AMAs are the latest casualty in Reddit’s API war
3 years ago by AbaixoDeCao to c/technology
Lol I remember someone in that thread asking Woody if he remembered taking a high school girl to her prom and knocking her up. And the social media manager faking Woody’s involvement just answering “can we stick to the movie?”
Yeah the entire AMA was a dumpster fire, but that was when things really devolved. It quickly got upvoted to the top, and it refused to die. Every single comment he made was quickly bombed with “why haven’t you answered that prom question yet” responses.
I always have time to talk about Rampart.
I just had a good laugh at myself because rampart is so non-existent in my mind, that I had to Google what the hell you were talking about.
So Woody Harrelson is forever famous for the worst AMA ever because he aggressively plugged a movie that must've been so bad and irrelevant that I have no idea what people are talking about when they reference it today.
They mention this in the article
Who is Victoria?
It's so crazy how they fired her. Reddit's leadership really loves to shoot themselves in the foot. I applaud the mods scaling back their AMA mod duties. No point in doing so much extra work for a community that reddit continually shows it doesn't care about and actively harms through their bad decisions.
Reddit created a way to drive more people to its native apps (where Reddit shows ads and generates revenue) as of July 1. But we can't overlook that Reddit was built on people's willingness to provide free content and labor, and the API battle has driven away some of the most popular content and veteran volunteer mods.
Reddit won the battle for API fees, but the war for desirable content—something no social media platform can ever be complacent about—is at risk. And that's not the type of problem that ousted mods and forcibly reopened subreddits can fix.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
This is too good.
That PRC echo chamber of a sub?
Conde Nast has owned Reddit in some part since at least 2012. They've tended to stay pretty hands off with it though.
Sorry for the meta question, but what’s the difference between AMA and IAMA? Are these 2 different subs?
IAMA was the subreddit that hosted AMAs.
Both acronyms come from the titling format: “I am a XYZ, ask me anything”
Thank you!
AMA ask me anything IAMA I am a
AMAs stopped being interesting a while ago. It was more like a quick press release session with celebrities trying to promote their latest stuff.
I kinda miss the IAmA part of it. People like us in usual or unusual circumstances sharing their daily lives. Researchers in remote islands, members of ethnicities or cultures that rarely get media attention, cool or unconventional jobs and how they got there. People and their stories.
Agreed, all it is now is a marketing stunt. Usually with responses built by some lawyer or publicist. But anyway, 1 horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?
It's definitely 1 horse sized duck. I mean 100 duck sized horses would swarm you in seconds! I don't get why everyone thinks they can just stomp 100 of anything!! They would circle you and it would be over!
Yep, that's why it was interesting. Celebs are mostly boring and already have access to platforms if they want to talk to people.
I want to hear from people who I'd normally never get to listen to and who want to share details of their interests.
celebs are mostly boring and already have access to platforms if they want to talk to people.
Lucky for me, I, Margot Robbie, can say things on Lemonworld that I would never say in public. So that's a plus.
Honestly, any user or mod that sticks around Reddit after this entire thing…I just don’t get. How can you be so disregarded, have your opinion so thoroughly dismissed, and then just keep creating content and driving traffic to the company? Fuck capitalism, but fuck reddit in this particular instance.
Because they don’t care.
Not entirely true.
Some of us are still occasionally browsing parts of reddit because not every niche community has fully made the transition yet and said niche communities are the ONLY places to get relevant, timely information for those niches.
I know for me there are some decade+ old MMO communities that haven't swapped over yet. Since many of the old wikis got shut down years ago when fandom, etc, took over everything, for some games the only choices are youtube and reddit. Personally, I hate youtube's monetization forcing tiny bits of information to be strung out into 15-20+ minute videos more than I hate what the reddit team is doing, and I hate what's happened to reddit a LOT.
The move is going to be an ongoing process for a while.
Labeling everyone with broad brush strokes misses some of the nuance of the situation, but I look forward to the day I no longer have to visit Reddit for the information I'm looking for.
