Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark
3 years ago by 0485 to c/lemmyworld
Of course they aren't going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.
My expectation... Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a "we did everything we could" and then go back, business as usual.
I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It's their own fault. They didn't have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn't have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I'm really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There's this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can't just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren't. The scale of the two businesses is not the same... none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn't need these thousands of employees, they're already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that's way too open and won't turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
they are doing things like launching Avatars, NFT's, and other ways to try and cash in for a quick buck.
As someone who's 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there's definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there's too many people who don't seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I'm getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it.. Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.
THIS!
Here's your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
I've seen people saying "Lemmy can never replace reddit because the instances won't be able to afford to host video!" ...My dudes, I have never once asked my forum / social media site to host videos.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, "yeah, this is fine."
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It's still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we're going black for two days. They should've just says "were going black until you cange the rules again".
Of course it's up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it's any other day. If I wouldn't have known subreddits went private (and they didn't sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I'll just see posts from subreddits who don't participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.
The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It's not easy and I think Reddit knows it.
Is this for real? I wonder if different people's r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There's like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I've never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.
What is Jerboa, if you'll excuse my ignorance?
Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what's going on.
Loading full web pages takes more server processing power than API access.
This is browser and RIF just seems weird because blackout should mean less user load.
There are, apparently, 2.8 million subreddits. About 8,000 are dark, meaning that's just over one quarter of one percent of subreddits. Even with some of the largest subs participating, I wouldn't be surprised if there is no massive dip in traffic. There are enough subs still open with enough mass appeal that most people will just look at some other subs for a few days. And I'll be honest, even though I've made an account both here and on kbin, I know I'll still use old.reddit (with RES and an adblocker at least) most of the time, simply because I doubt any of the subs I actively look at will do any meaningful migration that would lead to a similar level of discussion.
Hmm, 2.8 million subreddits, but how many are ghost towns? I wonder if anyone has a measurement in terms of monthly active users or something along those lines.
Of all the subs I was subscribed to, there were I want to say only about 10 that didn't take part in the blackout. I unsubscribed to all of them. I am now subscribed to only subs that either took part in the blackout, or in one case one that opted to remain public (due to the nature of its contents) but is blocking all submissions for the next couple days.
For me, once RIF stops working, reddit will be dead to me. I will never install their official app, and 99% of the time I'm on reddit is on mobile. I have no doubt that old reddits days are numbered as well and that was the remaining 1%.
IDK, he said in the AMA that old reddit isn't going anywhere, and even if he's lying I don't think he would immediately do a 180 and kill it. The way I see it, it will probably be around for the foreseeable future.
Reading comment above yours i dont think the 2.8million is correct and it also states that there are only 100,000 subreddits with over 125 subscribers and only 34,000 with more tham 1000 subs. Of the roughly 8000 subreddits that went dark there are someof the biggests subscriber counts woth some having millions of subscribers. I think based on that that its actually quite a hefty number.
It's also worth noting that many of those massive subs, especially the default subs, have lots of overlap in subscribers. r/funny with 50 million and r/aww with 30 million does not necessarily equal 80 million people because there are millions, probably even tens of millions, of people who are subbed to both.
Wait WHAT.
Yeah, it's kinda crazy. I support the blackout but deep down I know nothing of substance will come of it. Their dip in traffic is probably not much worse than when a major city loses power.
I wouldn't say nothing. I found this site.
Why would anyone even want the job as a moderator on a dying site that's going to be filled with trolls and spam? Heck, you'd be better-off just getting a job at McDonalds. At least that pays.
I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let's be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I'm sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy's active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit's monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is 'dying', Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it's a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)
Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it's going to be a couple years off.
There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/...)
There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.
Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that's currently dark so I can't give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.
This makes sense to me. I was wondering how many were active, engaged communities and how many were shells or ghost towns.
somebody else pointed this out, but it's honestly bizarre he's going in on the "we aren't making any money" ploy in preparation for the ipo
what's the pitch to the investors? "please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase"?
