly top subreddits I think Reddit should be employing people directly or indirectly to do the moderation. At the very least they should be compensating those people and reviewing their performance.

Reddit should also make better mod tools and do way more to help with moderation. It's offensively bad what they offer today. If Reddit actually gave a damn they would force every software engineer at the company to spend 2 weeks as the moderator of a subreddit once a year and I guarantee this problem would be solved quickly.

I also think some semblance of moderator hierarchy would be extremely helpful. Have some sort of mod council that oversees all of Ask* subreddits and another for sports subreddits and another for NSFW subreddits. Those content domains will all have similar needs and having someone looking at the bigger picture across individual subs would be very helpful.

The host of a podcast having total control of a community seems like the perfect example of illegitimate control. I'd assume they'd remove any critical discussion to the point it would devolve into their own personal website where all it's good for is promoting the product. Users with anything critical to say would be banned, posts removed. That's about as anti user as it gets.

then those people can make their own different sub, there is no need to completely take over and remove a moderator team.

that has been the standard in all of reddits history.

Thanks for writing this down. I don’t know about the details of Reddit moderation for popular subs, but I’ve moderated a pretty tiny one, and have some friends who moderate small communities elsewhere.

The perception that Mods are all power hungry and looking to impose their will is all consuming in some circles, ans it frustrates me. Most of the moderation is pure drudgery that is uninteresting and un controversial. Occasionally a mod will be wrong, or cross a line, and that sucks. But there is a real lack of appreciation for the work these volunteers do day to day.

Like, when I talk about this stuff with some friends who are nerds but don’t hang out in the same circles as any mods, they have no idea that mods are actually doing work beyond occasionally banning someone.

It can be one way for many subs, and another way for others. Go to a sub that deals with controversial issues, find a threat with a lot of deleted posts, and look up that thread on unddit.com. Often times you will see mods deleting all dissenting opinions and not allow any discussion about it to even take place.

Thank you for writing these interesting insights. However, I wonder what was your motivation to do moderation and what made you stop?

I was a contributor to a sub with a specific interest group (think something like your favorite programming framework). I got some value out of the community and so when someone suggested 'it would be really nice if a sub existed for xyz' I just went ahead and made the subreddit and was like, well here you go. By default, when you make a subreddit you're the moderator.

Then once that subreddit grew a little bit two things happened: first moderators of similar subreddits asked if I would be willing to help them out on their subs. The second was that moderators from other subreddits who enjoyed the community would reach out and ask if I needed any help moderating the sub. I both cases I said sure and eventually I ended up just being added to a bunch of subreddits as a moderator.

I would spend about an hour a day doing it and I think I kept it up as long as I did for the social aspect of it - I didn't want to burden the other moderators by leaving.

Then there was a highly politically charged let's say discussion that cropped up on the subreddit around some specific language (think similar to the default git branch being called "master"). It was exhausting to moderate, and it all suddenly felt like it wasn't worth it.

I also said to myself, hey I've got a lot to lose here, I've got a high paying job at a top company, and what happens it someone upset about this issue decides to email my employer and cause trouble? That could have real consequences for me. I'm taking a risk here and it's no longer worth it.

So yeah, I deleted the account and just walked away.

thanks for your perspective on how this worked....

Power mods are a real problem on Reddit.

It's the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this 'protest'.

The end result of this protest looks like it's going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years.

It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.

I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely.

This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.

> put it to a public vote

Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.

The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"

I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.

The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)

I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.

Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"

Is this more rigged election without evidence talk? I browse Reddit maybe 20 minutes a week, on the weeks that I think to use it. I'm subscribed to maybe a dozen subs. I voted in favor of the strike in the one sub that was kind of late to asking about the protest and I noticed in time.

I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.

>Is this more rigged election without evidence talk?

I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.

In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.

But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??

If you're just someone who browses 20min/week, I'm not sure you represent the average user in any of your subreddits either much less one that should be weighing in on whether other people get to use the subreddit. ;)

"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.

So you're a mod. Who's to say you personally did not brigade or tilt the poll in the other direction? I'm curious what makes you immune to random calls of conspiracy and corruption. It's especially ironic since you claim most mods are scum and corrupt, so I'm curious if you think you somehow are not.

Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.

> they are not representative of the overall community.

I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.

I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)

I read (and very occasionally contribute to) a large number of subreddits that I'm not subscribed to. Recently I use redreader, but I'm the past I did it via the main Reddit website, simply by visiting /r/a+b+c+d..... to show all the posts on the same page.

Selection bias, most casual users are not going to fill out a poll. The only ones who would are those who are likely to support the protest. This is clearly visible when you look at how many total votes there are compared to how many subscribers the subreddit has.

8000 votes out of 7.5 million members. I'm on r/nba every day and didn't see the poll.

People will say statistically 8000 votes is sufficient for an accurate sample, but only if the voting isn't brigaded.

All comments on other basketball subs at the moment are overwhelmingly in favour of re-opening the sub.

r/nba and r/hockey are particularly interesting examples because the threads before the shutdown were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the subs open and all the upvoted posts were openly trashing the mods over their decision. The poll was also posted in the ModCoord discord servers so was almost certainly not representative of the average r/nba or r/hockey user.

They are still more democratic than the power CEO.

I don't think it matters. As long as the members of a community have no problem with X being a mod, X should probably remain a mod for that community. If the community eventually hates X, X should be removable.

Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don't think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.

Yep. Given that this is HN, try looking at /r/California. It's basically a person fief for a single user (granted, he's not nearly as obnoxious as many Reddit mods.) Yet simply because this user owns the obvious name, there is no real alternate sub for California-level news.

> Yet simply because this user owns the obvious name, there is no real alternate sub for California-level news.

Alternatively, the users aren't bothered by the moderation there and no one's felt the need to start an alternative.

It’s exactly what happened to digg. MrBabyMan etc owned the front page so everyone who disagrees or just doesn’t care for their content left

It’s fun to consider this from his perspective. He has essentially pushed all-in on this and now he has no way of backing out. If this is all about getting ready for IPO, then he can’t back out, because that would show potential future investors that he is not in control of policy changes, and that means that when shareholders want to crank up the money making machine, they can’t. At the same time, he needs to show that the site can continue and take a minimal hit to revenue when such protests happen. He will never back down, as this is essentially a battle test to show the strength of the platform for investors after the IPO. It’s an all or nothing play. If revenue takes a hit after all this and doesn’t recover, then Reddit is now worth half. If it does recover, Reddit is much more stable than first anticipated and is now worth double. Right now, he is pretty confident that the outcome will be the latter.

Agreed. Seems to me that the whole thing is about getting good growth numbers on paper before the IPO.

He’s not interested in the long term success of the platform, but trying to get a successful exit.

It’s funny - he is part of the founding team and had been working on Reddit for 18 years. Maybe his just tired of it all and wants to do something else, so the IPO can not come soon enough He must have cared about the user and the platform at some point, or else we wouldn’t have gotten this far Or who knows - maybe there’s been a power shift at Reddit that made what we’re seeing possible…

If the customers can shut down the company arbitrarily, then what's the point of investing in it? Of course they should make it a rule that mods are not allowed to shut down their main channels.

Otherwise, Reddit should IPO and then demand that all users buy a share. Users who don't are deleted. Then let the shareholders-users figure out how to make good on their investment

Or they could hire the mods, like some other sides do? The mods here are regular users, which also means (by Reddits own terms and rules) that they can do whatever they want with their subs. That also means shutting or locking them down. If they were on the payroll, that would not be an option.

All companies depend on their customers, that's not a reddit only thing. If Coca-Cola pisses of their customers, they'll go to Pepsi in the blink of an eye.

sure, but they won't break all the vending machines

The analogy breaks down here because the users made their own vending machines.

For example I made this comment, and I am allowed to edit it or even remove it.

Imagine now for a second if hacker news was allowed to manipulate or modify user comments directly for profit.

It’s more like the users are the vending machines, and the cans, and the soda.

When your whole value is provided by the unpaid labor of the users, you don’t get to say, “How dare they!”, when you’re the leach.

As a user, all he's done is prove to me that he will cave instantly to shareholder pressure. There aren't even any public shareholders asking for more money now and he's already cranking the money-making lever. How am I to expect the site to become better in the future when infinite growth is expected? Why would I put my time in this site over another?

And that’s the bet on his side. He has reached a point where he believes the users’ options are non-competitive, so the way he sees it, users doesn’t have any choice. It’s his way or no way. The average user doesn’t care, they just want to have fun. Which might also be why he is okay with changing all the mods, because those are the people like you and I that care and will take up the fight.

They've lost the retail investors, that alone could moved the needle on an IPO. Just look at what r/wallstreetbets did with GME.

I just would like to thank the CEOs of Twitter and Reddit for helping to kill my doom scrolling addiction.

I will miss using Apollo, which is one of the best apps on my phone. It works well, complies with all of Apple's HIG rules, and is supported by an enthusiastic and communicative developer.

Reddit management are incompetent fools that are looking for the VC cashout of an IPO before the site goes to shit.

Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification" continues to become more and more prescient of the last few years of internet "development".

I’m disappointed for the same reasons as everyone else. But there’s definitely a silver lining here. Relying on a corporation for community was never a good idea, and that Reddit’s relative insulation was nothing but an aberration. Recent events is no more than a delayed affirmation of enshittification theory. And the good news is the sooner we collectively realize that the root cause is the business model, the sooner we can fix the problem.

Apollo followed Apple design language better than the first party apps.

True. When I search for things though, the answers I seek are on Reddit. I’ll look into the archive or Reddit backup of deleted posts sometime but for now I go by the preview search showing me a couple lines of the top answer.

Smelled this one coming miles away.

Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push for a lot more users. The academics, for certain.

Give it a few months, it'll be like FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr. Ad and bot ridden ghost town, devoid of all creativity - nay, devoid of actual information at all. Just a sinking ship with people still getting off.

Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.

If they remove old reddit, I'm done. The "new" reddit UI is literally one of my least favorite things in the world. Filled with clutter and ads, requires too many clicks to see what you want to see, low information density... I could go on.

New reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I'm looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add "old" to the URL.

> Who even designed it?

Someone looking to maximize user engagement metrics and ad impressions.

But why should I visit tiktokified reddit if I can visit actual tiktok instead?

I interviewed at Reddit around that time. They showed me what (I didn’t know at the time) was to be the new design & asked me to critique it (UI role).

I.. did not hold back. I was polite, and encouraging, but the myriad of flaws was obvious. They seemed rather put out & defensive.

It was around about them I realized that it was not going to be a good fit.

Some time earlier this year (I think; certainly before the API drama; wish I'd bookmarked it), I saw a comment here from a Reddit manager complaining that they couldn't find good developers. I think the reason is pretty clear.

> Who even designed it?

This guy. https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/

To be fair I tried it again and it's speedier and better than I remembered, especially with the classic view.

I still prefer old Reddit though. Even to Lemmy, as I prefer the fluid layout and contrast between comments.

Probably it was created by someone who prefer mobile environments and who also believe that bulky big interfaces are good. New design seems to be aiming at keeping users engaged with the site all the time by obstructing visibility of comments, for example

Yesterday I saw a thread on tildes where some new user presented changes to the site via custom style which introduces rounded corners and big elements all around: https://tildes.net/~tildes/16cl/i_made_a_thing_to_make_tilde...

Guess it's the generation gap - those who were growing up with mobile devices are fond of similar interfaces and that's what reddit tried to exploit

I'm on the opposite side: I prefer minimal interfaces, like old reddit, hn or current tildes. Lemmy seems to be more "modern" on that aspect

No point designing it for mobile browsers if they're going to block mobile browsers from using it, or at best irritate the hell out of mobile web users with relentless 'app nags'

Someone has to be using the redesign, most I'd guess, but I don't understand how. It's one thing that I don't like the look and feel, that's pretty subjective to a point, but the problem is that it doesn't actually work.

Something as basic as reading comments is still broken, after all these years. You can not navigate the comment section. Seems like a pretty big oversight, unless you betting the farm on doom-scrolling, and I think that exactly what's happening.

Reddit management left the community to it's own devices for years, now the ad revenue is drying up, they have an IPO around the corner (because no VC is going to throw more money into an anonymous message board). I don't really see any easy out for Reddit, they do need money, but I'm not sure they are going about it in the right way.

> You can not navigate the comment section.

You're basically forced to hold control down, because expanding a comment might cause a page load, and the back button won't bring you where you originally were.

Most people dont even know about old.reddit. new users never hear of it, most of old users got served the redesign and just went with it. I bet only minority knows and actively uses old.reddit. its insane

Why do many hate "new" Reddit in the first place?

The worst part for me is all the flashes and redraws as it gradually loads more and more separate resources.

"Hey look, here's a paragraph to read... nope, I just realised there's an image near the top that I think is going to be huge so I pushed that paragraph below the fold... no, wait, that image is actually tiny so here's that paragraph again... ooooh, but now there's a sidebar, so I've just resized and reflowed the paragraph that you had kind of started to read - good luck finding your place again!"

As for how broken the "back" button is, fuuuuu.....

Any good alternative? I like hacker news for now that it still got some comments worth reading and interesting articles

Not that I know of. I keep poking around all the ones that pop up here, some of which are nicely made but still small, and I've been contemplating joining a Lemmy instance or starting one with some friends.

Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/

Are these servers like subreddits, or more like email providers?

Is there a "see all, interact with all, no restrictions" lemmy server?

Help! :)

That's kind of the thing about the fediverse: that's basically not possible. Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block. You could, of course, run your own instance, but obviously that's its own can of worms.

So... It's tricky.

edit: also, sites like joinmastodon USUALLY just completely exclude anything too controversial, for pretty obvious reasons. Dunno about join-lemmy but I'd bet on it.

> Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block.

So if I'm understanding correctly, it's a platform that encourages peer pressure and bullying? Or am I misunderstanding?

Yes. That's exactly how it played out with Mastodon.

It's basically run by infantile people.

You know what made Reddit popular? Share ability. How the hell am I going to send a link to the Lemmy verse or whatever to my brother in law?

It's on the web, so you can send links the regular way.

Either right-click a post, copy link, paste into brother-in-law chat.

Or open a post, copy the browser's address bar, paste into brother-in-law chat.

E.g. https://beehaw.org/post/529329

> Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block

Yikes.. damn. I haven't really jumped in to the fediverse yet, but I've been excited about its potential. But this sounds incredibly toxic. Basically it sounds like we've gone from having to conform to the corporation's rules, to having to conform to the center of the venn diagram or else you get shut off. Am I misunderstanding?

> having to conform to the center of the venn diagram or else you get shut off

There's no shutting off. The instances that are blocked still work.

It's like email. If cheapviagrapillz.com is identified as sending a substantial amount of spam, they will be blacklisted. Their server still works, they can still send emails, but many servers will not accept those emails.

Each server (AKA "Instance") is kind of like an email provider, or like a bunch of individual Reddit websites. On Lemmy a "Community" is their version of a subreddit. Each server/instance hosts its own communities, but if you have an account on one server, you can still subscribe, read and post on off-server communities.

Each server is a piece of the federation. Some Instances do not federate with all other instances though. I'm not sure if there are any instances that access every other instance.

I'm not sure about lemmy, but I know that on other fediverse projects like Mastodon there were some servers that were completely unmoderated, filled with terrible content and were defederated by most other instances. Most decent people don't want to see that stuff on their feed.

> some servers that were completely unmoderated, filled with terrible content and were defederated by most other instances. Most decent people don't want to see that stuff on their feed.

Why not solve that by blocking them yourself, instead of forcing everyone else to block them?

From a user point of view that would do just fine. Maybe server owners might not want to be associated with those instances for potential legal issues.

Some servers admins have also defederated from certain instances because they were receiving increased trolling/spam from certain instances and it was too much work to moderate with the current number of mods they had.

Thanks, I'd read about Lemmy in various threads on here and finally decided to check it out.

Unfortunately, it seems to be down right now.

Lemmy is still significantly lower user count but honestly I prefer the community at the moment. Everything feels small and jovial. At least for the 12 comments I've posted thus far. I'm running my own, which makes it easy to federate out to pretty much anything and worry less about overload as I'm not really pushing for users.

Thus far, it's definitely felt like a very viable replacement for reddit for the communities I have found.

The current de-federation stuff is already bringing out extreme toxicity and personal attacks.

Why is this bad? Isn't it represantitive of real life? There's no such thing as a safe space, only a strong mind.

> Everything feels small and jovial.

From the comment I replied to. People getting up in their arms and attacking others for no good reason does not seem very jovial. It seems dumb, childish, and immature, which yes, is what I expect from a random sampling of people.

I don’t want safe spaces, I simply prefer to surround myself with people not being idiots and assholes, it makes life far more relaxing.

How is this representative of real life? Like where do you live where people are toxic to you to your face and harass you, honest to god I don’t really see that in my life at least. It’s pretty clear that people behave differently when given anonymity, shouldn’t we try to “emulate real life” at least in the way we interact with each other on the daily?

It happens. I know someone who was called a dictator, fascist, silencer and worse by his coworkers for the sin of asking people to take political discussions to a different slack channel than the engineering team's main one. I know a few other people who work there, and can confirm it isn't just him; the place is just plain toxic.

Imagine his surprise when he was basically pushed out of the company in less than a year.

I'd normally say "good for him, he dodged a bullet, he's not going to be hurt by fallout once the company gets so rotten inside it collapses on itself". Unfortunately, this is not an isolated trend; if it keeps up, we'll see a whole generation of people with minds filled with hate, and I'm not sure the society can survive it undamaged.

As soon as he found that this behavior was condoned by management there, he should have started looking for a new job. Obviously, he's not a "cultural fit" for that company.

There are a lot of really crappy companies out there with toxic cultures; don't stick around in one if you don't have to.

> called a dictator, fascist, silencer and worse by his coworkers

That company's HR department must be fascinating

> to take political discussions

I'm really curious what you're considering "political discussions" here, and if it includes "please stop using ethnic slurs in git commit messages" or something like that

Ah yes. There's no such thing as a safe party, which is why I always wear my stab vest and helmet to my mom's Thanksgiving dinner.

