The blackout is starting to have a financial impact on Reddit, but we must stay dark!
3 years ago by Jessica to c/lemmyworld
If the performance weakness continues for a week or two, the agency would start recommending decreasing spend with Reddit or directing it to other platforms.
After the blackout, we will be closely monitoring user behavior on Reddit and guide clients when we can unpause,” said Freddy Dabaghi, managing director at Stagwell-backed Crispin Porter Bogusky, which has asked clients to stop campaigns, depending on their client goals.
Same. It's really struck me both how little I miss it and how much I like the communities here. There's a much friendlier vibe.
And for the most part, aside from the bullshit threads where it's encouraged and expected, the comments are a lot more 'high-effort,' which is nice. That's something that I would expect to tend to naturally go down with the lowest common denominator as user count increases, but we'll see.
Yeah, I think the kind of people to drop reddit over this are going to be more my kind of people, if that makes sense.
Conversation seems deeper, less dominated by repeated jokes.
The forum wheel spins what the forum wheel wills.
All praise the hamster
As much as I'll miss my karma crops, the higher bar here (at least, for now) is a welcome reprieve.
Doesn’t lemmy have w “points” thing?
This is a really good point, and one of the reasons I'm happy to make my new online home here.
The type of people who act like this is nothing, or worse, act like there's nothing that can be done and we should just roll over, won't have gone through the trouble to come here. And yeah, I'm with you, they can all hang out and circlejerk the same jokes over and over along with the bots.
Best of both worlds, and we're all happy. A bit of positive selection bias.
It really is, there isn't as much content as reddit and that may or may not change but the lack of people acting like they are better than everyone makes it well worth it. I deleted the app and won't go back
yup, let those folk stay on Reddit.
I wanted to leave for such a long time, but the alternatives weren't active enough.
If enough people stick around, yeah, I'm never going back.
What do you mean by Lemmy for Reddit?
Ah ok, I thought I was about to learn something new again ^^
I love how these articles always frame the strike as "These needy people are mad because Reddit is now charging for something that was free before." Motherfucker, we're mad because the price was unreasonable and they were unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Third party app developers even agreed that charging for API usage was a reasonable thing but they expected the cost to be reasonable, as well.
I'm mad because of the slander.
The reason the price is unreasonable is because they're butthurt that OpenAI and other companies have used the API to pull a LOT of text for machine learning datasets. They are sad that they didn't get a slice of that cake.
On NPR they did interview the Apollo dev at least.
They still got the frame completely wrong, unless there's a different radio segment I didn't hear. The one I heard was mostly from an expert I had never heard from before who made it seem like "the developers" were mad because they had to pay. They included a single throwaway line from Chris. (I think that's the Apollo dev's name.) No mention they the pricing was clearly intended to be unreasonable.
There was a segment today, and one yesterday where they actually put Christian on air for a bit longer and he explained things a little better. The one today was definitely obnoxious. But whatever. There's a lot of nuance in why the API decision is annoying and some of it really does boil down to old users feeling betrayed or having diverging preference. I definitely feel betrayed, and have a preference not to be tracked on my semi-anonymous internet forum.
But to someone who hasn't spent a decade+ on Reddit, the argument makes sense I think. The API does represent an opportunity cost. Whether that opportunity cost is grounded in reality, or MBA brain rot is probably outside the scope for All Things Considered
It's bullshit fr. I also haven't seen one major news article report on that god awful AMA where Spez tried to lie about what Christian said and then claim he was blackmailed but was met with audio recordings of himself that proved he was lying
If I were world dictator I would just make advertising illegal. It's the perfect dictator move. Simple policy that's hard to enforce which will almost certainly have unintended consequences. But God damn do I hate advertising.
Your wish has been granted, all small businesses have gone bankrupt because nobody knows they exist and since the only form of advertising left is undercover guerilla advertising campaigns every post on every platform is secretly an advertisement!
I think people should be allowed to promote products and services, but those promotions should not be given any more weight than any other kind of post. The problem is when advertisers are allowed to buy spots on a site.
Isn't that how it works now anyway, in addition to regular ads?
oh no
It is such a bizarre and creepy industry, everything about it is gross. I support you for world dictator!
I honestly think I'd prefer that they just let me pay them outright rather than trying to use me as bait for advertisers. The expectation that everything should be free leads to what we see today
Yea I wouldn't mind If some of these instances had like one stickied post at the top for a paid ad If that was enough to pay for most of these server costs
The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.
sadly adverts are what allows some things to be free to consumers, it's the funding that supports the content that people consume. It's what it is for now, in the future maybe there would be better merit systems funded by tax or something if humans get together and stop being greedy.