Personally, I hate youtube's monetization forcing tiny bits of information to be strung out into 15-20+ minute videos
It's not perfect, but SponsorBlock helps a bit with that, it can automatically skips reminders and such. And the new YouTube chapter feature is also actually good for finding the info you want in a video, but that depends on the video creator.
I really miss the old wikis, Fandom is just filled with irrelevant bullshit like recommending me I visit another wiki that has nothing to do with the one I'm using at the moment.
I understand users, they just want the forum and don't care about the politics.
Mods on the other hand... it's a busy job that you are already doing for free. If the platform is turning against you what incentive is there to work for them?
There are a couple small subreddits I’m part of that are lifelines, close communities for people who need a space to share information & be themselves. I’ve checked in on them once during the past month & they’re still holding together. The mods are staying because those small groups of users need them & don’t have another place to go. I expect once the Fediverse spawns more highly specialized niche communities, they’ll drift over.
They’re expecting lawsuits to fly, and don’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole lest they get dragged in.
That era ended when they fired Victoria.
I think we should get back to talking about rampart
your name is all emojis?
Go into your settings and you can make your Display Name be anything. For example I changed mine in honour of you...
ETA: Wait - it didn't work. My sorcery has failed!
Neato.
Nice hat.
Not if it's my latest project, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
Lmao thanks Margot
Academy Award nominated actress Margot Robbie can manage her own Lemonworld account!
(Don't tell my publicist please)
Lemonworld 😂
I love it!
@MargotRobbie @Aux lol what is going on? Where's the blue check?
I mean it's literally no different from guests on talk shows or podcasts. They are almost never there just for fun.
And I get it. Why would you put yourself through that unless you're promoting something?
It was a flawed system, but it really benefited Reddit. Volunteer mods did it because they were supposed to be the leaders of their communities and reddit was supposed to just be a platform for hosting them. By attacking that system they removed the main incentive for volunteer mods to exist.
Yeah it really went from "This is your community. You created it and can run it how you want. Reddit is just a collection of loosely-connected, privately-run forums" to "This is my subreddit and I expect you to work for free making it nice for me, even though you created it."
Spez pm'd me and said he canceled my AMA because my elbows are too pointy. :(
I remember how James Corden got fucked over while holding his AMA. Good times.
The Fediverse needs to trick him over here too, so we can do it again. See it as the Fediverses official legitimization or coming-of-age ceremony on the internet.
Here- this way you don't have to go to Reddit to read about it- https://www.distractify.com/...
It's so weird. Ellen is a horrible mean person but she gets a talk show. Corden is a horrible mean person and he gets a talk show. Is it because Carson was also a horrible mean person or something?
I haven't seen a good AMA on that sub for over 5 years already. This, to me, is like hearing that someone shot my already dead dog. Upsetting, but I had already moved on.
I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.
What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we'll just have to wait and see.
But personally, I'm ok even if reddit isn't toppled. Now that I've stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.
Yeah. In the beginning I'm rooting for the death of reddit but now that I've weaned myself off of it I just don't give a shit any more. They can rake in billions, or they can crumble tomorrow. I'm elsewhere and I feel fine.
Im a casual reddit lurker. I left because the official reddit app is horrible to browse even casually
See, but the fact you actually committed to leaving means there's a lot more people even more casual than you still on reddit.
If, you are correct that..
most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else.
And, a lot of the content creators and content moderators leave, decreasing the quality of the content on reddit.
Then, these lurkers will leave the platform.
I don't see why these folks would stay on reddit if the content decreases in quality. Especially, if we are assuming these lurkers do nothing to contribute to the content they are consuming.
It's interesting, you actually provided great evidence which counters your original claim that reddit will not be affected by all of this bad publicity.
The point of contention which is why I believe as above is that the standards of most people still on reddit are fairly low. Reddit has been going downhill for years, this much is known; it's only now, with this latest screw up, that I, (assumedly) you, and many others have decided to jump ship. I, personally, willfully ignored much of the enshittification of reddit, content that I could use third party tools and apps to make up for it's deficiencies; now that reddit is showing they don't care about us and are tearing down those tools, I'm gone.