You might want to look up this thing called "civilization", where we've been creating safe spaces for the last 5,000 years. Maybe it's just a passing fad, but I'm hopeful for it.

> we've been creating safe spaces for the last 5,000 years

Seriously? If you look into history books or even recent news articles, you'll quickly find out that safety is a rare privilege.

> You might want to look up this thing called "civilization"

How about this thing called "inequality and oppression?"

Well, GP seems to have edited their comment to flip its meaning 180°; earlier, IIRC (don't have a cached copy up) they were advocating for establishment of "safe spaces" of the kind that people who use term "safe spaces" establish - which for everyone else are more like digital equivalent of Lebensraum[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

Uh, no, I did no such thing.

I meant mozman's reply to your comment, not your comment.

And I'm absolutely in agreement with yours - I've seen this playing out on Mastodon first-hand. The federated model, as implemented by Fediverse, turns out to be extremely vulnerable to bullies.

(Kind of like a bunch of independent, friendly villages end up being vulnerable to a smart warlord. It's arguably a big part of what historically drove creation of countries and empires.)

FWIW, I’ve only seen that version of their comment, so if they edited it, it was very quickly.

I did not edit anything.

HM is heavily moderated but there's still plenty of toxicity - it just requires more energy and cleverness to emit.

In real life, people who harass or assault get sued or otherwise. We have built spaces for XYZ set of people for thousands of years. If you can't behave with some civility, go live in the forest and away from society.

There's a lot of irony in expressing what you did in one of the most heavily moderated forums.

Eternal september

Their hardcoded scunthorphe filter blocks very common word in non English languages, such as the French words for late, delay, and firewood. The lead dev insists, rudely and vehemently, that those who have a problem with it are fascists.

This hasn't been the case for quite a time https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773

The filter has been able to be deactivated and changed by instance owners for at least a year.

Is there something like a 'Lemmy frontpage' yet?

As in a view/site that aggregates top posts across Lemmy instances?

You can select "All" (instead of "Local") on any Lemmy instance. You will then get a list of accumulated posts from some federated instances as well. The list is sortable by the usual properties. The details on how this works in detail and which posts are shown elude my right now, but the functionality is there.

I'd like to know also, the community manager returns stuff with like 5 comments.

Lemmy also isn't blocked as a social networking site at my work. I assume its the same elsewhere

It's going to sound dumb, but honestly? I filled an rss reader up with some of the best sources I could think of, and am actually really enjoying just quietly taking the world in again, instead of trying to come up with my latest snarky Reddit-friendly quip.

Do you have your best source list?

News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.

Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.

Music: Pitchfork.

MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.

Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.

an rss feed of quantum-related rss feeds: https://entangled.cloud

I've actually been wanting to do this, but I don't personally know a lot of good sources that still use RSS. Would love to see your feed list.

News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.

Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.

Music: Pitchfork.

MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.

Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.

Still looking for more stuff. It honestly feels strangely better absorbing without commenting.

You can use emails to rss services as sources. I do that for everyone that asks for my email to keep me “updated”.

Yeah I did that too when Twitter died, shout-out to the fantastic NetNewsWire on mac.

But here's the thing, reading within your own walled garden doesn't expose you to radically new ideas as much. The rss only approach lacks the discovery aspect of social media. Now that Reddit is dying too I'm pretty much down to Mastodon and HN for finding interesting novel stuff.

It's difficult to curate that list for me, I want high-quality blogs as well as news. But having ~100 feeds, ~20 of which being "news" each with ~20 posts per day, meant at least 2 hours per day catching up. I quit cold turkey last autumn but want to reinstate it, except with only the folks that post once per day or less.

What I find helps is going through each category as the mood hits me. If I looked at my one main feed, I would almost be overwhelmed.

I do miss the discussion in some cases. I'm an NFL fan in the UK so I don't have a lot of other NFL fans around me. /r/nfl and /r/greenbaypackers were both great for providing me with a community of people I could discuss stuff with, in addition to the news aggregation thing. When the blackout started and I considered what I really got from Reddit, /r/nfl was the only thing really.

Mind sharing?

News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.

Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.

Music: Pitchfork.

MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.

Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.

There's https://squabbles.io

It's not federated, but the UI is okay for now than the other alternatives that I've seen. It's ran by 1 dev who has quickly been adding features and listening to user feedback. It's also nearing 16,000 users and a few users are developing some mobile apps for it.

kbin.social is really great. It’s the most active Lemmy instance and it connects with Lemmy and Mastodon so you’ve got both networks built in. The UX is, I feel, better than instances which use the Lemmy front end. The mobile site is actually functional. Sadly no app yet.

Of course the networks are much smaller than Reddit, but the conversations are much more qualitative. I honestly prefer it. Less soon scrolling.

Hacker News is till great though the more I get exposed to the whole ActivityPub fediverse thing the more I wish it wasn't disconnected. I was in a read only HN app earlier today and wanted to post a comment to HN and instantly wished I could post a link into jerboa's search and have Hacker News available as a community.

The technology is getting there. The problem is the communities need time to grow. Star Trek fans have made a real effort. The bulk of reddit content is lowest common denominator shit and those consumers want everything handed to them fully formed. They aren't going to deal with server instability and submit bug reports and try and build new communities. They will delete Apollo and install the Reddit official app.

I liked kbin.social a lot. It's a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have a ton of users, but I found that that's actually very ok. It reminds me of Reddit 10 years ago. Nowadays every thread in Reddit is either stupid memes and the same predictable jokes over and over, or some fanatical social wars stuff. Kbin looks like a place where you can actually have a conversation again, without being banned or destroyed for disagreeing even if done rationally and politely. I hope it survives its technical challenges.

be careful for what you wish for. 4chan went from both good and bad at the same time to overwhelmingly bad, eclipsing and later drowning the good due to reddit's initial purge of problematic communities implicitly encouraging them to migrate to communities like 4chan. Reddit fostered and encouraged these communities (it is said that spez was a mod for jailbait subreddit) in the initial days when its aim was to become the website with most active users/content. You really don't want reddit users here.

Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit. However reddit did host that community for years (Spez claimed the creep mods were helpful in flagging cp throughout the site), and it's ironic you mention "problematic" communities migrating to 4chan in the same context, since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit. KiwiFarms even more so.

> You really don't want reddit users here

No one wants reddit users.

>Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit.

I stand corrected then. It's been seen many times in the last few weeks in many places.

> since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit.

While true, the time I was around there, the time of gaia online/SA/4chan (2005 to 09) it was also something that people joked about. There was even a popular character called pedobear that was often used as the butt of jokes for those who sexualized minors. Though reddit was a later phenomenon, and reddit was an order of magnitude worse, it wasn't like sexualization of minors was looked at as a crime at 4chan by everyone. There were some free speech absolutists who claimed to be against it, but were against taking it down.

Surprisingly no one has mentioned Tildes.net yet. It's something in between reddit and hackernews. Requires an invite to register, though they are quite easy to find.

How? I've been anonymously lurking on Tildes for months, haven't seen an opportunity. I'm even a Patreon subscriber!

I got one today by writing to someone on r/redditalternatives mentioning it. Would offer you one, but can’t yet send invites.

Lemmy! I've been checking it out lately and people are moving popular subreddits to Lemmy's servers. It's a bit confusing at first but once you get it, it works like email. And it's... fantastic!

But I'll wait for this protest to die down to see its "real" value. Most of the posts now are about the protest and migration from Reddit. Things are on fire now.

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney,

This happened on the r/audible subreddit, the official audibledotcom customer service account became a mod and started deleting all the threads remotely critical of audible or amazon. The subreddit revolved and they were removed as a mod but it was a solid 5-months of nary a harsh word.

If they ever kill off old.reddit I'm out, I can't stand the cartoony new reddit design.

This ^^

Oooof I can totally see Disney buying the subreddit.

The whole reason to Google Reddit results is for independent enthusiast opinions positive and especially negative. Corporatised subs are going to kill that dead for many things. Another nail in the coffin of Reddit. Love of money truly is the root of all evil.

I think you’re right. The more I think about it the more I feel like Reddit to me is the comment section for thinks that either don’t have a comment section or have a bad comment section.

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

This isn't an accurate extrapolation. In fact it's extrapolating in the opposite direction.

The moderators are taking a moral stand against an API policy. But the the actual users of the subreddits never consented to this moral stand. By removing these moderators that are working against the users, reddit is giving the subreddits back to the users.

I mod a small sub that I started many years ago, the sub users expressed overwhelming support for the 2 day private protest.

So I am interested in what numbers you are using to support your statement that users did not consent.

"Overwhelming" as a proportion of all sub members? Or just as a majority of those who actually voted?

Most subs did a poll to see what the users think, and for all those I've seen there has been overwhelming support for a blackout.

I think many people didn't see or care about those original polls. All the subs I'm in that re-polled their users after the initial 2 day shutdown are now open as a result. The two that have stayed shut have not re-polled (and one didn't poll in the first place, the mods just unilaterally shut it).

Many, many subreddits held polls before deciding what to do. I know that kind of online poll is not scientific, or whatever but do you have a better idea? Not going on strike is also a moral stand that should get consent from the user base.

Sure, online polls have obvious flaws (non-response bias, how many people actually saw the poll, who was motivated to actually respond to the poll, did voters actually understand the protest would last more than 1 day, should logged out lurkers have any representation, etc)

But beyond that, shutting down a subreddit for multiple days is such a drastic action, it should require more than just a simple majority in a quick online poll.

For instance, to amend the Constitution, you typically need a supermajority (2/3 or 3/4 of different parts of the government). To convict someone guilty in a trial, you typically need evidence beyond reasonable doubt and a unanimous jury verdict.

The burden of proof that users want to shut down the subreddit should be overwhelming.

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here.

They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank.

The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money.

But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.

This whole conflict could have been nipped in the bud, people would have grumbled a bit, but as long as Reddit got their act together in terms of tooling eventually, life would have gone on, and Reddit would have had their payday too (I doubt milking mods for spare change is the master plan here).

Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.

This is the end, it's all downhill from here, I doubt they can recover.

Needless to say I'll avoid their IPO like the plague and so will many others.

10 years from now something else will have come along and replaced them and we'll all look back at this moment.

The threshold for free API usage for modding tools is being increased from 60 to 100 queries per minute

https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

There are a very small minority that exceed that even now apparently.

Seems not unreasonable to me.

Why is this downvoted?

According to the linked article, even the bots which exceed the usage were manually whitelisted to stay free.

Reddit destroyed any trust they had, so I'd guess it doesn't matter that much what they say in response at this point. It's too little, too late to say you'll keep API free for some people at this point.

I think there's still a remote opportunity they claw trust back, but it's getting smaller the longer they have their CEO out there telling people to get stuffed.

They are probably downvoted because the majority of developers of said moderator tools have pulled the pin and are shutting them down... seeing as the writing is already on the wall. Why spend any more effort maintaing the tools created when Reddit has said they will kill them off as soon as they have finished their own version? And anyone following what Reddit has been doing in the leadup to this stand-off, would be rightfully suspicious of whether Reddit even intends to uphold their pinky promise here and not just revoke API access as soon as this quietens down.

This is not even accounting for the fact that outside of business practices, they have completely alienated developers, by showing them they will take their words out of context, adversarially try to pit users against them and give them 30 days to comply or else. Why would anyone want to enter in a business agreement with a company that does this, before even looking at price?

Also: reddit pinky promises to implement mod tools they've been pinky promising for more than 5 years. Back when overwatch 1 came out, I became a mod for /r/overwatch_memes (now dead, the subreddit without an underscore ultimately was better) and even modding this subset of a subset of a gaming community would have been impossible without the API. Several moderation features that I ended up developing a bot for (using the API), reddit had been promising to implement for some time, and none of them are currently implemented. If you've been a mod all this time, you know that reddit promises to mods are completely empty. It's been fine until now because you could rely on other tools but modding anything with regular users without these tools is impossible without significantly restricting rules on allowed content.

They made their intentions clear with the pricing change, they want third party apps dead. Why carry on making or supporting them with the shadow of the noose falling on you?

You're downvoted because people clearly don't want to actually discuss this. It's all about the pitchforks.

That doesn't matter if they previously broke the bot or the bot author took them down to protest the API price change. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps change is reverted.

• AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but the last update was three weeks ago.

• Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.

• FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm not sure how many are still running.

• Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation work in the right kind of sub.

The threshold is being increased from 60 to 100 for bots which didn't delegate auth, but not for any tools that used specific user-ids. It's misleading.

To quote from reddit's docs: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16160319875...

> Important note: Historically, our rate limit response headers indicated counts by client id/user id combination. These headers will update to reflect this new policy based on client id only on July 1, 2023.

Historically, reddit rate limited by user-id, so if for example, both of us logged in using a reddit app, each of us had a rate limit of 60/min free queries. Each app only gets one client-id, regardless of the number of users it has.

Now, the rate limit of 100 is per app, not per user-id, which obviously doesn't work for any tooling that acts on behalf of the user.

Reddit can only make those claims by ignoring "moderator tool" which used user-ids. In a very real sense, reddit apps like "reddit is fun" and "apollo" were moderator tools, and those are the biggest losers in this change.

You can see someone on reddit complaining about this too: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

I'm not saying that what they're saying is necessarily wrong, but their communication around these changes makes it hard to take them in good faith.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Other than being able to maintain your own list of users, are there downsides to using Oauth?

Yup. I mod with RIF very frequently and will likely be done when it's gone.

Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage, obviously have false assumptions given they’re actually implementing the plan.

It’s a sad thing to watch.

Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage

You fool! Their projections are only garbage, because they haven't IPO'd yet! Sure, they're not profitable now, but once they IPO, they'll have the money to, uh... I mean, to become profitable! That's it!

Stop confusing the issue!

Modern finance in a nutshell.

Likely the only thing management care about is getting the IPO over the line so they can cash out and retire.

What makes you so sure that you were right? The world is way more irrational than you think and their financial projections may still be accurate.

Facebook was in a much better place when they went for IPO and they stock still fell by more than 50% on the first day. I can't see anyone that has google "reddit" since the last few days look at an IPO and go "ah yes, the website that went down from users leaving it, perfect".

We’ll see! They may yet turn out to be TikTok after all.

Yep, forget them, they're done.

i PRAY for them not to recover. the trouble is, the point with giving subs to IP owners, is extremely likely. though as likely is that reddit will be just bought whole by some ass or another...

i realize this sounds very harsh, but at this point: anything that drives people into federated services is a godsend

I disagree with your doomsday scenario.

There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.

No doubt some have already contacted Reddit management saying that if they de-mod x subreddit they will jump in and guarantee the subreddit's operation.

I don't understand the argument about the lack of free labour drying up. It won't. There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power. And Reddit management knows this. For years they have seen how moderators relish and also abuse power. That's why there are moderator guidelines.

In fact, I think it can be argued that Reddit is leveraging this moment to flush out long standing and troublesome moderators which I think is clearly being what the end game is. And Huffman's goal.

It may be silly of me to say, however, I don't think people are giving Huffman enough credit. He knew that there would be significant blowback. He has been involved with Reddit longer and probably far more in depth than any other employee or user. I wouldn't put it past him that he knows Reddit moderation is due for a shake up and is probably keen on getting rid of a subset. And by doing so he can not only pick and choose which users he wants in on what subreddits but more importantly can dictate the culture he wants.

This whole episode if far from over. He has clearly said that the new API changes are going nowhere and I'm willing to bet that he gets what he wants (which includes a mod clean out) with the outcome being a few people quitting the site and people talking about him from now until eternity.

EDIT: Spelling

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties. (...) There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power.

Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power. This is how people seeking status and power self-identify, and if they're given mod power, you can count on their subreddits going to shit rather quickly, and/or them eventually getting bored and quitting, once they realize that being a mod is a hard and thankless job, with people who need you the most hating you the most.

Now sure, the current set of moderators isn't made of saints and purely selfless people either. But it's stable. The worst moderators long ago dropped out, or rode their subreddits down to ground. Reddit ecosystem reached an equilibrium. Now the corporate is shaking everything up, and the platform will have to re-equilibrize again. I expect to watch good subreddits go to shit, some getting forked off, and maybe those forks thriving if there's still enough selfless enough volunteers left after this debacle.

> Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power

Okay. How about AI as the new mod then?

Bots creating content. Bots moderating content to fit corporate agenda. Clueless users consuming streamlined content. That would be a perfect circle.

Just cut out the literal middle “man”, and have the bots click on the ads too.

Sure, if you also let the bots buy things and sell things, then it'll be perfectly reasonable for them to also click on ads.

At that point, however, we may find out that the global economy turned into a fully automated, circular optimization process, and took off, leaving humans behind to starve and die.

The paper clip maximizer in reality.

Funny that this is the only part companies don't want.

> Okay. How about AI as the new mod then?

Sure, when we solve AI alignment (and I mean x-risk / Eliezer-style AI alignment, not the outrage-minimizing political correctness that's being called "alignment" by OpenAI and the others).

And how will this AI (that doesn't exist but sure) interact with reddit?

> Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power.

Who do you think the existing mods are?

> Who do you think the existing mods are?

The people invested in the community (or their vision of the community) enough to do that job for free, and do it well enough the community accepts it. I.e. people either not from the group I mentioned, or the least bad cases from it.

Right now (or at least before the blackout), you were looking at subreddits in a steady state. Some had excellent moderation, others less so. Users moved around according to their tastes, and as things settled, every subreddit ended having its own kind of flavor and quality level.

With the existing moderators leaving in protest and with Reddit shaking things up, everything is in flux again. It will take time for the worst, power/status-seeking mods to eventually get bored and drop out (thankfully Reddit isn't actually paying the mods, thus giving the bad ones little reason to stay), possibly destroying whatever subreddits they took over in the process.

> Who do you think the existing mods are?

I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathread.

(We're a university town, so lots of students seek people willing to fill in badly designed questionaires.)