Around 14 years ago or so, I actually turned off my Adblocker for reddit, because I respected the platform and how it was run. I've never turned off Adblocker for ANY other site before or since. Reddit can get fucked. I'm not going back period.
Sites need to understand that. No one wants to pay 10$/month for some premium crap, all we want is to replace ad revenue.
But sadly most of them charge ridiculous amounts, so it's infeasible to support many of them. People end up choosing the big ones because they provide the most value per money, so we get more monopolization.
Imagine after the 3rd party apps are killed!
Even if Reddit does negotiate manageable rates for "non profit" 3rd party apps (lol), wait until Reddit users figure out they still can't access NSFW content except from the Reddit official app and the new Reddit layout. Break out the popcorn.
I truly never realized how many people used Reddit for porn until this happened
The main draw was that people using 3rd party apps didn't see (reddit's) ads. If 10% of apollo's users go to the official app, that is 10% that are seeing ads were they didn't before.
Bit of a catch-22, because reddit is also counting all those 3rd-party users as part of their userbase when talking about how many users they have. These 3rd party app users also generate some of the content that draws undiscerning users to open reddit and view ads on the way.
Yupp, bit of a leopards ate my face moment! Is their a community for that on here yet btw?
I personally hope they go bankrupt. I mean I feel bad for the average worker just trying to make a living, but fuck Reddit. Those folks should jump ship while they can and do something better for themselves.
I really like the idea that position if big social networks is not secure, that will make all of them think before making bad decisions.
Facebook is almost dead, at least around me (Meta is not with IG and Wapp), I am now starting to hope that reddit would not recover.
They have been digging this grave for some time now. We should let them go.
Reddit announced a layoff just this past week. Nobody's job there is safe. Best the rest get out while they can.
A new blackout tracker just dropped on the Discord: https://darktotal.com/
I’ve also been liking https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
That’s very useful. I scrolled through the out of blackout list and was disappointed to find quite a few of my most-visited subreddits were public again
It almost makes me more upset that the subreddits are going public and makes me resist going back even more. It’s obviously having some sort of impact from that article about advertisers. Like, do mods really need to have their subreddit public that much? Go touch some god damn grass It’s irritating
This one is much nicer.
I love how this contrasts with the CEO statement that many subreddits would go back to normal after the 2 days
Mod fight, probably.
I cancelled my Reddit premium today. I was hesitant because I was in the $30/yr and didn’t want to get rid of that pricing since it’s $50 now. But I’m liking the fediverse and the quirks that comes with it. Will cancelling make an impact? Probably not. But I’d rather not support them if they’re not going to give me a choice on which app I use.
Earnest question, what did the $30/year get you? I never gave them a penny out of my own pocket, didn't know why I would.
It gave you 700 tokens a month. So you could give out awards to posts. It also removed ads. But I used Apollo and old.reddit(don’t know if ads are placed here) so it didn’t exactly benefit me much.
I also cancelled my Reddit premium. I was using Apollo so the no ad thing was not a factor and I never used my tokens. But I used reddit a lot over many years and wanted to contribute. Currently I am avoiding reddit and trying out Lemmy. Will decide before Jun 30 whether to delete posts/comments/account. I have also resrrected an RSS app which I had not been using for quite a while.
I never had premium. But I deleted my 8-year account today. I took a screenshot as I was using power delete suite. I was tempted to make a throwaway account and post it to some of their subreddits that are still trending and see if I could start some kind of stupid little movement. Maybe they think a little bit longer if they start seeing people delete long-term accounts. And I'm sure there are lots of accounts out there that are much longer term and much higher Karma than me. Actually sacrificing some of those accounts could actually make a difference.
Canceled my premium as well. I'm enjoying Lemmy so far and have no plans to go back to Reddit
In this adconomy?
I've used an adblock for more than a decade now. At work, due to security reasons, the way we connect to internet is quite restricted and I don't have an adblock. Internet experience is terrible with that, like unusable. Most websites you barely can find what you are looking for, and the annoyance is constant. It's like a nightmare every time I have to use it that way.
yk you could "side-load" install the adblocker extension manually from flash drive ;)
EDIT: /s? I am aware there are jobs that require very high security, this was just a cheeky don't-really-do-this remark.
One possible solution: if OP is allowed to connect their phone to their work computer, and they have a rooted Android phone, they could get around this using VPN tethering. I'll spell out how to do this, in case someone else can benefit from it.