There are 3.1 million subreddits.
That 8838 is the number of subs who pledged to protest in some capacity. A lot of them are big subreddits, but still. It's not like they've cut off access to 90% of the site like some people think.
Yeah but how many of those millions are ghost towns?, since a lot of the biggest subs are participating I'm more curious about how reddit will handle it, replacing the mods in every one of them? That's a lot of man power, I hope whoever they put in charge isn't an idiot that does it for free, and what's more funny is that the best mod tools rely on the API and 3rd party access.
At the very least I expect a decline in quality content and spam, trolls, bots etc.
My bet? AI.
If they have any kind of archive of past mod decisions then they can just dump all that into a neural net. And then they get to look all sexy in their upcoming IPO because they are using āļøāļøāļøARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEāļøāļøāļø like all the āļøāļøāļøSEXIESTāļøāļøāļø companies!!!1! No more of those annoying unpaid volunteers to get uppity any more!
I, for one, do not welcome our new AI moderation overlords, and will probably be done with Reddit if this happens. But I just know someone there has to be pushing for this.
It would take a considerable while to train an in-house LLM AI for moderation purposes, and even if it was trained honestly it would at least be consistent whereas you can get away with breaking mod rules as long as your meme made them chuckle, etc.
Who cares, AI will become a part of Lemmy too and I'm just done with reddit anyways.
Over half my feed went dark. I was only getting posts from 4-5 subreddits, mostly news. That's a big impact on a user.
I guess they're living up to their name?
All the subreddits I subscribe to went dark except for 1. It's a sub about this show called "From". I'm slightly disappointed in them
Losing RIF is what got me looking elsewhere.
Yeah, but those subs contain the majority of redditor interaction. ~70k people on a sub is enough to put it into the top 5%. The top 1% subs are very likely responsible for 50%+ of all reddit posts. Losing just a handful of them is a big deal.
Unfortunately in a few hours most of those subreddits will open back up and it'll be business as normal. The ones that don't open will be transferred over to new moderators and they'll resume normal operation too.
Realistically, for the most part, not much will change for Reddit. A lot has changed for me and you, though. I've diversified my entertainment and don't intend to lurk the same website for hours a day. I like Lemmy, and I like the people here but Reddit is too old and too encompassing to never visit it again.
The problem is that there is a lot of great crowd-sourced knowledge on Reddit on everything from programming to which microwave oven I should buy. It's going to take time to replace that, if it can be done.
Good point! I hope that happens!
I kind of want all the users to wipe their comments and burn it down like the library of Alexandria. Then spez can't mine it for AI.
I hate losing the window into humanity, but it would be insanely satisfying to watch the fire burn.
if you do this just remember to redact your comments and posts FIRST and do it only while the subs are live tomorrow not dark right not. read a different post that thishas something to do with what reddit keep and can use.
Couldn't agree more on your second paragraph. I have lurked Reddit for years. This, however, is my first comment, and it's on Lemmy...
Yea, My sub is only going dark from the 12th - 14th, i already replicated the sub here. but its not Reddit 0_o I don't think anything will ever replace reddit but give it sometime and after the exodus on the 30th this will be the only place to be. RedReader on Reddit is a good third party app for reddit (On Android) But its a learning curve but good. I heard it had immunity from the 3p app list cause of its accessibilty.
Well it forced me to look for alternative. People wonāt necessarily stick with Lemmy right now, but they know there are alternative, some of their name and what it looks like.
Personally I have looked at Lemmy and nine or kine (something like that) and I think itās pretty close.
Piggy backing off this to remind people that after multiple reports of a child porn seller on reddit were either ignored or claimed to not to violate TOS, spez personally banned me for harassment after I asked him to intervene.
The CP seller was still active MONTHS later.
I think Reddit will have a somewhat significant loss in users but it'll endure, at least for the time being. Social media sites die slower now. But I'm happy I found alternatives because I just can't see myself using their official app
As of today, he's saying "the blackout will pass." Doesn't sound he cares at all, so I'm here now. Hello, new friend!