Yes, the biggest subreddits will always have a number of power tripping mods. But the vast majority of subreddits have a stable mod team putting in a little daily effort to keep their online community organised. These are the people who will walk away if the removal of their preferred tools makes moderating harder. At least I know I will.

I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.

No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good.

Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.

To be entirely fair, it was already common on reddit to accuse mods of being on power trips. /U/awkwardtheturtle and other powermods have been a known issue for a while (see also: the /r/GME moderator kerfuffle). I agree that most moderator work was airline quality (few incidents but "televized" heavily for its failures), but most incidents get you going "well why was anyone allowed this kind of unchecked power in the first place?".

I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.

> I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO

I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO.

My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.

I do agree with you, though if any of them are reading this, I have to also validate their experience, if not their conclusions; I was shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, my hometown and nearest city, and not because I'm an alt-right troll, I just have a somewhat argumentative tone about things I care deeply about - it came down to my tone.

I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space.

In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine.

That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it.

So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!"

For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago.

In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place.

If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.

I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.

> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.

Yeah, shadowbans suck.

On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

It’s a difficult situation.

>Yeah, shadowbans suck. On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

Any online forum will just become full of crap without moderation. So moderation is a necessity. And shadowbans are a sometimes-efffective tool of moderation.

How then, to prevent abuse of power? One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.

> One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.

That’s pretty much what Reddit is like already. If you dislike the mods of one subreddit you can join another competing subreddit, or start your own.

Likewise, with Lemmy if the people on one instance are bad, leave the instance and join another or run an instance of your own.

The people who would troll you like that already know what a shadow ban is and will just create more accounts anyway.

It’s not a difficult situation, you are being willfully ignorant.

I also got into a small argument in another thread about low effort sites.

Another constant criticism of fediverse sites I'm seeing here is equally weird, this idea that responsibility for finding the right instance is given - not forced upon, but gifted to - the user, and that is a problem.

It's a feature, it's the feature that makes the system invulnerable to the sort of enshittification that this forum's parent organization specializes in. therefore, in the minds of quite a lot of people here, it's a bug, and frankly, of course VC heads would think that way; never mind the petty dictatorship of the moderator, if there is no market capturing endgame where you can either cash out or seize a community and abuse it as your personal platform (Hi, Elon), that definitely is a bug, I suppose.

My thinking is that having a slight learning curve barrier to entry, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe having a zero effort onboarding process, maybe THAT is the bug. Because who does an easy onboarding process serve, if not the VChead who wants to capture as many eyeballs as possible and turn them into income? It certainly doesn't seem to help the mods who have to deal with people who can very easily create a new account once banned.

And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.

(edit: thinking about it, though, I had nothing good to say about r/Winnipeg in the days after the shadowban, and I did speak about it in other places as a factual thing that I could demonstrate to be true. As such, their action along with my reaction was ultimately corrosive to the legitimacy of the subreddit. But at this point we've moved on to discussing the legitimacy of the whole site, and in my mind, it lost its legitimacy when it enabled shadowbans...)

But, I can see why reddit moderators have to resort to it: they do not have the ability to ban IPs, and Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs or IP blocks, because that runs contrary to their primary purpose, to capture and monetize eyeballs.

Compare to an operator of an individual Instance: of a sub is having issues with a persistent individual troll, they can appeal to the sysop (I just decided I'm calling them sysops and I don't give a shit what anyone else does) and have that individual's IP banned. If other instances allow him to return through them, well, we have defederation for instances that don't keep their houses clean.

Moreover, the sysop has zero motivation to build up as many users as possible, and that is going to do more than anything else to ensure that the only instances which tolerate trolls are going to be the ones setup specifically for that purpose, and that problem is already more or less sorted [edit: on the fediverse, anyways...].

Bottom line, the problem you're describing arises from the attempt to make content moderation compatible with scale, and that's just never gonna work, and without scale, you have no capitalism.

> And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.

If the user doesn't post, then shadow banning is much harder to detect. I regularly see comments from users who were shadow-banned by Reddit; it can take months for them to figure it out. We use shadow-banning only on spammers and trolls. Our process requires peer approval and evidence; there's also an audit trail. We used to ban these accounts, but shadow-banning them instead substantially reduced the amount of harassment we receive. Conflict is inevitable when moderating a subreddit, and we'd rather spend our effort on users who participate in good faith.

And that's one reason the platform has no legitimacy. You say YOU only use it on a certain type, but it got used on me. Have a look at my comments here, I'm far from perfect but I'm neither of those things.

I outlined in a different conversation in this thread that I can see why you have to resort to this: Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs, and I assume you are likewise not empowered to.

Reddit needs as many eyeballs as they can get, and that is why if you simply ban an account they are able to create a new one; the problem for you, the cog, is unfortunate, but from their perspective they get a new user on their balance sheet every time.

Reddit is incentivized to make your task a struggle that never ends. So it's not that I judge you for it, I judge Reddit's conflict of interest and complete unsuitability as a public square.

That said, I still see what you do as fundamentally cowardly.

Edit: It is intended to be a process with no appeal as a feature. Would you sign up to have your relationship with a community forum severed, secretly and capriciously, and with no appeal or review intended to be possible, at the whim of someone you have never met? And even if you had an attack of integrity, it will never not be a Reddit feature for the reasons outlined above, so your only course of action would not be to stop shadowbanning, but rather, to simply leave the forum for a better one. If Reddit survives as a place where Geographical locations keep their community forums, that will be a horrible fate for us.

Yep, I was also shadow banned from my local city subreddit shortly after being blanked banned from several other subreddits for simply participating in unrelated subreddits. Shadowbans are particularly problematic in city based subreddits where people are more likely to actually try and connect for something in meat space. Missing persons, lost pets, etc. We found a stray pet, but it took my wife creating an account, to finally connect with the owner via reddit despite me having had a 10 plus year old reddit account that was shadowbanned for our city.

> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not

I think they can be justified under select circumstances.

For instance, I think a shadowban is justified for accounts that exist merely to post spam or purposely derail every thread, and obviously aren't being used by a reasonable person. If an account represents a long-term existential threat to the quality of the community, then almost any legal means are justified to take action against it. Whether it's a bot or a human who just wants to watch the community burn, let them shout into the ether.

On the other hand, shadowbans against people who accidentally break the rules a couple times, or call someone a doodiehead, or have the wrong politics, or are subscribed to the wrong communities, are largely unethical. It's a form of disembodiment being imposed on an individual who has a reason for wanting to communicate with others, even if their communication is considered disagreeable.

Sadly, the latter is far more common on Reddit.

Even in the case of the incessant troll, the shadowban is just pretend. I identified after three posts with no engagement that something was afoot, and in order to see it, all I had to do was log out. It is incredibly petty, and even more ineffective.

You might be surprised. I've seen users who were shadow-banned by Reddit for months without figuring it out.

Exactly, I don’t think people would remotely feel the same if Wikipedia did something to alienate all the experienced moderators in such a way a mass exodus occurred. Wikipedia would go to shit as inexperienced mods took over

Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.

Wikipedia went to shit long time ago. I only trust it with plants and animals.

> Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.

This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me".

If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.

Maybe you need to read my statement more closely, specifically the words "on this one".

I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil.

Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period.

That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.

I know a fair number of HN participants in person, and a much larger number online but out-of-band. As a rule they're pretty knowledgeable within their field, and nice people in line with their HN persona. I've seen all kinds of beautiful stuff here, projects that get off the ground friendships, altruism and extreme effort to clarify things sometimes in the face of unreasonable assumptions and worse. HN really is special. But it is also very fragile and the degree to which this is the case is probably not much appreciated.

It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after.

Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.

This forum does have nuanced thought, from some users, some of the time.

But I wouldn't say that's the case for the majority of comments on complex, charged, and/or politicized issues. Most of us are morons about most things; and most of the time we don't even know it.

And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.

This issue is very clear - Huffman is 100% in the wrong. He's been caught lying about some very serious issues, like utterly falsely claiming blackmail - and then doubled and tripled down it. He has made his character known over the years, un-personing Swartz, editing users comments for giggles, letting bots and advertisers swarm the site, etc.

Most mods AND communities on Reddit are against these changes, strongly, and have made that abundantly clear.

> And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.

Afaik that is just one and the community helps out as well.

I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them.

Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head:

- The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users.

- /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted.

- Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread.

- City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city.

- Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer.

- The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods.

- /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons.

I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.

Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened.

Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so.

I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies.

So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

"No Politics" is always a shorthand for "No Politics I don't agree with".

> So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

I never said it was a Reddit specific issue, so I'm not sure why you're reading that into the comment. The discussion here is about Reddit though, and there have been numerous posts here wondering why people are upset with Reddit mods, and saying that mods just keep the place clean, so I listed some examples off the top of my head about why people might not like many of the mods. In the past, when the topic has been broader, I’ve discussed this as an internet wide issue (the people who have the time to live online don’t tend to be the best socialized individuals).

The fact that bad behavior is common on the internet doesn’t mean bad behavior is not an issue.

An issue that has no relevance to the discussion of silos vs fediverse. If anything, the fedi is probably going to allow for slightly more actual free speech in the end; nobody is gonna kick Trump off truth.social, for instance, and people who are into that sort of thing still get to have a community, whatever mainline Mastodon might think about that. I doubt r/the_donald is ever coming back.

You're absolutely right about all of that - and yet, I'm still on the mods side for this one.

Huffman is and always has been an absolute tool; in fact he's a big factor for much of what you're talking about.

And this is an awful policy, that make giant steps toward a level of enshittification that I won't tolerate.

There's a good number of Reddit mods that also run IRC chatrooms. There's a venn diagram there and it doesn't have an IPO slice.

> from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO.

It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".

You are the exception, not the rule. Overzealous or corporate owned reddit mods already killed the site for a lot of people. I feel bad for the mods of smaller communities, but I have no sympathy for most. I'm glad that people like you are walking away, you can make some other part of the internet a better place, or better yet, you can now devote your efforts to making some real place better.

> Who do you think the existing mods are?

People are always stepping up to be mods. Most shouldn't be.

The existing mods of successful subreddits are the ones who stepped up, should have been mods, and who demonstrated it by creating a successful community. If you replace those by random wannabe mods, on average the result will be bad.

> on average the result will be bad

And in many cases the results will be catastrophic. In other cases the people stepping up will have no idea what it actually means to moderate the subreddits of the larger sizes, and will subsequently fail.

> should have been mods

Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.

Mods should be servant to their community; and not use them for whatever purpose they see fit. It's a thankless, ungrateful job. But here is the trick: no one is forcing you to take it. If you think Reddit changes are the straw that broke the camel's back, and that it's not worth it anymore you do have an option: step down.

But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.

Except that whole thing goes away when the users were polled vñanf voted in favor.

I'm not a mod. I used RiF. Same goes for many Apollo users and others.

The attempts to set forth the narrative by reddit are very basic but it remains to be seen if effective.

if you don't like what that the users of a sub (both unpaid moderating users and non-moderating users) decided to do with their sub, you can always start your own

honestly this is reminiscent of a certain group of people unhappy with the results of how The People voted in a certain election, and consequently complained that said results were illegitimate and should be overturned and the people they disagree with should be removed from power

The polls I have personally had a number of participants that was a single digit percent of the number of subscribers. Not exactly representative of the whole community.

If the participation rate in the US election was 3.5% because they announced it 3 days prior to the vote and only to a fraction of citizens, there would be good reason to be mad at the results

said certain group of people who contest said election use the same argument, among others, to push the view that they're the true majority, and so the election there, too, should be overturned and the opposite result instated, just with different arbitrary and ultimately meaningless thresholds

if you ask me, all those nonvoters would have voted to close down the subreddit. I'd guess you think differently, but since they didn't vote, we'll never know, and they don't count for either.

as a side note, if the result had been the opposite, would the same people be similarly rallying to have the vote overturned and flipped to "blackout" due to the low "turnout"? I doubt it.

>Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.

Yet I'm not hearing Reddit talk about hiring professional moderators

>Mods should be servant to their community

Why? They're not working for a charity. If Reddit expects free servants, there's regulations on things like internships, which Reddit doesn't appear to be remotely in compliance with. Servants generally get paid when working at for-profit companies or are otherwise subject to specific labor laws for things like internships. How many IPO shares are Reddit's servants getting?

>But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.

Yet there is a long history of labor strikes. Reddit could find itself facing a class action lawsuit by ex-moderators over unpaid wages. The more Reddit gets itself involved in managing free labor, the more it exposes itself to liability.

It is survival of the fittest kind of thing for online communities, or survivorship bias. Darwin would like to have a word or two.

There's more: to the extent that Reddit corporate jumps at the chance to accept all these people, it will be replacing the 'currently stable' moderation environment with a substantial class of ringers, where we don't know their intentions other than they are prepared to back Reddit's power move here.

This is potentially a Twitter-like implosion, if they go there. Far from having major subreddits taken over by companies (which likely have no idea this is happening and have no motivation to suddenly supply social media volunteers), it's gonna be major subreddits taken over by kittens in blenders and 4chan-like behavior.

There's common factors among folks like this, and one is that they can be coordinated. I think it much more likely that Reddit gets taken over by conspiracy theorists and terrorists, than, for instance, hippies. Some will be very pleased at the result, but then some are really pleased at what's happened to Twitter (as long as you ignore the valuation, that is)

Lucid comment. Yes, always approach moderator, admin, other similar role candidates first. Some of the ones asking are going to be great. The trouble lies with the rest, who should never have the role.

Long ago, that was how I became a sysadmin. I still remember some of the talks. Great stuff on how to take good care of users, systems, other things.

On Reddit, people asking to moderate has generally been a bust in my experience.

I think you nailed it with this comment - there is a long line of folks who are waiting for open mod positions.

As a general principle, people in that line self-identify as unsuitable for the role and should not be given it, unless your goal is to destroy the community.

Which I guess is fine for Reddit - people will escape bad mods by forking subreddits off, and things will eventually settle down. Just don't expect your favorite subreddits to be there once the dust settles.

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.

You mean "4 chan users salivating at the idea of trolling reddit" ?

Is 4chan living rent free in your head?

or it's just a fun stand in for "mentally unwell racist person"

You mean 'controlling' reddit. Folks like this have had tastes of power before. If you think about it, knowing that Reddit is a feeder to ChatGPT, it could be a strategic move to try and make it so that all the AIs of the future default to 4chan mindset.

Bold if true! Heck of a motivation.

And Reddit as it stands is clearly not optimal for delivering this, but with enough dedicated mods power-modding the heck out of everything, maybe it COULD be the ideal source data for the ultimate 4chan artificial intelligence…

I would be only mildly surprised if some group of channers would plan that. Despite their toxicity, they are the most focused and determined group I have ever seen. So bad it is always for destructive purposes. They could have been great people.

4channers are remarkably resourceful and effective at times, if any group could manage such an ambitious task as poisoning all LLM AIs it would be them. I've heard it described as weaponized autism.

You make some good points but if there's one fatal flaw these big tech CEOs and their boards seem to have it's hubris. Reddit doesn't have a moat and it also doesn't have data that's amazingly interesting. This may very well be part of a power play by Huffman but he's forgotten the only two things that really matter at the end of the day, which are quality and volume/scale. Screwing his mods hurts him on both of those counts, because bottom line is it will result in people leaving and putting their energy into rival projects. Tech giants can and do fall and it almost always happens because they lose sight of those two things which matter and get embroiled in their own internal political navel-gazing BS. If he is sacrificing quality and scale for anything he's slowly signing the death warrant of the business he manages.

Mind you this may even be intentional - "let's move this business into the maturation phase where it continually gets shittier and our margins get higher until it collapses and we sell it off or something" is a completely normal and regular strategy, happens all the time, businesses exist to make money for their owners. All businesses go through three phases, growth, maturity, and decline. But as a user or consumer if you see it moving toward the end of the cycle it's usually in your best interest to get the hell out sooner rather than later.

> Reddit doesn't have a moat

Reddit has a tremendous moat. Like any social network, its users are the moat. Its usability has gotten worse in the past few years but there simply aren't great alternatives. (Federated services like Lemmy are not serious reddit alternatives.)

Well it's the long tail of high-effort users, comments, subreddits, that are the moat. The vast majority of content is replaceable by tiktok, twitter, etc...

Users are a pretty weak moat. We know this because if they were a good one, Reddit wouldn't exist. We'd all still be on Myspace or Digg or wherever. Apple, Microsoft, Google, those guys have moats. Leaving their ecosystems is HARD. Leaving Myspace, Digg, Facebook or Reddit just because there are less users somewhere else isn't really that big of a loss. Once people have a good alternative they do it pretty quickly. The history of rapid turnover in social media giants compared to other tech sectors is the proof.

If you wanted to be edgy I think you could even argue users are an anti-moat for social media because they age, become uncool, and then the next generation doesn't want to hang out in your uncool boomer space and goes somewhere else. This is FB's current predicament.

It's not much of a moat if Reddit hasn't derived a single cent of profit from it.

While I agree that the situation described is excessive, good mods are non fungible, a mod will have to take unpopular decisions, and act according to experience to determine a best path to follow, what the mod team does determines the kind of discussion to be had in the platform and who's allowed to have it

It's the reason subs will look for "experienced mods", there's a learning curve and a taste you'll have to develop, specially with smaller communities

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.

Either those people will be bad mods who will shepherd their communities into further decline, or many of them will eventually come around to the position that Reddit's changes are bad for mods.

There's nothing magic about the current batch of mods other than that they got there first. The same things that affected their perspective will affect the perspective of their replacements.

Exactly. I canceled my monthly subscription and logged out. I mostly loved Reddit for long for pieces anyway, so I'm going to pay more attention to Substack and see how that emerges.

I'm curious, why you even get subscription in the first place?

No ads the 'proper' way, I guess?

reddit had ads?

'promoted posts'. Not too intrusive so I never looked for a way to block them.

Whatever the outcome of this si, an I never used Reddit, it seems to have been an incredibly dumb idea to do all of that before the IPO...