But for many others, they don't care about any of the current goings on. Many do not even understand how the site actually works, confusing mods with admins as the same thing and not even getting that a sub could shut down (I was a mod, and saw many pieces of mod mail that amounted to "why can't I see posts here help"). Their standards for how bad things can get until they'll make a change in their browsing habits are surprisingly resilient.
I hope reddit adopts twitters new rate limiting and stars making people log in to view content that will really drive traffic away and make searches for blank reddit searches dissappear from Google and hopefully be replaced by blank lemmy start showing up in Google
I deleted my account, I still browse on desktop but I won’t interact.
I’m glad RES lets you block subreddits even if logged out, because there’s some real shitholes which appear if you aren’t logged in
I’m only using Reddit on Safari now that Apollo is gone and, even then, my use has been minimal since the blackout last month.
It will be slow, but Reddit’s death will be fine for me. I will definitely miss the smaller, niche communities, but I think they’ll all find a way to carry on either through Lemmy, et al, or whatever rises from there.
Reddit’s decisions, from investing in NFTs to letting go of Victoria way back when, have all been contributing to the inevitable, but when the content providers leave - and they are - the site will just collapse. My schadenfreude lies in Reddit never even realizing its IPO after all this drama.
you can see the posts/comments per day on this site:
https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
there was definitely a dip, but there seems to always be a dip on weekends and with it being a holiday in the US it is hard to say how much that is affecting usage
Wednesday should be the first 'normal' day since July 1st so I'll be interested to see how much it recovers
It does have a post/comment volume chart, but I don't know how reliable that data is. On July 1st, the API change affected both users (resulting in some leaving which should reduce those metrics) as well as mods (resulting in a reduced ability to deal with bots and trolls, which should increase those metrics).
Add in the complication that Reddit's admins now have a short vs long term conflict where the short term is helped by making it seem like the API changes haven't hurt anything and allowing bots to inflate numbers (or even run them themselves) while the long term would want to see bot activity stamped out so that more users aren't driven away by it.
I don't think we'll get a good idea of what's going on in the short term. In the long term, it might require tools to scrape the data without the API being available (which will definitely happen, you can't allow users to access something and prevent programs from accessing it because the browser itself is a program and HTML, which makes it possible for browsers to organize the information they display, also makes it easier to parse and separate data).
I don’t really care if Reddit dies as long as we keep getting good content here on the fediverse. So far I have been totally surprised exactly how good this place has been as far as activity goes. I will miss the niche communities on Reddit so if we can siphon a bit more growth off this is excellent but the various Lemmy servers have enough activity to replace Reddit for general content for me
I only use it when I'm on desktop. Their mobile app isn't bad in my opinion, but I just refuse to give them my data.
I thought I would keep using old.reddit after they killed RiF but I’ve abandoned the platform all together. Finally got my lemmy account and I’m not going back. Google still shows me Reddit when I search for just about anything but I’m actively avoiding them.
For me, it wasn't so much the loss of third party apps as it was the way the admins handled it. I had never realized how little they actually valued their community. Instead, everything was about the money. Too bad they failed to see that users and the content they created was the reason Reddit was worth anything in the first place.
There were absolutely paths forward that would have worked to allow 3rd party apps without price gouging them. The whole thing was in bad faith and they never wanted to allow 3rd party apps at all, they just didn't want to announce they were kicking them off the platform. It wasn't just about the money, it was about control. Control over the users by forcing them to use their app where they could push unwanted content on you and degrade your experience to maximize profits. The 3rd party apps made money by providing a better user experience which was directly counter to their aims to maximize profits.
3rd party apps did not make a huge percentage of the user base, so why were they so afraid of them? I think the answer is that they are planning on making the user experience on the main app much worse and they know users would be looking for alternatives after, so they went out to kill the alternatives, or charge them an insane amount.
Just add “-reddit.com” to the ed of your query and the search engine will omit results from that site.