What's needed:
- a rooted Android phone
- a VPN based ad blocker (Blokada, AdAway, etc)
- a USB cable
- a VPN hotspot app
Steps:
- Connect your phone to a VPN based ad blocker
- Connect your phone to your computer
- Open the VPN hotspot app. Turn on USB tethering, then rndis0
If it doesn't work, try turning on USB debugging on your phone, or changing default USB configuration under Developer options
only if I want to risk losing my job and potential criminal charges (not joking)
Right? It's like sleeping with strangers without a condom on. Even the FBI recommends an adblocker now.
I mean. We're all here. No idea how many people will actually stay, but I hope It's enough. I like the change
Any amount will push lemmy closer to mainstream, so it's always a good thing. The world won't stop going into an anti-privacy and anti-freedom direction over night, so we might be looking at some exponential growth after the wave of new users.
I wouldn't say we're all here. The statistics really don't show that unfortunately
I definetly didn't write clearly, sry :p
I meant that everyone on this thread is already on board. I just hope people actually stay in Lemmy
I can only talk for myself. Since yesterday I lurk on Reddit but don’t really engage with it anymore other than that.
As soon as Apollo is gone, even that will go away. I don’t know if I will stay on Lemmy, only time will tell even tho I hope so. But my active days on Reddit are ending right now.
Moved today. A big part of what I enjoy on reddit is reading comments and with how active communities are over here, I just might be here to stay!
Two Wpromote clients canceled two premium, takeover-style campaigns that were supposed to launch this week
"Takeover" campaigns are getting canceled. I wonder which blacked out subs were going to be taken over with ads this week.
Not literally take over a subreddit, takeover advertising campaigns are typically a high-key screen space domination type of advertising. Think of something like a video games news site where the homepage is completely covered in advertising for a new, high budget game. Ads at the top, ads at the bottom, ads in the normally-empty margins, and often a focus on articles about the subject.
How that reflects to Reddit I'd never know, it's likely something that's exclusive to the newer layout that I have no interest in using.
This type of advertising is the death-knell of any site, because at that point you're interacting with an advert with some extra elements rather than a site with ads.
I'm of the opinion that it has a time and a place, but I do agree that it's exceptionally intrusive to the site's normal experience and should be very rare and short-lived. Any more than a day and its runs afoul of the people who just aren't interested.
What do you think the unblockable "He Gets Us" bullshit is?
They have been doing this since March 2020.
Source: https://www.redditinc.com/...
At this point, even if they were to reverse all the decisions they’ve made, I have no intention or desire to go back to Reddit. Lemmy has been a great replacement and I’m hoping it’ll only improve over time.
I deleted my Twitter account and haven't been back since blood diamond heir and purchaser, not founder, of Tesla Elon Musk bought it.
I'm done with reddit. I just hope the anti-capitalist subs regenerate here or I'll have to find another place to vent (again, not reddit) in that regard.
I'd love to try to make one, but I'm too busy with wage slave survival to be an attentive mod.
Libel of this nature must not stand. They're blood emeralds.
Cut my hands off why dont ya!
I’m just as happy here, for now. A community driven feed and a chance to interact with random people is enough to replace 95% of what I used Reddit for, and Twitter (which I was never really active in) and the alternatives that sprung up following the Musk cliff just don’t scratch that itch.
I’ve actually been expecting Reddit to die for a while and worried I wouldn’t find the Next Thing^TM until it was too late. I’ve gone through and deleted all my alts and their comments/posts, but will give spez another week before I purge my (almost 200k) main account. It would be nice if Lemmy got enough traction in my areas of interest to fully replace Reddit either way. I have some bad habits there I would be wise to leave behind anyway.
Reddit doesn't provide anything I can't get elsewhere. I don't know anyone there, I just reply to comments that pique my interest. Heck I delete my Reddit account every few years for privacy so even my account itself isn't precious. I'm just getting started here but it's hard to imagine Lemmy couldn't replace it entirely.
I nuked my 15 year 750k karma "main" recently because I ran afoul of a super mod who banned me from like 8 subs in one fell swoop because I talked shit on his favorite game or some dumb shit. IDGAF it's just the internet I'll burn my next one too if it feels appropriate (and I probably will now, I just want to find one of those comment scrambler things I've read about.)
@CannaVet @MagicShel Wow 750k ? How long you been on reddit? I been there 6 years and only got 350k
I've been looking for the next thing for more than a year, because the things that made Reddit a (relatively) healthier form of social media were being eroded. I tried out tildes, and the community was much more friendly, but almost too friendly. It was like they were overcompensating out of fear of the community becoming toxic... It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't comfortable - it felt like meeting strangers who you really want to impress. They're also somewhat anti-growth, which isn't a bad idea, but they were well below the sweet spot
Plus, I never loved the old school Reddit visuals, and it's design principle is html only and had no app or dark mode... All in all it's a great place for a specific group of redditors that didn't include me
Then I made up my resolution to leave Reddit when my apps go down and started looking at making a custom app to collate RSS feeds, and I started hearing about Lemmy.