They were done the minute mods broke their habit of moderating their subreddits. Some dedicated mods might come back, but it is really hard to return to a lost habits so the damage is done already.

"The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out."

From the AMA by Reddit's CEO 6 days ago[1]:

Mod Tools

We know many communities rely on tools like RES, ContextMod, Toolbox, etc., and these tools will continue to have free access to the Data API.

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

This entire thing started, as far as I recall, because the above was NOT being done. You're reading misinformation / misdirection.

And once it had gained momentum, it exploded into a power struggle with the owners of the site. It's now a pure tribal war: the mod tribe will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because - just like all major platforms - it cannot support adblocking alternate clients that are profitable while free riding on their infrastructure.

It's also very predictable who will win the war: whomever has the root keys of the servers and web domains. Major reddits like r/funny are providing very limited value in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the content is viral, not locally produced. So if a user is a r/funny subscriber and that goes dark, just present him with content from r/humor for a few months, they will get to see the same viral memes and 95% of the users will never notice anything went wrong.

Mods vastly overestimate their power here and underestimate the number of lurkers that form the backbone of Reddit viewership and are indifferent to this issue.

The price reddit is charging for API access seems much higher than the value to Reddit of the ads that are being blocked by the client using that API.

I agree, they are clearly eying data access as a revenue source and company moat, and position themselves for the AI boom. But even a much smaller fee would have killed 3rd party clients, and they needed to do that anyway.

There is a very simple way out that reddit could take, similar to what spotify does: Third Party Apps continue being allowed, but API access requires the user's account to have reddit gold. People would be unhappy and complain, but the protest would end, Reddit would increase their revenue, third party app developers wouldn't have to pay, and people would accept it in the end.

This is not a fight over access fees, it's a fight for data. The fees are prohibitive deliberately, to guarantee nobody makes more money than Reddit out of user generated data.

How are the fees prohibitive?

From the same AMA linked above:

----

Free Data API

Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:

100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.

Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.

Premium Enterprise API / Third-party apps

Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).

----

So users are happy to pay, say, Netflix $15 a month, but are outraged when Reddit tries to charge heavy app users $1 a month?

1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls.

Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps". They are ensuring that the only entities that would even be able to afford their API costs are large businesses. As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms. Do you want increased capitalistic control of the Internet? Because this is one further step down that road, that I fear we may already be too far down.

"1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls."

Whoever said anything about whether it cost Reddit 24 cents to provide 1k API calls?

This subthread is about whether what Reddit is charging for API calls is "prohibitive", not about what it cost Reddit.

"Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps"."

They're charging whoever uses Reddit's API keys, and I don't understand why third-party app users can't just use their own API keys and pay for their own API usage.

"As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms."

Why couldn't he just pass the costs down to the users of his app? Or just ask them to use their own API keys?

> it's a fight for data.

It's a loser fight for reddit. If you show your data to user, in any form, it can be scrapped. period.

I take a different view in the sense that reddit has benefitted from the unpaid work of mods for 15+ years.

Mods have generally been either neutral or positive towards reddit as an entity in the past, now... I suspect a lot are asking themselves if continuing to be a mod is worth the effort, at least on reddit itself, I can imagine a lot of them are looking for alternatives or just thinking about giving up altogether.

If it was about the ads, then they'd tie the API access to the user account, and require a user to sub to Gold for the ability to use third-party clients, then ads wouldn't be necessary in the third-party clients. This just goes to show that advertising itself is out of control - either they make more money off ads than they do subscription revenue, or it's purely about control. Money and control are two sides of the exact same coin, so either way you look at it, this is pure greed.

> (users) will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because it can not support (servicing 3rd party clients)

To be clear, Reddit has had $350+ million dollars in yearly revenue for a few years now, primarily from premium subscriptions and ad revenue (ads that are not, in fact, always blocked by 3rd-party clients -- ads show up in reddit Sync Pro all the time)

They absolutely could roll back everything and be profitable. They're "struggling to profit" because the CEO is literally burning all the money trying to chase an IPO, not because there was ever any fundamental problem with Reddit's cost structure.

The same echo chamber some of those very mods operate in. Pot, kettle, black. Suck it up. You think the hot air from those servers comes by magic? Plenty of them need replacing. The king is dead. Long live the king!

> Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.

There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this.

No, they've made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care about all of this stuff is a price they're willing to pay.

It seems pretty clear that they believe the people who will leave are not crucial enough (in function and number) to make the overall communities collapse, and that the result they want to achieve is worth the losses.

The mistake is that reddit thinks moderators use the API for convenience and not by necessity. Previous protests against reddit didn't last long, because they were against things that fundamentally didn't matter outside of ethics, while this is, especially for moderators, a significant ask for their already unpaid labor. Moderators, emboldened by user support, are on strike because this affects them personally in a big way. The interpersonal bullshit spez in particular has been pulling was just the nail in the coffin for users who weren't quite sure who to support.

I am one of those users who doesn't quite know who to support. I absolutely support the end users generating and consuming the content. There are seemingly regular examples of both, admin and mods abusing these users.

What kind of mod tools do the apps allow that Reddit does not?

I do not know if these are mod tools I would agree are necessary (e.g. bans for repeated spam) or are these tools that I would agree allow mods to abuse their power (e.g. ban users are who mere followers of other subreddits).

Frankly, I fear unofficial mod tools could lead to much worse problems if at least portions of the API are not carefully rate limited. Here I include pricing as a type of rate limiting and this could be Reddit's attempt at reeling in this abuse (even if only for IPO reasons). A particular egregious example of such an abuse would be to download all new users' history of posts to make a race determination and ban a new user because of that. Sure, a mod could do this manually using Reddit's UI, but it would remain more difficult to automate this on a large-scale.

I agree. Judging from r/all, they seem to be chasing tictok. It's an almost entirely auto-play short videos, mostly reposts from tictok.

Well, if I was Huffman, the question I would be asking is can I bring revenue up so much from api and other things that I can now employ a lot of mods?

He might have made that call already, and it might be possible.

Facebook works with paid mods after all.

> But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.

Nope. The value of being a reddit mod is clout. Clout does not matter to me hence I would not want to skip $$$$ for a clout of one. It matters to them hence they do it for $0.00. As they do not want to do the work, they get no clout. I applaud reddit for nuking them.

Classic corporate leader mentality, thinking they have absolute control over everything, just because their employees must do as they're told.

Facebook and Twitter are not bot ridden ghost towns... but anyways, I'll make the opposite prediction: Reddit is going to turn out just fine and this episode will quickly become a memory from the past.

Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment.

It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company.

FB is a boomer & genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with ads and most millennials & genZ seemingly using it as a glorified contacts list. It’s a shadow of what it was.

My impression on Twitter is completely different. It's been actually quite nice lately.

Yes, with "blocktheblue" installed it's easier than ever to block trolls on sight. Unfortunately some of the trolls are catching and choosing not to get "verified" by lord Elon.

Twitter seems perfectly healthy. I came back after years away.

It sounds like you’d just grown used to the previous manufactured consensus.

There are a LOT more MAGA "verified" troll bots on there on anything to do with politics. Why are MAGA people trolling on the Bernie Sanders feed for example? Anyway, it's okay if you only follow mostly "fact-based" accounts and don't bother with any political or news sources.

If someone has the words "manufactured consent" in their comment it's a dead giveaway that MAGA bullshitting is what they want, thinking it somehow represents "free speech". So, from the perspective of the GP Twitter is probably now more healthy than ever.

People being free to say things you disagree with — including “MAGA bullshitting” — is representative of a return to free speech principles.

If you have the understanding of a 14 year old, sure.

Meanwhile, the understanding of the rest of us has moved to understanding that hate sketch, & toxic environments resulting from it, restricts the speech of minorities.

But you’re ok with that as long as no MAGA racist is told to shut up, apparently, so don’t pretend you’re pro-free speech. You’re simply pro-racists.

I direct you to Twitter's valuation. So, I take it you're a communist and don't approve of capitalism or a marketplace of ideas showing its preferences by financial support or lack thereof?

In fairness, both the MAGAs and the tankies are pretty happy, but then there's precious little difference (or none).

Free and healthy forums don't value as well as curated and highly controlled ones.

The previous "highly-curating" management at least fought politically motivated government takedown request from questionably democratic countries. The current management just rolls over and claims nothing can be done.

I wouldn't call this state of affairs "free". More like spineless.

> The previous "highly-curating" management at least fought politically motivated government takedown request from questionably democratic countries.

The opposite is true, old Twitter colluded with the FBI in suppressing political information like the Hunter Biden laptop case, where the FBI falsely labeled accounts as Russian propaganda. There was a lot of stuff like this in the Twitter files, yet the media conveniently failed to report on it.

The Twitter Files showed nothing of the sort. Can tell you just bought the lies others sold about it through.

God, you lot are so easy to grift…

>I direct you to Twitter's valuation.

That's an imperfect correlate of user experience. A lot of sites have banned NSFW content for the sake of their valuations in ways that have obviously agitated their userbase.

I agree with you on all points, except to nuance your last:

(1) This may not be true of other parts of the world, and in particular, it may not be true of countries outside the 'anglosphere'. (Anyone care to report on international FB health?)

(2) Even within the Anglosphere, there are still very specific pockets of FB which are viable. In my experience, they are usually attached to queer community and/or leftist organizing. FB activity has in fact picked up since the Muskpocalypse. I imagine it will pick up again now that the Fediverse is hitting the scaling wall imposed by using a protocol that is arguably exponential-ish big-O with federated server count. (https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/110198847653604631)

I'm sort of hoping that Nostr takes off before BlueSky figures out a way of owning the fediverse. Or even Secure Scuttlebutt! Now that would be a weird timeline.

SSB was horribly unusable last time I gave it a try.

Nostr is great of course and everyone should just build on that.

Yeah, that’s all absolutely fair. That is, however, a problem for most platforms as—generally-the Anglosphere (or at least that plus Western Europe) is the paying customer.

Pivoting to cater to/exploit that market is not really possible for most of them now either.

I disagree. Personally I still think Twitter is a goldmine for following the latest relevant releases of AI-papers (@_akhaliq), the current Stock market buzz (several accounts), and the Ukraine war from an OSINT and serious journalism perspective (@maxseddon).

You get what you decide to follow.

I won‘t use it anymore since the third party shut down and the inferior product they themselves provide. And the heart of the Apple community migrated to Mastoton and it doesn‘t feel ethically right to use it right now due to right wing people being catered there.

I'd argue that Reddit is even more ideologically biased, especially on the largest subs. Personally, I quite enjoy both sites although they do have different types of content.

A lot of people on the left basically can't imagine a social media platform being good unless it heavily restricts right-wing speech/expression.

Gonna need an example here. Otherwise this looks like low effort right wing fauxrage.

Example: Someone just talked about an alleged "crazy MAGA-crowd" on Twitter just because censorship has decreased. That sounds more like "low effort left wing fauxrage" than the opposite.

Enforcing terms of service is not censorship. However stochastic terrorism is and you seem fine with that.

The irony.

Literally every series study—and meta study—shows that social media platforms have a strong right wing bias, and have for years.

The right lives off a fictional persecution complex tho so… your comment is hardly a surprise, or original.

you have blinders on. Tucker Carlsens videos have tens of millions of views on Twitter. Heads of states and scientists from around the world still communicate via twitter. Even tumblr-weirdo types still post there. You couldn't be more wrong.

> you have blinders on. Tucker Carlsens videos have tens of millions of views on Twitter.

Twitter misrepresents views and impressions. The "views" you see under the video are impressions. Presumably reached 24ish M views, 110ish M impressions on first episode.

Episode 3 has, presumably, 90M impressions and < .6M likes, < 0.170M retweets etc. The metrics (likes and retweets) are not particularly good for a supposedly high engagement video, are they?

You think 600,000 likes is low engagement?

No. I think that in the context, 600k likes is low engagement.

We are speaking about 2-3 orders of magnitude difference.

For comparison, MKBHD video [1], 1.2 orders of magnitude difference between views and likes; Adam's video [2], 1.4 orders; 40 minute long video essay on House Md [3] (1.5M views with subscriber count of 0.15M) , 1.7 orders of magnitude.

Carlson's engagement has 2.17 orders of magnitude difference, while being as long as [1], longer than [2], and far shorter than [3].

All of the videos above are supposed to be far less "entertaining" and are expected to have far less engagement value, yet outperformed Carlson's thing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvN5_GXlg2Y

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK5PzV35UPA

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwbB7XkjwHw

The voting culture on YT and Twitter could be different.

Everyone kept going on about pressing the like button and smashing the subscribe button on YouTube for years.

I would not be surprised if people on YouTube use the like button more actively than people on Twitter.

Besides, is 1.7 orders of magnitude (from one of your examples) even significantly different from 2.1 orders of magnitude enough to draw any conclusions at all?

> Besides, is 1.7 orders of magnitude (from one of your examples) even significantly different from 2.1 orders of magnitude enough to draw any conclusions at all?

10^(2.1) / 10^1.7 gives us about 2.5x lower engagement in Carlson's video over some unknown guy's 40 minute long video on House Md.

This is mostly nonsense.

Carlson's show averaged 4.3 million viewers on fox.

His latest episode on twitter has almost 16 million.

I wouldn't really trust the numbers twitter is putting out.

They have no obligation to any shareholders not to lie.

Can you, in good conscience, accept that 1 in 8 people saw this tweet [1]?

http://web.archive.org/web/20230616134055/https://twitter.co...

Yeah I'll take Twitter's metrics with a metric ton of salt. They cannot be trusted. A "view" could be two seconds of autoplay with the video half-in-view when it shows up in the "for you" tab. Not real engagement.

Your experience of Twitter and mine are very different. I suggest following people who produce threads and tweets you enjoy and blocking, muting and unfollowing others.

Twitter is bearable just 1) never use "for you" tab, only "following" 2) don't follow trolls 3) mute reply trolls and llm autoreply accounts 4) maintain a biiiig blocklist of words.

FB: don't know but I surely see almost no ads. I use mbasic.

What do you think the major politics and news subs are on Reddit? Or is it only bot-ridden, ideological fake-outrage when it's right wing?

The running joke in /r/politics is it’s all bots anyhow. That’s not the dunk you think it is.

This is not true in developing countries. From my experience, the poorer a country, the more likely you are to see extensive, serious use of Facebook. And the revenue growth opportunity is huge for FB in these places. It is already flat or slightly negative in highly advanced countries.

Kind of, but GDP per capita is way lower. It would take 35 average Nigerian users to replace one average American. Which still isn't exactly true, since there are high-margin items that are impossible to cross-sell that way. E.g. a $1k iPhone is affordable by a $70k american but not by any single $2k income Nigerian.

Sheer quantity of users doesn't replace higher GDP cohorts.

That’s a fair point, but losing one to gain the other (which is what’s happening at Twitter) is not a good strategy either.

There have always been both liberals and conservatives on twitter, and they have always had fun socking it out. The only difference today is that there's no more orchestrated censorship of conservatives going on, since Musk bounced most of the crybullies out of the company, and put an end to the FBI payments for banning things the government doesn't like. The same cannot be said for Facebook.

Tons of left leaning Twitter accounts were banned under the old regime. If you are a right winger, you might not be aware of this.

Example?

"Ugh. This place is such a ghost town that it even has Republicans and old people."

But you repeat yourself.

No, it’s mostly just those. If you want to spend all your time in The Villages, feel free. Most sane people do not.

On the rare occasion I open Facebook I’m immediately trolled by paid News Corp tabloid garbage. Like every time. So definitely can confirm.

Not as ghost townny as Bluesky

Blue sky still doesn't have open sign ups so pretty apples and oranges. It's a closed alpha right now.

By fine you mean where they are now, still massively unprofitable?

I think Reddit is financially unstable and they are doing this to try to become like Facebook, etc. In other words, financially stable. It's a company, if people stop buying the product it will fold like any other company. Time will tell.

When you’re a company relying on outsourcing moderation work to an army of unpaid moderators, it’s probably not a good idea to drive away said moderators. Especially when your customers (advertisers) really don’t like sites that allow bad content to slip through their moderation too much.

That would make sense if they wanted to emulate FB, which is questionable in itself, but how they're proceeding with these changes is completely killing the very thing that made them successful in the first place. It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.

It's a very dumb move, considering they had all the resources and power to do this right, and still increase their revenue. Now they will increase it momentarily, which will please shareholders, but eventually this will die down as people abandon the platform because it has become a shell of its former self.

> It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.

You're assuming they care, or ever cared. Maybe I'm getting too cynical, but I feel it's pretty clear Reddit leadership doesn't give a damn about Reddit the discussion/community site. For them, it's just a late-stage company that's been pumped and needs to be dumped. Where we see Reddit as its own unique artifact, they see it as just another money-producing asset, mature and ripe for harvest. They'll destroy it to cash out, as it has always been the plan - it's almost always the plan with startups in general - and find some other thing to repeat the process.

That makes sense now, as a scheme to increase valuation before the IPO[1]. But I wouldn't say that that has been their strategy all along. They're still not profitable after all these years, and the relationship with the community has been amicable, for the most part. The API has been free since the beginning, after all, which has allowed the site to prosper.

Though it does feel like they're ready to sacrifice the community for short-term revenue, and that their mid-term plan might just be to cash out once the ship starts sinking.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-aims-ipo-second-ha...

> They're still not profitable after all these years, and the relationship with the community has been amicable, for the most part.

IANAEconomist, but I think the current go-to explanation is that companies can remain unprofitable indefinitely, focusing on increasing growth and stacking more and more loans / investment rounds - as long as interest rates are near-zero, making money cheap. Now that they've gone up, there's enormous pressure to unwind the stack, and such companies need to start making money right frakkin now, hence the sudden squeeze[0] done by Reddit (and other SaaS businesses).

[0] - The so-called "enshittification". I dislike the term, but it was coined to describe exactly this direction of company evolution.

It's weird to see Aaron Swartz evoked as some sort of martyr vis a vis Reddit. (You're not the first person to do it.)