I hope someday instead of google, I go to a website that has the fediverse indexed and directs me right to a Lemmy thread with my answer.
Google is shit, Reddit was what I searched for everything on and now Reddit is shit.
Let’s fucking go Lemmy I have faith in you
Here you go! 🤓
A gentleman, a scholar, and an all-around good person.
That was my line of thinking too, more or less. After RiF, I was like "I guess RedReader is still up, since they got an exemption! I'll just wait out till July 1 then switch to that.
But the day after the protest, I just decided to drop the platform altogether. It felt spineless calling out reddit on their bullshit, just to fall in line and still give traffic to their site.
Lemmy needs to come up with their own term for an AMA.
That’s fucking perfect
Or from the reverse, Lemmy Answer You. Are we okay with the inevitable shortened version being LAY? Perhaps we should keep the "anything" on the end so it becomes LAYA. Much better SEO.
Publicly Lemme Ask Your Earnest Radical Opinion Nobody Expected
It's already a word, which is bound to create confusion and be harder to search for.
LAYA is also a homophone for a certain space princess, but the spelling is unique.
That felt real good
Nice
Ask someone something.
Ding ding, we have a winner.
(ㆁωㆁ)
Eh Reddit doesn’t own that term, let’s just take it
I agree. Reddit didn't trademark AMA so that means we can use it too.
Oh, okay I had no idea. Crazy how they bothered to trademark it but not do anything to support the mods of the AMA community, rather even actively harming them by firing the only person at Reddit that was helping them out, Victoria Taylor.
LAMA
"Q&A" has already been around for decades before reddit.
AKIRA: Ask Knowledgeable Individuals - Receive Answers
This triggers geometry memories with right triangles.
Angle Side Angle
I don't think Lemmy is big enough for more high profile people to come here. The main reason celebrities do AMAs are for publicity for whatever they're promoting. Lemmy has way less total users than /r/iama has.
I thought about this the other day.
I couldn't care about high profile AMA
Seriously. A few were cool. But most were pretty much just marketing teams with celebrities who couldn't care less about the 2011 hit crime drama Rampart starring Woody Harrelson
I love the smaller ones. And I think that made early reddit AMA great. Also whoever that girl was that helped do the AMAs was great. Who remembers that era. She was a mini celebrity and then they fired her.
Lemmy could definitely make headway by going back to the basics and doing AMA with random people with cool or niche expertise
Yep. She was the canary in the coal mine.
It doesn't have to start with A-listers.
Looks like a certain super talented Australian actress picked the right place to promote "Barbie".
Margot Elise Robbie, you're a genius.
Margot Elise Robbie, your posts of tech commentary and promotion of "Barbie" on in theaters July 21st is AMAZING!!!!!!
That's "character actress Margot Robbie, marketing genius" for you!
It would, right?
It's refering to my new movie, "Barbie", silly.
Margo
I just hope my wad of hundreds is enough to include popcorn and drinks.
Imma need to see your verification pic, Ms. Robbie.
Ew no you're just going to post it to lemmynsfw.
I mean, you're welcome to do one with your clothes on.
It's amazing to me how sanitized the reddit front page is. All this nonsense going on right now (which Reddit The Company, and Steve Huffman in particular is responsible for) is incredibly important to any potential future of Reddit The Website, up to and including the possibility of Reddit (the Website, the Company, and the Userbase) becoming irrelevant.
But go browse reddit, and you have to look for it. Right now, the first arguably "anti-spez" submission is from r/shitposting, halfway down page two.
And that's it. There's nothing else. If you wanna talk about the current events of the website you're on, on that website, apparently go fuck yourself.
I'm surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I've curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.
I suspect they've fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.
Most people don't actually give a crap and those of us that did probably already left. I think this is mostly what Reddit was banking on happening. The question remains whether those that have left also were contributing the most content through posts or comments which could make the site stale and in turn drive more people away.
Some lemmy instance admin should do an IAMA there.
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AMAs died when Reddit fired Victoria, they haven’t been worth a shit in a while.
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