I liked it enough that I've dropped everything and started building a better app. There's a lot missing, but there's so much good energy.
And the design principles of the fediverse address many of the fundimental problems with social media and the Internet as a whole. This might really be something important
3rd-party devs recognized that paying for API access is reasonable, but they rightfully objected to the pricing.
The Internet is moving towards a subscription-based model, mimicking the one it opposed at the beginning. Or to put it more succinctly: app subscription are the new bills.
Guess I should have worded better. I actually like subscription-based membership if it means we remove advertisements and data collection/sales. I personally think spez is lying about reddit not being profitable. They are probably raking it in via ad sales and selling harvested data.
I think the internet at its best is when it's ad-free, not harvesting and selling user data, and free to use.
Wikipedia is one of the most successful projects on the internet, and it works exactly like that.
Hypothetically, I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of compensation model. But experience shows that as soon as you introduce a for-profit model, people in charge will eventually ask the question "hey, if this is making money, couldn't we squeeze much more money out of it!?!?"
Even if it was true, the decision to host all images and videos themselves must have helped with that lol.
I don't think the idea is stupid, just poorly executed. From Reddir's POV, this makes sense (why wouldn't it?). They could have done this in a much better way.
long live lemmy 💙
The problem is that they always want more. It's not enough to make money. So the ads and intrusive garbage gets worse and worse until we reach an unusable nightmare.
TV shows have banner ads during the show. Everyone wants to send you notifications. Even cars are starting to have ads on their screens.
It's exhausting.
Tuned into watch Nhl this year. My god. There are fast moving full colour animations on the boards. Right in the middle of the action in one of the fastest moving contact sports with a tiny puck you're trying to keep track of. It's unwatchable. Had to just use it like a radio station and only watch when there was a highlight.
It's obnoxious and has made me never want to see ads ever again. I'm OK with seeing something useful like a local ad for deals on a local food place or Safeway deals or something, toys and videogames maybe even movies but I shouldn't have to let them data mine me for targeted ads that end up being repetitive and constant. When living in italy we may have had programming that wouldn't start on time or not at all but at least it wasn't interrupted by ads. I was so confused as a kid seeing gargoyles have a weird spot or two where it would cut off with a dramatic reaction shot then continue with the same or similar one. I had no idea that's where ads went. I have no idea who ads work on but whoever you are stop buying stuff just because you saw an ad please lol!
Otherwise why would businesses pay to host interesting content for free?
See, I think that's the problem.
Wikipedia is one of the all-time great projects on the internet, and it keeps chugging along all without forcing miserable ads on its users or charging them a subscription fee or selling their data to the highest bidder.
And their donation drives are perfectly fine, and I'm perfectly willing to give them some money every now and then as long as they're asking for what is needed to keep the site up and running.
Maybe not everything should be run as a for-profit business, with an overriding goal of monetizing clicks and maximizing profits?
I am/was? A moderator of r/NintendoDE, still backed out, until they take us over or comply with the demands.
Probably we'll be taken over at some point, but I feel like Reddit has lost its place for me, and a large part of the trust that I out there too.
I officially left reddit. Totally done with it. I remember when the Digg exodus happened. No one thought things would turn out the way it did for Digg. There will always be users on reddit, and who knows, maybe they will use AI to aggregate content to fill the void for those who have left. It's all about the targeted ads in the end; they don't care who submits content, they care about the views.
It's hard to stay dark when the admins can put admin-friendly mods in charge of subs.
They can try but without the moderation tools at the core of the issue, the subs will be inundated with bot spam till it dies. There will never be enough admins with free time to replace all the unpaid moderators let alone their knowledge. Not to mention doing a hostile takeover of subs without any understanding of each community's values will serve only to piss off more people.
Besides cashing out a dying platform, there is no winning for Reddit if they keep this up.
That's fine let reddit shittify itself further. Whoever they replaced them with is gonna do reddit bidding that is unless they turn on reddit, regardless its not going to return reddit to its former self.
Is AI capable of this? My gut is that there is still too much nuance for AI to be successful, that it won't be able to adapt to changing circumstances as a subreddit community evolves for example. Are we at that point with AI technology?
The thing that should scare advertisers the most isn't just the slight dip in revenue, but that those users are moving to ad-free sites. Those impressions are unrecoverable by redistributing spend away from Reddit.
that those users are moving to ad-free sites
When I check my ublock origin for this site, it says 0 blocked trackers and ads out of 0%. That's so refreshing. I don't think I've seen a website like that in decades.