As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?

Considering he was a major force driving the rewrite of Reddit from Lisp (the version that HN is based on currently) to Python, adding features like Markdown support (a language he helped create in 2002), Aaron defined major parts of the site that have persisted across multiple rewrites of Reddit's codebase.

Hacker News is written in arc. The first reddit was written in Common Lisp. clisp, specifically, I believe.

Aaron convinced them to do it in his web.py and it was rewritten in a weekend (or so the story went). Later, it was written in Pylons and open sourced. No idea these days.

Ouch. Mixed character, that's for sure, but I guess no hero is perfect.

Well, their Common Lisp setup was hilariously broken, not by fault of the language IMO...

The amazing part is (as far as I remember) that both were implemented[1] as single files[2][3].

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060213215829/http://webpy.org/...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20060106081029/http://webpy.org/...

This was pretty common back then even for extremely complicated (for the time) sites (graybeard here). FCGI rewarded having a single huge application that would gradually leak memory over the course of the day until you told the intern to bounce the service when certain red lights started going off too frequently.

I had the same impression as you until I listened to a podcast with Steve Huffmann about the early days of Reddit. For some time, he and Aaron worked quite intensively on the site. From the podcast, it rather appeared that they had different visions about the site. Aaron wanted to build a very different kind of community and experience. When Reddit started to become successful, there was less and less time to work on these „visions“ until he lost interest and basically left the team.

Lucked out in terms of money in the short term, not so much in terms of finding a good fit.

Baidu pioneered this exact same sellout strat decades ago. Sad to see Reddit going down the same despicable path.

Why do people keep bringing up Aaron Swartz around this? He was just an early developer for the site, not even part of its original creation.

What would you rather they do, go bankrupt?

Reddit is not profitable. They need a path to profitability to continue operating in a high rate environment.

I'm very sympathetic. Doesn't seem like alienating all the volunteer labor is the way to go though.

Without much inside info, I think what they should have done is something like: 1. Make actually-good first-party tools for moderators, 2. Figure out how to monetize everything else.

But trying to make money off of the volunteer labor is not the way to go, IMO.

It really reminds me of Twitter. Why can't these super high traffic sites where all the content is contributed for free figure out how to make money?

> What would you rather they do, go bankrupt?

If they're unable to build a profitable product off of the existing foundations then, yes, I absolutely want them to fail. This is how capitalism works.

> Reddit is not profitable. They need a path to profitability to continue operating in a high rate environment.

They've had over a decade to innovate their way to success just like every other tech company of that era.

From a business standpoint, they are an abject failure and don't deserve to exist if they can't hire people smart enough to monetize without alienating the entire user base.

Seeing as Reddit is already in the top visited sites in the US by many metrics [1] I find it somewhat hard to believe that they can't find a way to better monetize than astronomically increasing its API access.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites

This makes good sense sadly. I suspect even fan run alternative subs will be banned out of existence for spurious reasons. It's the 80:20 principle, as long as they can keep the big subs that drive the traffic open they won't care if the smaller ones have little or no moderation.

So much user-generated content going to waste. Idiots at Reddit forgot who was responsible for everything that is in place today, and they forgot the unrewarded work and countless hours of time the moderators and everyone else put in.

This is going to be an upside down tumble, and we all know what happened to Tumblr.

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

They have to be platinum ad partners in order to get their subs, of course. Just like how yelp extorts companies for reviews, reddit now extorts companies for comments.

That would be a dangerous game to play with Disney or Paramount/CBS. I'd sooner assume that /r/starwars and /r/startrek serve at the pleasure of their respective IP holders, and I don't believe Reddit has pockets deep enough to challenge either of them.

I mean, Star Trek fans are used to seeing every interesting creative fan project shut down by a C&D letter - and as for Star Wars, everyone knows you don't go up against the House of the Mouse.

Did Reddit forget why they were popular in the first place? Remember the Digg redesign? Seems like every Reddit update has been user-hostile in a way that was much worse than the Digg stuff.

Being popular isn't their primary goal.

(I'm not saying I like the changes or think they are good, I'm just saying that you aren't analyzing their motivations if you focus on popularity)

Very true, I've seen the same phenomenon at other startups firsthand, when business leaders are eager to burn unlimited amounts of user goodwill to make number go up.

Being popular used to pay the bills, in the form of VC financing. The jig is up, now they need to make actual money.

As far as I've heard, r/startrek already started their own instance at https://startrek.website and indicated they will close their sub for good. This may be the first major sub to be handed over. Paramount may then even sue startrek.website for IP infringement, etc.

I'm re-stocking my strategic popcorn reserves.

Oh, and /r/DaystromInstitute moved there too. I guess I'll have to check this Lemmy thing out - that subreddit was more than 50% of what kept me logged in to Reddit in the first place.

That they did that and that their community followed is super cool ! It shows that the decentralized web isn’t dead and is a viable solution.

Well, startrek fans already have the built-in knowledge of how federation works so I guess that might have been easier than other communities.

Yep, instantly followed them from lemmy.world. :)

Someone joked that it's natural for Star Trek to join the Federation early.

Interesting that the stickied post on https://startrek.website mentions they have a Patreon setup to help with hosting costs.

> We’ve started a Patreon here: Patreon.com/treksite. There’s only one plan and it’s just $4. If our growth continues like it has, we’re going to need to upgrade our hosting very soon.

$4 is not outside of the realm of what it might have cost a regular user to continue paying for one of these 3rd party Reddit Apps on the new pricing [1]. There are clear benefits to paying your own way: owning your data, stronger community identity; when boiling down to money alone I found it an interesting comparison, since that's what this whole situation started about. However it is certainly no longer just about the money at this point after public comments made by Reddit Corp.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23743993/reddit-apollo-cl...

They've already reversed the permanent closing: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/14aifzm/rstartrek...

Turned out lots of the community members don't care about this and don't want to move. Shocking stuff

This is giving me flashbacks to when Digg.com committed a similar suicide, which was a major part of Reddit's growth back in the day.

And now we get to the real reason for their bizarre behaviour. They want to push ordinary mods off the platform to be replaced by their own drones. You can tell which subs are modded by shills by who broke the strike. Like r/worldnews that was modded by Ghislaine Maxwell right up until the day she was incarcerated. https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/

They could just do that anyway, (and I'm pretty sure selling influence is actually one of the things these protesting careerist mods do, just with more steps) the "real reason" is the API is generating less revenue than what it replaces, no big conspiracy

If that where true, they would have replied to those Devs who accepted the new API pricing. Instead, they ignored them for at least 2 out of the 4 weeks notice they gave.

Unless we'll find a way to have neutral sites that can run a discussion forum such as Reddit and others, this problem will be recurring.

Say Reddit goes under, there will be another company looking to fill the vacuum. It will play nice for a year or two until they have the majority of the market and then become an asshole company looking to censor whatever they don't like and become hated just like the company they displaced.

Somehow I think people lose their minds when they feel like they have any sorts of power over others...

The selling off of communities _dedicated_ to IP (Disney is an excellent example you give) is a genius move imho, and perhaps was part of the strategy for going IPO. Not only does Reddit slurp up more user data via official Apps, they have revenue from the IP owners.

They have the deep pockets to employ mods to keep the place clean, especially now 3rd party Mod tools are permitted - it's just the direct user-experience tools/apps which are kicked out.

I would bet the _vast_ majority of consumers don't really care about the blackouts/API changes. They just want to catch up on the latest F1 news, recent movie trailers or whatever their hobby.

According to this admin they will use rules 4 (inactive moderation) and 2 (vandalism) to drive out the mods. https://np.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code...

Therefore, if mods want to retain their position, they need to poll their users for support, and then reopen the sub in a very limited capacity that continues the spirit of the protest while obeying the rules. I.e. mods are free to run the subs as they like, so they could limit posting to users with > X karma, or > Y account age. As long as the community agrees, it can't be considered vandalism.

And /u/spez also knew it too. They are going to kill the goose for IPO. Then leave.

I assume they can’t have employees as mods without risking legal responsibility (S230, etc)?

old.reddit.com is the only way that I can use reddit. I tried the new interface and it's just so bad. The change isn't subtle either. It's like using a completely different site.

Facebook — a sinking ship with more people getting on then off: https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...

This CEO should be removed, not the moderators.

That would require Reddit to voluntarily go out of business, and most companies do not do that.

Ironically when the problems with bots allegedly writing unfavorable opinions came up, bots were quite a rare occurrence. When I look at some of the defaults now, it reads like the simplest AI generated flavor text that is tuned to the ever same topics. Brain dead market research output without any information.

You really notice this if you compare it to more specialized subs. Even if they are very active with thousands of users, the style of communication is different. It isn't trivial to detect bots, but I think some particular subs might be very infested. Another reason to perhaps scrap API access before someone takes a closer look.

This strategy of decline seems to be inevitable. When they distanced themselves from Swartz and did away with their principles to satisfy some other interests, it was the start of some form of decline, even if the official business numbers look different.

There are business numbers that show an increase in usage, but as a user you cannot feel that at all. On the contrary, it feels like it is moving in a different direction. Perhaps they changed their budgeting somehow to boost their revenue... Or some really rich clients bought a massive amount of reddit goodies.

They have actually flirted with this idea. The Love Island subreddit last year was co-moderated by both volunteers and the show's social media team. But that didn't continue this year.

It's amazing that after 20 years of this, people hasn't yet learned that:

- Corporations are not your friends. - Things changes. - What you put there is their property. - Your free work is their money.

It's digg 3.0

Good. Let it burn. It couldn't happen to a more deserving team of sociopaths.

r/StarTrek is already surreptitiously controlled by Viacom. Any negativity is immediately shut down. If you want to be critical of Star Trek, you have to rub shoulders with people who got banned from r/startrek because their criticism was that there was too many black people in the new shows.

It’s disgusting.

This hasn't been true in my experience. People were very critical of Picard season 2 and the whole of Discovery. I posted criticisms myself and never got banned.

>Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

This is obviously not going to happen, and insinuations to the contrary are just sour grapes. The fact that this could even be upvoted speaks poorly to the Redditization of HN.

>Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.

He has been for years. These same powermods have been at the forefront of demanding changes that undermined his vision.

If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.

Additionally if you pay for it you're a customer, and it's still not your community, you still accepted a contract that probably allows the company to do pretty much anything, and they can pull the rug at any point.

If you pay, your data set is just worth more (Edit: to the company), since it proves you have money and can be made to spend it.

Reddit management would do well to understand that with regards to the labour and content they receive for free.

This type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.

It isn't though. Facebook and Twitter have paid moderators that are employees, but since they are uninterested in building communities with quality content, you just end up with what they are today.

The people here thinking they got something for free is Reddit management.

If the roles these moderators played start looking like it was a form of work that's employee misclassification and backpay time.

Interesting thought. If they can be fired, they were employed.

By that definition, almost every user on every social media platform would be an "employee". What reddit mods are doing is really not that different from creating a facebook group to organise a party with your friend or a twitter page to share curated content that you love.

Mods don't work for reddit, they work for their community/subreddit. Creating a group on a social media platform doesn't make you an employee that can be fired. It makes you a power user that can get banned if you mess with other users/communities or with the platform too much.

I know one person personally who is a mod. It sure does look like work. He is effectively on-call and always tending to fires. I can imagine this to be a minority but yeah, I thought of it as "his job"

Paying for it doesn't make it your community, either, whatever that even means.

Just look at the old AOL keywords. People paid for AOL. Didn't matter.

Even in a community, the majority can choose to do things you don't like, just ask anyone who lives in an HOA.

AOL moderators didn't pay from my recollection. And they were therefor screwed the same way Reddit moderators were (My neighbour back then was an AOL moderator, forgot how they were called)

What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for? All the best ones that I can think of have never involved money moving around at all--participation makes a community, not money.

It's pretty common in meatspace for communities to have membership fees.

I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in.

There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered.

Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.

I was mostly taking about the moderators, because of the use of "their" in the title:

"Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private"

I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content.

[1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret [2] I create a CTO community around https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/

metafilter does that. It limits the user-base to those who have command of a bank-account or credit-card and imposes a friction on new account creation by gating it with a one-time $5 fee. They never aspired to be huge but I think they're doing fine.

> What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for?

Committee-run churches are this. Obviously not all churches fit the bill, but many do. Also other many other sort of traditional 'IRL' clubs that collect dues to pay expenses but are run by volunteers elected by the members.

Modern universities are the most extreme example of such communities.

They aren't getting something for free. They're getting something in exchange for being exposed to advertising.

Goes the other way. Reddit isn't paying the mods who run these communities. Without all this unpaid labor, the site can not function.

> If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't.

Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.

That knife cuts both ways - Reddit hasn't paid anyone to write valuable content for their platform, which means they don't really own the content and it can be taken away.

A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.

The thing is though that I _do_ pay for it. I'm a long time paying subscriber to reddit and I think I should be able to use the Reddit Sync app like I have for years. But that's not an option that's on the table.

I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I'm not. Now I'm on lemmy.

The problem is that people don't even agree on what "it" is. Low friction of cross-board collaboration increases the spam problem. There will be low quality instances in a federated world. Other people really really just want to post about woodworking or whatever and the federation thing is not interesting at all. Nobody wants a feed without content in it anymore than staring at an empty email account, so you kind of need one of those things to jumpstart it.

There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don't, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the "what would replace it" thing.

It's always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don't handle it and there's some other problem that's the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn't mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended.

I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that's not necessarily ActivityPub.

4chan has a pretty tidy solution by having 10x as many janitors as mods. The janitors recommend posts/threads for deletion but the mods hold the ultimate power. Even better with a functional reporting system.

How do you think reddit works, my guy?

They did pay for it, with free labour.

Well Reddit hasn’t paid me shit for my contributions to the Reddit community. You’re right! By your correct reasoning, Reddit does not own their community, they’re just a consumer of it!

You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.

Wikipedia is free, Linux is free, walking by the river is free.

Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?

Ironically, making something good for free shows me goodwill and makes me more likely to pay for it.

Why does paying for it making it better? Companies can screw paying customers over too. The issue is depending on a third party like this. And the solution is not some free tech utopia either. Taking risks is part of life, and so when screwed over like this, the parties involved just need to re-assess the situation and move on. And count on being screwed over next time too.

Personally, I couldn't care less about Reddit itself, but what's really annoying is that half of my Google searches end up in temporarily closed subreddits.

Reddit has become some sort of a Stack Overflow lately - I hope all that knowledge will be moved somewhere else.

This really only makes me angry with these power hungry moderators throwing toddler like temper tantrums... Not with Reddit, with them it is the bad web site...

I say just kick them out and get someone else. And if those are not good, repeat until it is acceptable.

This isn’t the moderators going rogue or being power hungry. The members of the community asked the moderators to extend the blackout. 48 hours is nothing. Easy for Reddit to ride it out.

just add “cache:” before the url (without the quotes, without any extra space), most of the time it works. it should go to google cache in most browsers.

Thank you. I was lost after they removed the cached version button on Google results. The link got progressively buried before it disappeared, I think.

Thanks. Doesn't work with Vivaldi, but on Chromium it does!

Aren't they on the internet archive?

So I would go as far to say as the only thing that was keeping Google useful to me was Reddit. I'd use Google to search Reddit and find info I need.

I honestly think this incident is a lot more major than people realize. A major, major, major part of the internet is being vaporized for almost no good reason at all.

It's pretty insane when you think about it.

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347711

554 point, 5 hours ago, 518 comments => not on the front page. No, it's not the algorithm.

Thanks for the link - I wouldn't have seen that thread had you not brought it up. However, are you implying the original story is being manually supressed? Could it be the discussion there got too heated? There are other factors that determine ranking, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

YC is a Reddit investor, and dang hasn't chimed in connecting the threads, and the other thread was removed from the homepage. It's suggestive but it doesn't prove anything. The guidelines say that HN moderates its own properties less, but that may not always be true, especially pre IPO.

Does YC still own any stake in Reddit? Didn't Conde Nast acquire 100% back in the day?

I don’t think it’s suggestive. This came up in an earlier thread[0] and he said it set off the flamewar detector, which likely happened again with this one. He probably just hasn’t seen the threads to merge them yet, it’s nighttime. Thanks for running the asylum dang.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285#36143711

If I was dang I would ban you for talking smack.

Aren't you the coolest kid in the playground, or the guy on the sideline cheering on the coolest guy. Actually just staring in hoping someone would notice you. Yeah I think is it he last one.

I believe you. But hear me when I say: you would be wrong for doing so. It's one of HN's strengths that it doesn't just not punish contrarian views, but actively encourages them. It's an attitude that resonates strongly with me, and a value that is rare and precious. And, I was careful to say "suggestive", which is an appropriately weak statement.

What's more, is we see evidence of how views like yours, to crush dissent by force, leads to weakness. Every strongman that surrounds himself with yes-men are weakened by the practice. They become detached from reality, coddled by delusion, and ultimately less effective in the world.

That's not to say that all criticism is good - it's not. Plenty of bad faith criticism exists, too: rooted in lies, or envy, or sadism, designed to harm, to demoralize, to weaken. In some cases because someone is paying you, and often because you don't really know what you're doing. Sometimes because you're having a bad day.

How does one distinguish one type of input from another? I think 90% of the time it's easy - when someone speaks in absolutes, when they demonstrate no self-restraint, when they go down the path of "everything bad said about you is true, everything good is false", they have become a zealous enemy, and yes, in that case I think I would seek to ban them. We would all pursue defamation cases against anyone who would attack us in this way (but don't because it's just too bloody expensive).

With my comment, was I doing this? No, clearly not. I may be factually wrong, but I don't think so and I wrote the comment in good faith; it accurately reflects the appearance of a situation. And I know from experience how easily people can grant themselves exceptions to their own rules when it is convenient, and I see it as a gesture of respect to point out the appearance of it. They can take it, and I have faith that they won't punish me for saying so. It feels like...safety. And you would take it away, not just from me, but from others who share these values!

