Nathan2055

That’s basically just Lemmy/kbin. Those two services can even interconnect with Mastodon thanks to ActivityPub.

As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, moving text around on the Internet has been a solved problem ever since NNTP. And that was 1986!

The only problem is that there’s not a lot of money in it, which is why having the ability to federate a bunch of smaller services together is such a good solution (at least on a technical level).

Reddit is effectively just a text-only forum (image and video uploads are fairly recent features, and the latter has never even worked properly) with subthreads and a voting system.

Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented. All HTTP forums are pretty much just centralized recreations of various components of Usenet. With modern databases, load balancing, and infrastructure management, the cost of building, hosting, and maintaining a web forum is effectively negligible.

The only real selling point of Reddit is having all of your forums in one place, with the ability to easily and instantly create your own forum if you want to. Everything else on Reddit is just a random collection of social media features bolted on to appease investors/advertisers/stakeholders, and the vast majority of Reddit users (or at least the ones I interact with) never touch any of them.

The only thing keeping people on Reddit are network effects. Which, admittedly, is a lot, given that’s what’s allowed Facebook to weather its seven quintillion controversies with minimal damage, but a well-designed successor with enough server capacity (this is very important, crashing under the initial migration load has been what sunk a number of previous high-profile “Reddit killers”) could easily take Reddit’s place.

Pretty much a week after starting any web development job, you discover that 95% of making a site fast is simply reducing the number of times it has to call the database.

Typically, this means caching everything as much as you possibly can.

This is the same reason why Wikipedia can’t just roll out a cookie-based “revert to old look” option for logged out users. It would require caching every page twice since you’d need a file prepared for both skins. The reason they can have skins for logged in users is because they already bypass the cache for logged in users (to allow for individual user scripts and stylesheets to be run, among other things). Even then, things like article text and category lists are still stored in various database caches, hence why there’s a “Purge cache” option available to logged in users.

It’s also a 180 from last week’s position, because Reddit has continually stated throughout this whole thing that they’re happy to continue supporting third-party apps as long as they pay, and that if they wanted third-party apps gone, they would have just killed the API outright.

But now Steve Huffman is saying here that the API was never supposed to support third-party apps, and they only allowed them out of the kindness of their heart. Which is also wrong, since the API was literally created in part to allow third-parties to make apps, because Reddit didn’t ship a first-party app until 2016 (as I mentioned in my top-level comment on this post).

I honestly can’t see him staying in his position much longer. As I noted in my thread, Reddit’s already starting to lose advertisers because of how they handled redirecting campaigns throughout all of this, and the continued instability is concerning the ones who remained. This isn’t an Elon Musk situation where he owns the company and can do whatever he wants, he has investors to answer to, and eventually they’re going to want answers as to why he’s pushing advertisers away, threatening developer partners, and refusing to listen to his site’s power users who both produce much of the content that drives traffic and provide them with millions of dollars a year in free moderation.

One again, it looks like Steve Huffman is ignoring his own company’s history and trying to pretend third-party apps weren’t a major part of Reddit’s initial success.

Reddit did not have an official, first-party app until 2016. Prior to that, it depended on third-parties to create apps, with the most notable example being Alien Blue, an iOS app that Reddit themselves acquired in 2014 and then discontinued at the same time they launched their official app.[1]

It’s also bizarre that he’s now saying that the Reddit API was never supposed to allow third-party apps, when he’s supposedly trying to convince app developers to pay Reddit to continue operating. In fact, in previous announcements, Reddit specifically said that this was not supposed to kill third-patty apps, and that if they wanted to do so, they would just turn off the API entirely.

Honestly, this is what’s making me dislike Reddit the most in this entire situation. If they just came out and said “we’re killing third-party apps to make more money”, I’d at least respect the honesty. But this constant barrage of excuses, starting with “it’s too much of a load on our servers” then “the regulatory environment has changed too much” then “the Apollo dev threatened us” then “third-party developers aren’t contributing to the community” and now finally “the API was never intended for third-party apps.”

The good news is that we’re starting to see signs of a financial impact to Reddit. Apparently, they redirected all of the ad impressions targeted at subreddits that were closed to the home page, resulting in substantially fewer click-throughs due to the lack of targeting.[2] Indications are that if the blackout continues for longer than a week or two, there’s going to be a mass withdrawal of ad dollars. The mods participating in the blackout are also discussing reaching out to advertisers directly to discuss the likely impact to content quality and (implicitly) encourage them to pull their ads unless Reddit changes their minds.[3]

I’m hoping that the board at Reddit sees the impact this is having to overall site trust and thus advertising quality, and forces Steve Huffman to walk things back.

Remember, most third-party apps have stated that they’re perfectly willing to start paying Reddit, it’s just that none of them can afford to do so at Elon Musk prices and with only 30 days notice to get payment infrastructure in place. Most have also stated that they would be open to adding Reddit’s own ads to their apps, or requiring users to have Reddit Premium subscriptions. Reddit has yet to respond to any of those options and/or explain why a compromise plan like those listed isn’t feasible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#Mobile_apps

[2]: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd...

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aafs0/indefinit...