Don't forget that in the end of the month and July 1st the third party apps will disappear on reddit. That means more redditors will to like lemmy or squablles etc.
Yeah, this is what I'm most interested to see. Right now it's a forward thinking, principled thing.
Once Relay, RiF, Apollo, BaconReader, and all the others go defunct, a lot more people are going to take notice. If they use the awful official app, they're going to realize Reddit has changed dramatically and not for the better, and they've just been shielded from the worst if it with their 3rd party apps.
Do you have a source on this? 5 days ago the message was "P.S. old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere".
A few months ago, the message was also "Reddit is not going to start charging for API access."
I'm not saying old.reddit.com is going away in the very near future, but I also wouldn't put too much trust into whatever spez says on any given day.
I don't disagree, but there's a big difference between "it might stop working sometime in the future, there's no way to know for sure" and "it will stop working somewhere around the date the API changes are made".
The first is a good guess, the second is just flat out wrong. Look, I don't like the reddit admins any more than the next guy, but there's no need to resort to straight up lying.
I would love to be a fly on the wall come July. If the advertisers start to pull their spots, the earth may rumble just a tad
On Monday, Reddit’s ad manager encountered a brief outage, during which buyers were unable to look at reporting statistics, even while impressions were still delivering, though the impact was fairly minimal, per four sources. (The Verge reported the moderator blackout crashed the site, although it’s unclear whether the crashes are related).
So the site was down for quite a bit of time but the ad related stuff was just a minor hiccup?
Priorities
Ah fuck yeah let’s go
Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.
Once Reddit restricts it API usage and Stock goes public it will slowly just become another Digg clone.
I wish the acronym CPM was defined. Maybe I overlooked it.
Cost per thousand. They don’t define it, because it’s a common metric in advertising.
Yup
The constellation of thousand, mille and million will probably confuse people until the end of time.
I never gave them money, but I gave them free content. That is now done and gone. As soon as Apollo's API is deleted, I'm editing all of my old comments and posts to remove any content and let readers know what. Some of it was very helpful stuff to help others troubleshoot PC and server issues.
@Nogami @Jessica You realize that id you delete your account that has all that content the comments and post will be there but the author will say ,[deleted] nobody will know it came from you only reddit will know
That's why you use shreddit. It can go through and remove all of your old posts. I used to have it running on a chron to remove all comments that had no or negative votes after a few weeks. You can actually set it to edit the comment into gibberish as well to muck with the SEO.
That's why I'm not deleting my account, only editing my posts to something like "I have revoked Reddit's license for this post due to the actions of Reddit's management towards 3rd party app authors. You may contact me on Lemmy instead".
Yeah but reddit shouldn't be getting clicks or revenue from the internet archive since it's just a snapshot. I hate to see knowledge destroyed, whatever the reason. I just hope there was an effort to preserve it.
I can't help but feel reddit is in a "heads I win, tails you lose" position right now with its users. They don't really need us. The formula for user engagement has been perfected by all the other social medias that came before it and in a short time I think reddit will be the same. Without an archive it seems like this is inflicting disproportionate harm on the community.
Wiping your account would reduce their clicks from searches, but as someone who uses a lot of open source software, this is a huge loss for all the tech help posts. If I could just search the archive for it though, that'd be great.
Holy Moly! Only 9000 of about 100000 Subs reportedly participate in the protest! Not even 10 percent! Ugh!
Yeah try googling questions and you'll see the results of the blackout. I've already had at least 3 questions that would've been answered by reddit, but when I clicked the link I couldn't read it because the community was private
In b4 all the top mods get replaced and all the sub are un privated
To permanently impact reddit, the users and not the mods would need to remove thier own posts
Edit: only a few hrs after this comment, reddit started doing it. I've heard they started rollong back edit+deletes also, but as people call posts removed by mods "deleted" its not clear yet if its users own deletions being reverted.
I had to put a block on the reddit domain on my searxng instance so I could find stuff without wasting time.
This is one of my biggest fears of Reddit shutting down. The loss of information is going to be significant. Even the wayback machine doesn't have as many archived posts as it seemed to before now.
. Pretty impressive (and impactful hopefully). 
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@lemmy.world
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
Follow us for server news 🐘
Outages 🔥
https://status.lemmy.world
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Support e-mail
Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.
Report contact
- DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- Email report@lemmy.world (PGP Supported)
Donations 💗
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
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Honestly, regardless of what happens, I have no plans to go back. Lemmy's been a refreshing breath of fresh air.
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