Yeah, its there in the ranking algorithm. Any post which starts getting more comments than votes gets downranked.

Oh? But is this a good metric for the algorithm?

I just noticed I very seldom upvote topics, but writing a comment is correlated with reading comments which is correlated with finding the topic interesting.

It was on the front page earlier this evening, that's how I found it. It probably just got pushed off because any article about Reddit right now devolves into arguing about what mods should do, why it's futile because of how Reddit will react, etc.

What makes you so confident it's not the algorithm?

I'm pretty sure it's been well established that a high comment-to-upvote ratio causes the HN ranking algorithm to penalize a story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-06-05 see top entry: more comments than points, yet stands solid at #1. Pretty sure I've also seen 2:1 ratios before rather than the 1:1 that this is (but I don't remember around which date that might have occurred or how to easily ctrl+f for it while browsing past days).

I heard the same as you, but I wonder if it has more to do with how many downvotes/flags are being handed out in the comments compared to how many votes the story is getting, rather than the absolute number of comments.

Why did reddit choose to charge app developers (causing financial uncertainty) for API requests instead of charging the end-users?

By purchasing my own usage and loading an API key into Apollo, I could continue to pay Apollo for the app alone like today, and pay Reddit separately for the API access. At least this way, I could decide if I’m happy with the price for API access.

I can only assume Reddit deliberately wanted to ruin the business model for third party apps.

    Why did reddit choose to charge app developers 
    (causing financial uncertainty) for API requests 
    instead of charging the end-users?

Selfishly I almost wish this had been their course of action -- restrict API access to Reddit Gold members, or some such.

Reddit Gold is $5.99/month, so 5-6x their average monthly income per user. Hell, they could just make it $2 a month.

Source, not sure how reliable: https://sacra.com/c/reddit/

One downside to this is that while $5.99/month is affordable to many, for other people (particularly those in other parts of the world) it is completely unaffordable. So, probably a no-go.

Seriously, brilliant approach. What a missed opportunity.

> I can only assume Reddit deliberately wanted to ruin the business model for third party apps.

Yes, that was the only intention.

You overestimate how tech-savvy an average user is (by a huge margin).

No one knows what an API is in real world. And no one is willing to pay just because they sees more than 100 images on r/funny in a short period.

By "no one" I meant that kind of userbase is so small that if you design your site around them you can say goodbye to IPO.

I don’t think the parent post is proposing that Reddit should restrict access to their own mobile app. They’re proposing that if you want to use a third party app, then put that behind “Reddit Premium+” or whatever.

The average reddit user wouldn’t care or know so they would just use the normal reddit app with all its tracking and ads or whatever, which is what reddit wants right now anyway.

> Why did reddit choose to charge app developers (causing financial uncertainty) for API requests instead of charging the end-users?

My theory is because they want to kill off third party access.

There's a power-law at play here. If the top 0.5% of those who participate / moderate / contribute the most leave, that might end the site. Tipping points exist. Interesting times.

The stickied comment stating that "this contradicts standing policies" is amusing. As if Reddit was somehow contractually bound to abide by random rules that they themselves made up, on their own site.

It's astonishing how many people don't seem to understand what it means to be a user today. Especially if you're not paying, but even if you are.

Comments like these are really.... something.

It's basically boiling down to don't you plebes know we can smash you like insects whenever we want? Now go enjoy your trickles of piss. People are protesting because they do understand, and they don't like it, and they will probably leave.

I am willing to bet a lot of money that reddit is not losing users out of this, it is gaining

I'd accept that it's not losing a lot of users, but I can't imagine it's gaining any?

publicity

Reddit has trained users and mods to think that way. They branded the site as a free-for-all, then went along with major social crusades etc etc, multiple times over the years. Ultimately, it's reddit leadership that led moderators to think that way, and now they are paying the price for it. They need to create some red lines to make the website functional and also tolerant, even to all political views

I'm a reddit moderator of subs both enormous and tiny. I've been frustrated for years by the core subs being taken over by various cabals of power users. Some like the power, some do it to push a particular agenda, and I am pretty sure some are doing it for financial gain.

Reddit has been hands off (which is why /r/trees is not about trees) and made things worse (which is why mods of top subs is so concentrated among a small group).

This is a turn for the much, much worse. I imagine that this will result in even tighter consolidation of moderation of the big subs in an even smaller set of people with a stronger devil's bargain between them. It is going to devolve in to reddit and "pro"-moderators simultaneously loathing, sabotaging and undermining each other and depending on each other at the same time.

A comment I posted recently about protesting mods transitioning to a quiet quitting approach became far more relevant:

Preserve plausible deniability so reddit admins don't have reason to oust you.

Quiet quit your moderation essentially.

Pressed by an admin?

Say "I've found a more hands off moderation style to be more effective"

They key is to let things go to crap but to also take away the easiest solution of replacing protester moderators.

It should be chaos.

Threatened by an admin? Go public, post you no longer support the protest as a sticky, link them to it, 24 hours go private again while they bother the next protestor mod.

Nothing would scare advertisers away more than having tons of "rogue" mods across the top 500 subreddits who could "turn protester" at any time (and do).

If reddit needed to generate income from api access they should have made a subscription a requirement for individual users to access the api.

Actually that makes a LOT more sense. If a person wants to use an app that connects via an API, let the user pay for it, not the app developer.

<narrator> It's not about who pays, it's about who controls. </narrator>

I wouldn't be surprised if they've put themselves on the radar of Harvard Business Review for having the ball in their court and somehow phenomenally fumbling it at every opportunity

I'm kinda curious why none of the third party app developers considered selling Reddit requests as in-app purchases – just charge the rate Reddit charges.

Some of them are trying to figure something out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd...

> There's no possibility to continue the free version of Relay; a monthly subscription price of $3 (or less) might be achievable.

And of that $3 the Developer says in that thread:

> Yes there should be a good amount in there for myself.

If 3rd party apps are so beloved, then $3/month to support a developer doing good work should not be a issue.

Honestly $3 isn't bad, I'd gladly pay that to continue using my Reddit app.

It's $3 today. What happens when Reddit triples the price with 30 day notice?

Don't forget that you alienate all those in poorer parts of the world unless you have regional prices.

Paying a monthly subscription to only have access to half of Reddit (NSFW will not be available through third-party apps) sounds like a bad deal to me.

Because they were only given 30 days before the API changes kicked in.

No. For mismanaging their relationships.

There's the aphorism that when you're using/buying a thing, it's always a relationship between you and other humans somewhere in the chain.

That has to be given hygiene and deference. Hygiene in keeping things healthy and in balance and deference in not trying to calcify some lording hierarchy.

If you bust either, your customers/users/whatever will be shopping around. There's other ways to fail but if you look at the most liked companies, you can basically rename that a list of companies that fuck up hygiene and deference the least.

See for yourself https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation...

Facebook trashed $30 B in a ‘metaverse’ nobody gives a shit about and forgot to add legs to avatars.

Twitter was sold off to Heil Musk.

Reddit after almost 20 years without turning a profit all of a sudden decided to monetise everything and is at war with their community.

Am I wrong if I say that the era of social media is at long last coming to a close ?

“We’re doing this out of a duty to protect the millions who rely on these subreddits”

No you’re not! You’re so obviously not. Just say it’s to protect your business.

The profit-driven behaviour I can stomach (it is their company after all) it’s the bullshit spin that upsets me.

Thanks reddit! I'm going to delete both accounts today and it is over. Also yes you have quality content, but starting today reddit will be totally blocked at dns level on my computers

If the moderators really want to take it out on reddit, they should "quiet quit" and start letting in more spam, brigading, and basically destroy the subreddit from the inside, and recreate it on another site.

Yup, this would have been an interesting approach. Just let everything through and let god sort it out.

Reddit has removed rogue moderators from time to time, so the precedents have been set. This was always a clearly visible outcome for any moderator who had paid attention to admin-mod interactions at any point over the last 5-9 years. The seemingly secure status of moderators is a cultural artifact, not a technical one. The moment the liabilty of unpaid community volunteers outweights the benefit, Reddit will not hesitate to remove said volunteers. Ultimately, this platform belongs to Reddit itself, and large communities have been diluted to the point where average users don't care about community ownership long ago.

If you're interested in fully saying goodbye to Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request - Request all of your data here. This will give you a copy of everything to have as a backup.

This will also allow you to use something like https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit to fully delete your reddit account (including comments, posts, etc).

Not much stopping Reddit from ‘keeping’ the mods and replacing who runs those user accounts. …

That would be a really dumb idea, so I wouldn't be surprised if it happens.

Its been a week now since I deleted reddit. I have 7.5 hours per week back! Amazing move, highly recommend.

14! I love it. I go for a walk every night now. Its actually a pretty cool world, the big room.

This is the result of shamelessness seeping into business. That contrarian business thinking that does away with any pretense of putting anything other than money first.

Also, this idea of charging for API access is lazy and unimaginative.

I'm surprised to keep hearing that charging for API is lazy and bad for a business. They can do whatever they want with their API and price their services as they see fit. Reddit isn't going anywhere because it's a good product for the end user. It's expensive to run and unfeathered access to their content was part of their acquisition strategy. Now they want to go public and want to be a real business.

I'm with Reddit on this decision. OpenAI is a multi-billion dollar company because of them. Does charging for API calls hurt small app developers? Absolutely. Nothing is free forever.

Sam Altman is on the board of Reddit, with all the peddling he is doing with US congress to limit other companies from building a "competitor", I think he is the one putting pressure on Reddit to stop API access, to hinder others. I wouldn't even be surprised if that was true.

An ironic sentiment considering Reddit is entirely reliant upon free labor of both moderators and users who upload content to provide any experience whatsoever.

Reddit is, at the moment, purposely expensive to run. They could have chosen to be a much smaller operation and act as stewards, but they want to turn a Craigslist into a Facebook.

OpenAI will get the data one way or another. Frankly they’ve probably got about as much data from Reddit as they need. The user base isn’t against Reddit moving to monetize and they aren’t sympathetic with OpenAI getting a free ride, these are weak strawmen. There were ways to accomplish both of these goals that wouldn’t involve this change, but their real goal here is to kill off 3PA and it’s very transparent.

I didn’t know moderators were being generous with their time only because Reddit was not profitable /s

Reddit will do what it wants with with their costs. It’s not a publicly funded entity. Building on top of someone else’s content is always risky. Just look at what Twitter did a few years ago.

If you want publicly available services, you need to socialize them. As long as it’s a for-profit company, they will do as they please.

Obviously they can do whatever they want, no one is saying they are doing something illegal, the pertinent question isn't can they be doing this but should they be doing this. I disagree that this is a sound business decision, and that is taking into account their goals of going public and becoming profitable. Internet popularity is fickle and that is the only moat they have.

Based on your last line, I am not surprised that you are surprised.

Users are the reason why Reddit has any value. They are the ones generating and reading the content.

Let's see how this strategy plays out.

day -1, total API requests X Bn per day, rev $0 day 0, third party apps shut down previously accounting for Y Bn requests per day, total API requests (X-Y) Bn per day, rev $0 day 1, everyone migrates to reddits garbage app. total API requests X Bn per day, rev $0

So you see, the goal is not to make money, and if you think that's the goal then I have a bridge to sell you. It's to eliminate a user's right to use a 3rd party client for the content generated by fellow users. Unless you seriously believe reddit is going to charge itself for API requests and somehow that will be a good business strategy.

Twitter did this move, and now they don't pay their rent nor their GCP bill.

So yes they can do whatever they want with their API, the same way I can do whatever I want with my body - including shooting myself in the foot.

For the contrarians that think this API change is a good idea, here's some alternative monetization strategies by chat gpt since you mentioned OpenAI:

Premium Subscriptions: Offer a "Reddit Gold Plus" or "Reddit Platinum" subscription for a monthly or yearly fee. This premium account could feature additional benefits like ad-free browsing, access to exclusive subreddits, enhanced customization options, early access to new features, etc.

Merchandise: Sell official Reddit merchandise online. This could include items like t-shirts, hats, mugs, stickers, and other items with popular subreddit logos or memes from the site.

Paid AMAs: Introduce a system where users can pay to get guaranteed questions in high-profile AMAs (Ask Me Anything sessions). This would need to be carefully moderated to avoid turning into a "pay-to-win" situation, but could provide extra value for users and extra income for Reddit.

Partnered Content: Partner with other brands for sponsored content, but ensure it's clearly marked and relevant to the Reddit community. For example, host sponsored contests or provide exclusive discounts to Reddit users from partnering brands.

Virtual Goods: Introduce a system of virtual goods that can be bought and gifted to others. This would be an extension of the existing awards system, with perhaps more tangible benefits tied to the goods.

Educational Content: Host paid educational courses or webinars on various topics. These could be in collaboration with experts from different fields who are also Reddit users.

Pro User Tools: Develop advanced analytics or other pro tools for power users, moderators, or businesses. For instance, improved post analytics, automated moderation tools, or subreddit-specific customizations.

Job Board: Create a job board where companies can pay to post job listings to the Reddit community. This can be especially targeted towards subreddits related to specific industries or fields.

Paid Polls or Surveys: Allow businesses to conduct paid surveys or polls, giving them access to the large and diverse user base of Reddit for market research.

Crowdfunding Platform: Launch an integrated crowdfunding platform where Reddit users can support other users' projects or ideas. Reddit could take a small percentage of the funding as a fee. This would also help foster a sense of community and support within the site.

And here are the risks with going for this pigheaded API monetization strategies (again by chatgpt):

Loss of User Base: Many users prefer third-party clients due to enhanced features, better user interface, or the ability to customize their browsing experience. Losing these could lead to a decline in user base and a drop in user activity.

Community Backlash: Reddit is built around its communities, many of which are very passionate about the platform. A significant change like this could lead to substantial backlash and negative sentiment from users, harming Reddit's reputation.

Innovation Stifling: Third-party clients often innovate and experiment with new features, some of which are later adopted by Reddit itself. Losing this could slow down the pace of innovation on the platform.

Monopolization of Reddit Experience: With third-party clients gone, Reddit would essentially have a monopoly on how users interact with its content. This could lead to less pressure to improve and innovate, potentially stagnating the platform's growth and user experience over time.

Potential Legal/Regulatory Consequences: Depending on the jurisdiction, such a move could potentially attract scrutiny from competition authorities or regulators, particularly if it is seen as anti-competitive behavior.

Decreased Developer Trust: Many developers, not just those directly working on third-party Reddit clients, might lose trust in Reddit. This could lead to decreased participation in any future developer-oriented initiatives by Reddit.

User Migration: Some users might migrate to alternative platforms that offer more freedom and customization, which could result in a significant loss for Reddit, both in terms of users and potential advertising revenue.

That's a great list. You might want to consider applying at Reddit for a PM role :)

https://www.redditinc.com/careers/

I don't think reddit cares as much about third-party clients as much as being mined for data. There is a case to be made that third-party clients take away from their ad revenue in the same way that third-party Twitter clients took away from Twitter's ad revenue (Twitter's financial woes are not due to limiting third-party clients by the way). It also adds a level of complexity since all changes to the platform require API changes as well (and backward compatibility support).

In fact, most, if not all, of your ideas require that a user use a first-party client.

Thinking that monetizing API is a good idea is not contrarian, by the way. It's what the company is looking to do. Rolling back this decision is the contrarian approach. Semantics but worth pointing out.

Something I want to ask before:

I've noticed that some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit's API and the increasing popularity of LLM/ChatGPT, and it does seem plausible.

What's interesting is that Twitter also closed down their API access merely months ago. Are these two occurrences related, or was Twitter's action also a response to ChatGPT/LLM?

(Also to be totally fair to them, Twitter and Reddit used to have the most comprehensive free API accesses which I enjoy. Instagram/facebook etc. are always a nightmare to work with in term of scraping.)

That weird "conspiracy theory" doesn't make any sense. LLMs are trained off a static dump of example data, and it's trivially easy to build a webscraper of Reddit's historical content.

It's trivially easy to build a scraper for the new content too. And I think people really over estimate the relative amount of data reddit has compared to the literal rest of the internet. Like sure, it's nicely categorized and ranked (somewhat), but leaving reddit out of a corpus probably won't drastically effect your final model.

>some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit's API and the increasing popularity of LLM/ChatGPT

Those people really don't have an idea how either of those work, nor how cause and effect work.

See also the graph showing that the decrease in the number of pirates in the world's oceans has contributed to climate change because "pirates are cool".

I believe this is more than speculation. Pretty sure that someone from Reddit basically said as much in one of the transcripts or conversations shared by Apollo’s dev. Reddit feels they are getting burned by letting their data be used to train LLMs for free.

That said, they were also letting people exceed their API rate limits by massive amounts, so hard for me to put the blame anywhere but with Reddit.

Here's an interesting theory about that. I can't claim any credit for it, it's from Jim Rutt, I heard him on the Clearer Thinking podcast (https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/160/jim-rutt-lar...).

He basically argues that LLMs are going to mean that vast quantities of the content on the internet are going to become automatically-generated drivel which no-one wants to actually read. I think this is pretty plausible. So in order to consume information from the internet, it will basically be a requirement to use an AI tool which, for a given query that you might have, will go out and retrieve all the information on it from many different sources, and return them, appropriately listed and summarised. Such a tool would probably want API access to the likes of Reddit, but would also make the main value prop of the way social media works currently (getting ads in front of eyeballs) useless. So end users will probably end up having to pay for their API use so that their tools can access these sites, and as a pleasant side effect they'll see no ads. So perhaps we'll end up at the promised utopia where users pay a little bit for the content that they like, and don't see ads along the way, as a result of AI. I have no idea how likely this is, but it sounds pretty good to me if it does work out like that.

And then they'll put ads in the LLM chat stream. "Using texts on neurolinguistic programming and mentalism, find subliminal ways of promoting {product}".

The CEO is explicitly saying this change has to do with the ChatGPT's and such.

>But with artificial intelligence-powered large language models like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google's Bard, a massive corpus of conversations is being hoovered up. And in return, Reddit receives very little, he said.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-h...

And this isn't the first time they've said this.

They could simply discriminate against LLMs via their APIs terms of service. That wouldn’t get bad actors, those would simply scrape. But that would be the case with the very expensive API.

Reddit might be able to force mods to keep their subs open, but there's no way to stop volunteers from volunteering somewhere else.

Anyone who has ever dreamt of making a reddit competitor, but didn't because reddit is an unstoppable behemoth, should take notice of what's going on. There's a huge opportunity here.

The users of a subreddits drive all the value, not the handful of moderators.

If a competitor magically got the support of all the moderators, that wouldn't get them very far.

Who's driving the current protest? Who are the primary users of Apollo? Mods.

Reddit mods are anonymous and completely unaccountable to users. They decide what users see and what they are allowed to say. Their influence should not be underestimated.

If mods defect to another platform en masse, so will a huge proportion of regular users.

Take a look at the first page of /r/all. Reddit's brand has already taken a huge hit over something that will have little short term impact on the majority of users. I don't use Apollo, but this kerfuffle is unavoidable for anyone who uses Reddit even casually became of the mods.

So they're getting rid of all their best unpaid workers?

Reddit is very, very confused about what makes it a long-term success. I wonder how many free person-hours have been dedicated to curating the website. And then they just treat them like garbage.

All you 'Web3' people, this is your chance to build something actually useful.

Making a subreddit private is a built in, native reddit feature. If the mods are still actively moderating, just doing so in a private community, how is it breaking any rules? Sounds like they are just making use of a reddit feature.

For small subreddits that may work, but for the larger ones Reddit doesn't care, they won't let such technicalities get in the way of their revenue.

The only way to really "win" here is to abandon the platform en masse, and delete all your content before you walk out the door.

Just wait a little while, because reddit seems to be actively undeleting stuff right now.

I think you're trying to be overly technical about a rule that can be seen different ways. The subreddits that went private are effectively blocking everyone from viewing them. They're not still moderating some smaller community. You can call that vandalism or a legitimate action depending on your perspective, but I don't think you can say it's definitely not against the rules from an objective perspective.

Rules written by reddit are interpreted and enforced in whichever way is most convenient to reddit. You can't rules-lawyer your way to a positive resolution in such a scenario, they have all the power.

"Stop quoting laws, we carry swords!" - Pompey

They are not " still actively moderating, just doing so in a private community", they are shutting down their community for everyone.

If you want to equate legal with morally good, the changes they are making to their API is technically not "breaking any rules" and banning all the mods that are shutting down subs would also not break any rules. Doesn't mean it was a good idea or that we should encourage it

Posting here to commemorate this moment as the point of no return - they've been downhill for a while. Looking forward to the future where all of their content is strip mined into an open source encrypted blockchain hosted app that gives zero shits about their copyrights and acts as if this never happened. They never deserved to own the communities on there to begin with. Burn in hell, idiots

Life has been nicer without Reddit. The last few days opened my eyes. I could actually just enjoy SF without having /r/sanfrancisco convince me that I don't live in the pleasant place I see out my window, but rather a mad max style dystopian hell hole that is worse than most war torn nations.

The detox has been nice. I think many others may feel the same.

Same. HN has been my replacement for now. I'll look into Lemmy, but it's nice here.

"Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation"

...so is Reddit a commons shared by the community, or is it a profit-generating resource? You only get to pick one.

>profit-generating

Lol nope.

The lesson from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit has in each case been identical:

Platform ownership matters. If you invest your time into a platform which someone else owns, they can devalue your investment at any time, on whim. Or they could sell it to a billionaire ideologue who is angry at his daughter.

I don't know what the future will look like, but I do know this: we will all be much more careful about how we spend our time, and what kind of control we have over the future of that investment.

Finally, a quick note of historical precedent: This is not a new problem. Musicians, writers, and artists have been dealing with exploitative contracts for a literal century. What's new is that the 'creator economy' has democratized not just content creation, but also creator exploitation.

We are all Ke$ha now, in a sense.

I have questions: The question for me is are they removing their unpaid labor which they found out can't control? What are they replacing it with more unpaid labor vying for power? Those who have two brain cells to rub together think that this going to end well for Reddit?

Shockers!! Funny how these mods who work for free thought they have any leverage.. now if they control the instances like a federated nodes, then maybe.

They did have some leverage but only so long as Reddit was still trying to keep up appearances. They probably did the equation and figured that bad optics for a little while outweighs possible long term gains. At that point all the mods power vanishes.

they're unpaid volunteers. too bad.

I don't think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community.

I don't like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking /u/Spez

Volunteer means they are doing good for the public, these morons aren’t paid and their only motivation there is to have that sense of power over other users to feel important.

hmmm "Good to the public" maybe not... "Service to the public" yes they are.

They're mods. They provide a service. But yeah... closing the community down is willful destruction of a utility. It makes sense for Reddit to rip em out

This has pushed me into deleting all three of my reddit accounts. What a disgusting, yet expected move by the CEO. For what little my actions are worth, I will try very hard to void any products that continue to advertise on reddit as well.

It’s been a long time since I payed attention to Reddit drama, but isnt Reddit dominated by maybe a dozen or so power mods that have an enormous amount of influence in what goes on on that site?

No.

No, and hasn’t been close to as you describe in a long time. Reddit made these people give up some of the subreddits that were on the old defaults list. The truth is that this generation of Reddit user is long gone; see /u/qgyh2 or /u/ManWithoutModem.

yes. Exactly

If people cared about society the same way they care about reddit the world would be a much better place.

Right!? Tells you a lot about our current pathetic narrow minded society, “Reddit mods!!” my arse, I need to see the same movement for bigger issues like housing, homelessness, low wages and others.

People trying to cite the reddit policy as if it’s some kind of law or constitution. They will change their policies or just straight up ignore it if they want. Lmfao

Seriously, people should've moved their communities to self-hosting already (while they still had control over them). Once the original moderators are booted new ones can simply remove any announcements like this.

It is unfortunate we're witnessing the fall of reddit, but at the end of the day it's a private owned site. If they want to destroy it for the few extra bucks it might bring them it's their right to do so.

Spez is the guy who wipes the street on the block where ppl happen to gather and play music, tell stories.

One day he decides to take fees from the ice-cream vendor. The ice-cream is gone.

Is there another relatively clean street where nobody would try to setup a shake down the crowd?

Reddit execs and such are rent-seekers except in place of land we have human content.

The website thingy they have running has become a commodity years ago.

Spaz apparently said the opposite of this to the public media - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/reddit-says-it-won...

With the direction they're going, they'll just get rid of volunteer moderators entirely and instead lean on contract moderator farms like Facebook etc. It's a more expensive option for sure but it gives them the most power and the least pushback against further revenue raising measures.

They know they need these communities un-privated asap, because as soon as search engines start reindexing their ranking will take a huge hit (therefore guest users, therefore ad revenue). At the same time they have shown no interest in listening to what the community wants. They are Digg-ing their grave.

This strategy would work if the people who disagree with the API closure is just the moderators (who provide free labour to reddit). It's not just them though, it might be felt most strongly by the power users, but people also frequent the app because of those power users.

The vast majority of power users are not a moderator either (although most moderators are power users).

My personal guess whats going on: Spez got a fixed target of mobile users he needs to reach to cash out and killing 3rd party apps to force users to migrate might just get him there. This is not substantiated in any way but is my guess why this is happening.

Why shouldn't they? The mods own nothing. One would think that lesson would be learned by now.

Reddit: You’re fired!

Mods: We don’t even work here.

So, is it time for Yahoo! 2.0 yet? Years ago I read a blog post talking about the next big ideas (Joel Spolsky?) and the one that stood out was a new search engine. At the time I thought it was a crazy idea; who|what would|could replace Google?! Now, I'm not so sure the idea was crazy at all.

The Reddit discussions over the past few days have got me thinking about how a lot of folks interact with it, and not just as a forum. Yahoo! was great in it's time because it was human moderated. Maybe we can get back to that by building a search engine out of Reddit style discussions, kinda like micro "search engines".

Or maybe I just described Stack Exchange. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Maybe we can get back to that by building a search engine out of Reddit style discussions, kinda like micro "search engines".

dude what rock have you been under? you just described chatGPT

That is a pretty toxic way. You should be safe voice opinion even if they are stupid. Not all things said are made with ill intentions.

Not saying mods were stupid. Just if you have a forum people even mods will have different opinions. That is healthy.

Is there a long list of people willing to do unpaid labour for Reddit at the moment? Or is Reddit going to make their employees/contractors do the moderating instead? At least then you wouldn't have to deal with dissent.

In the end Reddit will be a better place, with less activists deleting all your posts because they don't like them

To be honest i think Reddit would be better without mods and an automatic system to remove heavy spam

This makes no sense. Reddit already makes heavy use of automatic systems to limit spam, if they could do without human moderators they would, but they cannot.

Building a user community of Reddit's size is not something the CEO could reproduce or even repair if severely damaged which is something I think they've lost sight of.

One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?

I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderators at Reddit, it would be interesting if this discussion was more of a sticking point. I have to wonder if there's not a world where Reddit shouldn't implement a policy of:

> Look, you moderate a community above N size, we/your members need to know who you are

I'm not entirely sure where my opinion on it even stands but figured it might make for interesting discussion. It does get tricky in the face of subreddits that deal in protest/whistleblower/etc matter though. I don't want to lose the anonymous aspect of the internet, especially when it's been effectively under assault for years - but at the same time, something that powerful and/or manipulate-able seems like it shouldn't get a free pass.

Interested to hear what others think.

(I am also fully open to being wrong on e.g Reddit themselves not knowing who mods are, and invite someone to correct me if I am - but I've not seen anything to date that suggests otherwise)

Yes, and they seem to be absolutely 100% unaccountable.

Various mods have gotten plenty of heat over the years, like being grilled by andersen on CNN

A lot of moderators hide the moderator list because they get far too much abuse for decisions they make. It's dead simple: make a moderation decision based on the rules of the subreddit -> person affected by decision whines to the moderator and clogs up their inbox. Need to make more decisions per day -> inbox filled with more and more whining.

But a lot of the moderator decisions on reddit are personal in nature, not because of the rules. That has been one of the biggest issue with the reddit mods, they sit on these fiefdoms and punish anyone they disagree with. That makes for a bad, bad community. It's like if dang and YC rate limited your account because they personally disagreed with your point of view. This kind of behavior is routine on Reddit.

> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?

It doesn't bother me one bit. If the community is that big a company should fork over cash and pay employees to moderate it instead, or keep an eye on the volunteer moderators for any suspicious actions.

Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes. That way squatting is less of an issue.

> Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes.

The would just create a brigading problem.

Political subs could encourage their members to join lists of hundreds of subreddits and all vote for picked candidates. Coordination could happen on some other site as well.

I thought of a similar issue.

It could be limited to active high karma participants of the community, however anyone can game that with GPT powered bots.

Another possibility is to have yearly oustings instead of voting mods in.

At 90% disapproval mods get kicked out. This along with brigading detection should cover damage by bad actors for the most part.

Oh yeah, GPT pretty much ruins that. You don't even need humans to brigade now, you just need a bot army. The AI future is going to be amazing...

Any formula you can imagine will be gamed

If the bots are gaining enough karma to vote, maybe they deserve it.

To prevent the use of bot farms (or people farms) to stockpile votes, maybe we could look to the field of sybil resistance and digital IDs?

Stack Overflow has been holding moderator elections for a while. How do they do it?

Okay, and?

It's a subreddit, not presidential nomination.

"It's a subreddit" is a diminishing comment when it comes to these channels where you have significant amounts of people turning to them for information.

That's the point of my comment, really: this isn't just some site on the internet anymore.

It's literally just a site on the internet. You can go to any other site on the internet, even the same site but different slice.

> does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?

No. Reddit isn't Facebook. The whole place is anonymous. Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn't get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?

>Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn't get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?

Did you... read my comment? I'm clearly aware that's a risk.

It doesn't stop the question of "should these high-and-wide distribution channels be allowed to be run and controlled by people we know nothing about?".

How does knowing someone is "John Smith" rather than "spezzy" change anything?

>Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?

No, but there's no way to change this situation because Reddit won't create a situation where they have oversight capabilities for mods... that creates too much liability for them. In addition to getting value for the free labor of mods, Reddit also gets a legal shield.

    Reddit won't create a situation where they have 
    oversight capabilities for mods... that creates 
    too much liability for them

It's definitely interesting to watch how they walk that tightrope. Because they certainly do remove mods that are inactive or problematic, like how they are threatening to remove mods that have taken their subreddits dark.

    does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some 
    of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous

Reddit communities fork and spawn offshoots regularly. So for those who "get" how Reddit works it's not an issue.

However, yeah, considering the clout carried by big Reddit communities... it's a concern. I certainly don't think the answer is de-anonymizing those mods, though.

What information do you want to know about them, and why? Their name? Address? How many children they have?

The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we're concerned with respect to their role as a mod.

I dunno, maybe some kind of idea of who they're affiliated with, etc.

Unless they're a celebrity outside of Reddit, you're not going to be able to get a list of their in-person (non-Reddit) friends.

> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?

That doesn't follow; just because people aren't going by their real-world names doesn't mean that they're not accountable. For that matter, what would their real name even tell you? Okay, user someusername1 is actually John Doe and lives at 123 Main St. What exactly do you know now that makes you more comfortable with them being a mod, that you couldn't tell by their history of moderation and interaction in the forum where they're a mod?

Whether they work for an organization that's pushing a view, etc.

You (like many here) seem to think I want full documentation of who a Mod is, when I'm fairly certain my comment implies otherwise.

Some quotes from "sorted by controversial"[1], an amazing feature that I wish HN had as well:

> This is great news. Can Spez replace the r/NBA mods. Those losers need to be taught a lesson. Shutting down a huge sub with 8K votes on a hidden poll during the NBA FINALS. PATHETIC.

###

> Mods are free to run their communities the way they see fit within the boundaries of the rules that apply Reddit Wide.

> So no, this does not contradict standing policies. Free to run their communities means you as a user can either agree with the rules they state in their communities or not join.

> If you want to talk policies, don't forget about this one... Reddit Content Policy: Rule 8

> Don't break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of the site. Do not interrupt the serving of reddit, introduce malicious code onto reddit, (or) make it difficult for anyone else to use reddit due to your actions,......

> https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004351293...

> Reddit admins would be fully within their rights to remove moderators who don't even want to stop, just for the fact they are blocking users from freely accessing their own content in the communities they participate in.

###

> If I can be voted out of my community that I created, and built for almost 10 years I will delete every fucking thing and quit this site for good. I will not stand to be overthrown because reddit administration decided to have a pissing match with mods and give all our control to the community. If I let the community run my sub from the beginning I wouldn’t have a sub. I kept it to a standard and that is largely why it has succeeded. I’m not saying I’m the only one that can moderate that sub, but I am the only one with the original vision. If it comes to this I will delete everything and let the next person create it’s replacement.

I found it particularly fascinating that this one got downvoted, when I thought that it was in line with the group think. I guess redditors actually like the idea of voting out mods, but are in too much of an anti-management mood right now?

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...

Duh. Reddit owns the code. They can flip on any site they want to. "going dark" has no real power.

The referenced "Moderator Code of Conduct", apparently effective as of 8 September 2022:

<https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct>

Of course they did. What else did you expect?

The thing that I find interesting is that Reddit moderators are apparently not above weaponizing the community but seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'. If something doesn't change then Reddit is dead, so from the managements point of view all they've done is increased the problems rather than reduced them.

It's super easy to criticize the Reddit management for their inability to articulate what is going on behind the scenes but in my view that only means that there is no good news. Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse. So reducing the ability of the moderators to revolt is a first logical step in the direction of stability, which is where they will need to go.

Spez should step down, he's made way too many unforced errors. But the assumption that another manager will be able to dig(g) Reddit out of this hole is quite possibly not valid.

> seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat.

That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on the record would be a good start as well.

> Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'.

Bullshit. Reddit is horrible overstaffed and the last numbers we have are from 2021 when they made $350M. If you can’t run a site with an all volunteer mod staff for $350,000,000 a year then you have no business in tech.

> Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse.

Won’t anyone think of the poor company making over $350M a year? Spare me.

Then maybe you should go and run it.

Making 350 million per year for a site of this magnitude is pocket change because it's revenue not profit and costs are pretty high.

Of course everybody criticizing the team believes they can do a Twitter and run Reddit with 150 people but Reddit is a lot more to a lot more people than Twitter ever was. Those people also probably believe that they can rebuild it in a weekend. Or two.

Cutting API costs in half will not change the amount of noise that is being made because for many $0 would be too much. Agreed about the lying though, that shouldn't have happened and it disqualifies the current leadership. But be careful about making too many assumptions about what it's like to run a property at this scale, costs and labor wise.

I know that the 350M (last reported in 2021 so I think we can assume it’s higher now, at least the same) is revenue but that gets to my second point, headcount and other costs.

Reddit has had not substantially changed in many years. Yes they added chat (I don’t see anyone talking about using this) and NFTs (really? This is what lights a fire under your development team?) but they haven’t really touched the core experience in a very long time. Even “new” Reddit was just a UI refresh, that is still plagued with bugs (I’ve reported a number, all unanswered). The mod tool situation is pretty dire as well and has not been improved despite many broken promises.

What are those ~2K people doing? And Reddit is VERY different from Twitter. The real-time aspect isn’t there, their search has always been shit, and I’m not even sure if you can get notifications when someone posts (just replies to your comment/post). It’s a very different beast. They even can (and do) get away with heavy caching to hide up/down in real-time (I agree with that move, I’m just saying it also affords them the ability to cache). I also regularly get notifications of a reply then go to the thread and the reply doesn’t show up for 1-2 minutes. All that to say I think that Reddit is much easier to run than Twitter and it shouldn’t cost anywhere near $350M with salaries for employees to run.

I’m sure you need a bunch of sales/ad reps but as for the core development team? Judging by their output I find it hard to believe you need more than 10-20 developers, more in ops/production engineer-type role but the development output is next to nil and it’s not like they are spending their time on things like ADA-compliance (which, yes, they don’t HAVE to be accessible).

2000 seems insane, seems very “VC-funded” and I say that with the most negative of connotation. Why can’t anything be just profitable instead having to aim for 1000x returns and all-or-nothing thinking? I know, I know, late stage capitalism, blah, blah, blah, I still hate it.

Peaceful protests are virtue signaling. The appearance of doing something and caring without actual effort or change. That people are astonished at the return of the status quo afterwards shows how little thought is put into their execution or chance of achieving goals.

This could be all avoided by doing app that isn't horrible?

People use Apollo because the Reddit app is horrible.

This reminds of a a bunch of 12 year olds in a school yard taking their ball and going home. The maturity level of this CEO is shocking. And aome of the moderators can’t be much older than 12 in the way they have acted. So unprofessional and so unnecessary.

Your analogy isn't complete.

The analogy is more like: 12 year olds playing a soccer tournament that draws a crowd and the people owning the yard are selling drinks and showing ads.

With the fall of reddit, the wikis are the last refuge for communities on the internet

We could go back to web forums, like phpBB, etc.

Why not just allow 3rd party app usage only for those who have reddit gold active?

It's time we start building/switching to a decentralized social network. I'm an experienced product designer who always aiming for the best there is for a human, open to commit to something like that.

Huffman should have just come out and said "we cannot support third-party apps using our API any more, we are losing money on them, so they need to go". The constant BS is where the issue lies.

I gave up on twitter because of musk, and will now give up on Reddit.

What’s left ? I like hacker news for tech and went back to Facebook for city groups, which are way better than all the doom in reddit city subs anyways

I guess it's too late to say: Don't trust Steve Huffmann.

In my view reddit went down the gurgler years ago. The webapp is slow garbage now and I refuse to install any app because I have a feeling they are trying to extract user data.

Forums should be owned by individuals and scattered all around the web. If the State doesn't intervene I think we will go back to a more sane, free internet very soon

This reminds me of Digg's death throes and the massive exodus to reddit. It's as if Spez wants the same to happen to reddit and for everyone to migrate to discord.

Discord is worse. Like Reddit, it's owned by a corporation and unlike Reddit, search engines can't index it so the conversations effectively go into a black hole. Also, Discord is live chat so unless you're there 24/7, you might miss a conversation you are interested in, where on Reddit, you can still read and participate in older conversations you missed when they occurred.

Protest 2.0: click here for rphotos.io the new home of r/photos.

Then teach users about RSS.

Reddit via RSS reader is already 10x the better experience. Mixing in other feeds is no deal.

Good. Nobody should be able to destroy a community of millions just because they got became moderators years ago, without community consultation.

Serious question. How much time per week do moderators spend providing free labor for Reddit? Why do they do it? Is it like a fun hobby?

I remember decades ago moderators suing a website (AOL or something?) for unpaid labor. Perhaps this time it's reddit's turn.

I don't understand why anyone thinks this is surprising at this point. Trust them when they say your opinion means mud.

I've been an active Reddit user for at least 13 years now. Now I'm actively looking for an alternative.

So the protests are working. Hmmmmm

Maybe it's this is an overdramatic analogy, but this approach is reminiscent of a standard playbook used by a new tyrant when they come to power: Claim to be acting for the greater good and populace as a whole. Decapitate leadership of existing institutions that resist, install willing collaborators in their places, do this in the name of the good of populace even though it's that "good" that the decapitated were attempting to preserve.

One difference from the above is that the leadership is existing & simply turning tyrant. Otherwise the dynamic in Reddit is not completely dissimilar from that of any society: There are leaders at the top, sure, but the governing of that society-- and much of its value-- is derived from the consensual implicit social contract between those at the top and everyone on every level beneath that.

Can Reddit survive if such actions prevail? Maybe, but other social platform have failed for lesser reasons. And between Reddit and Twitter, there hasn't been a time in more than a decade that could give a rapid acting disruptor such a ready opportunity to sweep in and clear the slate of existing platforms that have lost the plot on what makes them useful and valuable.

It's like they're following a playbook on how to burn a company to the ground

Reddit is also undeleting deleted user content. Now I need to burn my account again.

I am not pleased.

Well. That’s that for Reddit. Where is the best alternative? Stackexchange?

Lemmy or kbin. There are also web forums.

What reddit is doing is crazy and it will face consequences for it.

Good for reddit. Subreddits aren't moderators personal fiefdoms.

How do we access reddit with noscript/basic (x)html browsers?

Seems like a reasonable decision to me. Moderators are not owners.

I like Reddit but I don’t think I will miss it. Good riddance.

I personally can’t take HN seriously on the topic of reddit because the site loves capitalism, and yet it’s now opposing exactly what a good capitalist would do to boost its own profits and eliminate the competition. What a reactionary echo chamber full of inexpert takes this site has become.

Deleted my account.

How many of Twitter's employees were convinced their company fights some righteous, on-the-right-side-of-history global battle? (Mind you: Global! It wasn't just US.) And then investors cashed out, Musk came in and discarded said employees like they were (less than) nothing.

It's the same story here, maybe a bit sadder since these mods are not even employees. They lost their time for nothing. They don't even have human connections with most anyone else since they are all anonymous and physically removed from each other. If Reddit pulls the plug all they are left with is a belief they did the right thing by wasting years to push the agenda of a corporation that showed them in absolute terms they mean nothing.

Moderation on Reddit became increasingly extremist after Trump took office in 2016. Sleazy tactics, heavy (shadow)banning of users, obscene mod & admin power trips, all perpetrated away from the public eye. There is no reliable evidence of just how much speech suppression and censorship Reddit does in practice. As someone who's been there for ~15 years, I promise you, if your regular, wide eyed, naive redditor who thinks the "communities" (a feel good word that means next to nothing in context) are all ponies and rainbows, would actually see how much abuse Reddit does day to day, the site would collapse in a week.

So now Reddit wipes its feet on some mods to make them toe the line even better than before. So what? If this gigantic Stanford experiment is killed off the world will be a better place without the shadow of a doubt.

I'm really sorry so many people take these companies at face value and gladly participate in clobbering the people who've been abused and tell their story. It's utterly disgusting and I'm heavily pro legislation to force social media companies with more than X users to keep public logs of censorship (with ids for both who applied suppression and to whom). This way the situation can be examined by any 3rd party and legal action can be taken more easily against these companies that exert immense influence on societies with zero oversight. If no social company can exist while enduring legal consequences for their actions then none should.

Huffman's lack of empathy is jarring.

Another useless website goes to its grave.

I am much happier touching grass, always been voluntary - now many more can touch grass with me.

What's the best alternative?

Lemmy or kbin

Lol we all knew this would happen

I laugh, as a conservative who was on the receiving end of these tactics 2 years ago. You reap what you sow.

No issue with this. Subreddits exists for the users, not the moderators - all of which can be replaced.

only so long as you can find competent moderators willing to do the job for free while using shitty tools.

The subreddit exists because a user created it. I created two subreddits 12 years ago that have a few hundred thousand subscribers today. So do I not have the right to set my subreddit to private? I never told people to join them. I never advertised them. Reddit has given me the built in functions to set it to private and to ban anyone I choose.

As a matter of fact, one of them has been private since this started and the other has remained open. They're both gaming related. I let my moderators decide because ultimately, they're the ones who have put the most work into keeping the curated. One group didn't really feel it was necessary while the other felt like it was a slap in the face from spez to essentially say, "I don't care what you think, 12 years of hard work to grow a community or not, you'll do what I say."

And I agree with them. They didn't moderate it for power. They did it because they love the specific console they were created for and are really proud to see their hard work pay off after years of investing their time into it. I've become jaded by this whole thing. Reddit no longer cares about its voluntary workforce in the slightest and I'll be handing ownership off to them, deleting my account and that will be the end of it.

So yes. In a way, it does belong to the users. But 48 hours of discomfort leading to threats of repossession after 12 years of work? They want it? They can have it.

This has been happening as long as I can remember. The funniest story I'm aware of is r/libertarian, where the admins removed the mod because he supported a laissez-faire moderation method. He'd go days without logging on and wouldn't take on more moderators, insisting people should be free to upvote or downvote as they please

The day of the mop is here

Bahahaha!

Not your bits, not your rights!

I’ve had such bad experiences with Reddit mods I’m cheering this on.

I am trying to care but years of abuse makes me think - go for it!

History repeats.

Just love the mods' meltdown.

good, many of those mods are weird and insane, better for them, and better for reddit

Although I agree in principle, they're not removing moderators for being power hungry or weird. They're replacing moderators who are protesting the changes with moderators who are under their thumb. I would be surprised if this led to better moderating

Funny seeing everyone who cheered the mass censorship these past few years realize they’re just cattle to the Reddit owners.

Had free speech stayed a pillar of Reddit (and the internet in general), a Reddit replacement would have been much easier to come to fruition.

I'm getting whiplash. First Axios said they are not going to remove moderators, then someone on Reddit said they will, then someone here said they won't, which is it?

I really don't think the vast majority of people care. HN readers do, but that's a narrow subset

HN readers are 1-2-5 years ahead what happens in the market. you can tell a lot of things that are coming down the pipe if you pay attention on HN. Once the "nerds" give up on reddit it will be an uphill battle to keep the site viable.

This exactly. There have been a few tech waves where nerd behaviour was the leading indicator by a few years. Search engine move from AltaVista to Google (yes, I'm old). Laptop move to Macbook Pro's. Ignore the nerds at your peril.

lol. you're not that old. remember the days when Intel was kicking AMD's ass and AMD was mostly building a worse Intel clone? Raise your hand if any of the following say anything to you: K5, K6, Duron. If you raised your hand and can go back even further in time tell me at what frequency did a Z80 run. hahahahaah

You’re so old that your username has a stand alone FPU >:)

you're so old that you use discrete transistors in your CPUs. hahaahahaha

i still have k6-233 with shuttle hot-603 motherboard.

What else do you got in that museum? :)

creative awe64, voodoo 2 and s3 virge....

motorola mango

Haha. I'm so old that the first computer I was introduced to in my first job (it may have been a Data General mainframe; my memory is fuzzy) had a solid copper "ribbon" running along the bottom inside the cabinet, and I was told "Don't drop a screwdriver on that or you'll short out the whole floor". The inside of the cabinet door had what looked like black "flash marks" on it. I also had to recover a program from a paper tape drive in that first year.

I have a feeling Reddit is mostly nerds though, after this I doubt there is going to be anyone left.

Recently I've been moving to Facebook Groups. Compared to Reddit the groups are much more niche, which is a good thing.

On Reddit there is a general sub about a hobby I'm interested in with 198k subscribers, on Facebook I've found groups with the specific niches of that I'm interested in with 16k - 30k subscribers. The questions are much more specific, and the people there are a lot more knowledgeable. The people on there seem friendlier too.

The lack of search indexing is a major downside though.

I highly doubt it, most revenue comes from non nerds who don't use adblockers or third party apps that don't show ads. I would not be surprised if Reddit revenues increase with these move. It's the same story as Facebook and Instagram, the real money is from the eyeballs of the masses, not of the niches they started out with.

This whole scuffle is reddit leadership fighting against the 1% Mods that moderate 99% of the subreddits. Everyone else is just a pawn.

The mods are just jealous that reddit is gonna be making a lot of money and want a cut. Even though this looks like reddit vs the community, this is actually reddit vs the Mod 1%.

Nah, the winners will be the paid shills that will take over more subreddits of the idealists. Some of them probably participated in the 3 days or whatever it was of blackout so they look good to the rest of the users, but they're ultimately getting paid by PR corporations and they'll be ready with alts that will take over subreddits that go permanently private.

How do we know that the current mods aren't paid shills also? This blackout would make a lot more sense if that were the case. They have to protect their bottom line, and the changes that reddit is enacting threatens their ability to operate.

Half of them are, that's what I'm saying.

(And I really doubt that the professional mods won't find solutions to stay in business -- and they'll probably be happy with a certain amount of "regulatory capture" making it more difficult to be a mod if you're not able to pay a hundred bucks a month or so for tooling to make it easier -- they can just pass those costs of doing business on)

Thats my bad. I misread that first part. Interestingly, reddit just released some numbers about bots using the API.[1]

> fewer than 100 bots total (including both moderation and non-moderation bots) currently exceed our updated free API Rate ..... out of the thousands of moderation bots that exist, less than 20 exceed the updated rate limits

Thats really interesting and shows that automated/bot moderation tools are almost completely unaffected by the API changes. I have a little bit less sympathy for the "free volunteers" of reddit.

[1] https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

Good! I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.

Reddit has both said moderator-specific as well as disability related APIs will still be free.

The masses got stampeded into supporting the protest because people like to feel that they're taking part in some righteous battle. Sucks for spez that he got outmaneuvered by a cabal of mods who derive their feeling of importance (and oftentimes a side income) from having control over a bunch of popular subreddits who are upset that their status is being threatened. Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.

Their app and site sucks. 3rd party apps exist because of that. They can't accept that its their fault.

> Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.

Not a mod, or even a power user, but I hope reddit dies. They seem hell-bent on making the experience of using their site as shitty as possible. The sooner communities move to alternatives that don't treat users like shit, the better.

What took them so long. Moderators are clearly coordinating with each other to close down reddit's website, that s malicious intent, not just a "protest". They should have rules that does not allow that behaviour. Reddit is so poorly ran

Protests are most effective when highly coordinated. Reddit is free to change their attitude and have the website back at any time, it's their choice to continue down this path.

Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?

The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.

they are protesting the high/unreasonable API price out of nowhere

And that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.

Incorrect, it is a legitimate protest. Many have pointed out that Reddit could just wait out 48 hours, so indefinite blackout is a more logical move.

An indefinite blackout is not a protest, it's extortion. It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."

Aren't all protests essentially extortion? We will sit here until you give into demands. We won't work until you give into our demands. We will crowd the streets until you give into our demands.

All that matters is who the community supports.

> We will crowd the streets until you give into our demands.

its more like blocking highways indefinitely.

Blocking an abstract highway where it takes 2 seconds to build a new one right by it at zero cost.

Reddit's original deal was hands off community as a service. I guess the mods are putting that to the test?

no, lots of info locked in specific subreddit, you can't recover it at zero cost.

Maybe reddit will provide such function.

And? Reddit can reverse course and have the highway back at any moment.

>It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."

Who has said that users shouldn't be allowed to use the new app? I haven't seen even a single instance of that. The problem is that Reddit - the centralized entity with power - is forcing that to be the only option.

Reddit could be reasonable and continue to permit both. Until they decide to be reasonable the protests will continue. If Reddit gets butthurt and wants to call organized collective action "extortion" they can, but their childish whining isn't impressing anyone who has two brain cells to rub together.

Incorrect, it is holding information hostage, due to vainglorious moderators.

The internet routes around damage.

The damage here is what Huffman & board are pulling. They can have their website and free moderation back after they grow up and change their attitude.

You could make the argument that it's a reasonable API price compared to other social media sites. What I really wish is they made a distinction between people signing into Apollo to use the app and Apollo making API calls, although I suppose they're probably trying to push people onto their app to improve ad revenue

Reddit is just where a community posted up. Reddit is free-riding off the efforts of the community, it is a lopsided arrangement. Reddit is not a challenging software platform to replicate, there are already platforms ready to be migrated to.

They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.

If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.

There are lots of users that are unhappy with Reddit for this. I've stopped using it this week.

I looked at one reddit: r/science. That is blockaded now. A 'private community'. This is (was) an aggregator of SCIENCE news and information. How does blocking the flow of potentially life-saving information help "the cause"?

Reddit is dead to me, too. This is beyond sad.

The good news is that you could go create your own subreddit. Right now. Go create r/Science2. Go do it and mod it yourself, then link it here.

Sounds like one more point for the protesters, nice!

I think you didn't see the amount of popular support these actions had. Many subreddits put it to a vote to go dark or not. The ones I am a part of were 90%+ in support.

I mean if they follow your plan and replace the moderators of the subreddits I enjoy then I'm done with Reddit. Reddit can't expect to freeride off various communities and then kick out mods without a reasonable excuse, and this definitely does not classify.

And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.

The most 'obstinate' users are the content creators and people actually driving those Reddits. I would hope you're familiar from the history of social media websites what happens when you drive out the users creating content.

How much times has this happened in history?

Digg and Tumblr?

People love a good bandwagon too, this will live or die by the PR it gets. People will leave if their favourite community gets messed with and the messaging falls flat, given how tone deaf they have been so far the odds of that are high.

I don't think everyone leaves en masse but I do expect a pretty big impact already, and considering they're attempting to IPO I doubt any of this is a good look.

> force communities back open

Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.

Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.

Moderators and content creators. The majority of Reddit users are lurkers. They never contribute anything, they don’t even comment.

The people who post all the links, all the pictures, all the text posts, all the most valuable comments (as opposed to the drive-by meme comments), these are the people most pissed off at Reddit. When Reddit loses them they will have nothing left.

All those lurker eyeballs they want to monetize will leave because they have nothing to look at.

I left precisely because of API pricing. I'm not using Reddit's shitty mobile app. I see the writing on the wall. old.reddit.com will be gone within a few years along with RES. I won't suffer that.

Fuck 'em.

If "the community" is upset at the moderators, they can take solace in the fact that the communities are almost certainly coming back - it's just a matter of if it's under new management or not.

The real question will be if that new management is up to the task, and somehow, I feel like trying to scrape together a new mod team for thousands of subreddits on short notice is not going to work out like they had hoped.

Which happened because of API pricing? The moderators are why the community works at all at this scale. They're also how reddit makes the site palatable to advertisers. That's just the current controversy anyway, Reddit inc has been making numerous user hostile choices and their choice to push third party apps away is clearly not for the benefit of the community.

And if they didn't do anything you'd have said that these mods are too proud to move away from power for a few days and absolutely cannot listen to their community.

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