Honestly fuck that guy. I'm glad that I don't need to continue supporting this person.
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Been for for 10 minutes. Really like it so far. Really gives me the vibe of the early 2000s internet (in a good way)
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let's gooooo lemmy!
Same. Dude is acting like a spoiled brat digging his heels in when everyone is telling him heās making a huge mistake. It would be like the captain of the Titanic seeing the iceberg and thinking āItāll moveā.
I think for me it was just the one last thing that pushed me over the edge. The content was starting to get meh and the bots were š
Like I said a few other places, even if Lemmy only grows to be 1% of the size, I honestly like the small community vibe of it more than Reddit. More direct interactions.
I won't argue against the need for reddit to be profitable, they're a business after all, BUT, all respectable software that is paid has different tiers of pricing, usually ranging from single-user to corporate-deployment.
spez is complaining everywhere that they can't allow corporate-level scraping of data to train AI for free, and that's fair, but why don't they differentiate "small" devs developing apps for users from "corporations" training AI?
I find it really hard to believe it's too difficult for them, other paid software/platforms do it all the time.
The only logical explanation to me is they don't want to, they just want to kill apps no matter what, that's why the unreasonable prices for everyone, they're just using the "no profitable" excuse to do that without a worse backslash than they're getting already, tho they're being quite stupid about it.
Since I don't see a link to it in the discussion, here's an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/...
Thanks for saving my time
I never expected them to change their mind, they know what they want and they know what sort of people they want on their platform and frankly it is not us.
Plenty of people including me are very glad about being pushed in a more fedi direction, and genuinely enjoy it here. Probably most of those people are older like me and feel very much at home with a bit of jank, with Mastodon's topic-based following system, etc etc. Because that's what the internet was like when we were first exploring it. We will 100% stick around.
For younger or less techy people though, the only thing that really gets them to use services is how easy it is. And that's fine too. We can have our own corner of the internet here to be dorks in, and they can have their own corner over there, and we can all still be friends just...you know...from a distance.
Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.
The problem is that Reddit is much bigger than Digg ever was. They are entrenched. Getting people to switch will be difficult when all we have to offer is āIts like Reddit but way more of a clusterfuck.ā
Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ānope.ā So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?
That's the biggest problem that I see for Lemmyās future. We should be asking ourselves āWhat can we do that other platforms cannot?ā We cannot survive if we're just a clone of Reddit.
Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ānope.ā So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?
To be honest, I (as a techy myself) thought the same when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. Once I realized that most of the big instances are already federated anyway and that I can see all their posts when I browse All, my doubts were gone. It's really not that much of a hurdle, even for non tech savvy people.
Exactly. I'm a normie, and I'm here with no problem.
Give us "normies" a little credit. I'm not technical minded AT ALL and I'm still willing to stick around and figure out how this shit works. Do I understand it? Hardly. Does the app I'm using (Jerboa) work? Barely. (Although today's new release has improved it greatly, thanks guys!). But I'm still floundering around here and it's a bit frustrating. I'm still going to give it a go though. I'm confident that improvements will come that make it easier here for everyone like me that uses the internet a lot but doesn't really understand the internet that much.
But maybe I'm just willing to stick it out because I was only looking for an excuse to leave Reddit and the means to do so. I admit I don't really care about the recent debacle, I just miss the old Reddit of 10-15 years ago and I don't like what it's become (a place full of memes, TikTok videos, dumb jokes, and hardly any real conversation anymore). It took this most recent fiasco for people to start talking about alternatives and that's when I finally learned about the fediverse and made the move. It has been a lot easier to leave when I knew where I could go.
Precisely, you don't have to be deeply technical to understand this, you just have to be willing to put in a little bit of work.
I also found it a little complex and daunting at first as it was my first contact with the fedirverse, and I've been on the internet since pretty much the start.
We'll make it a great place to be, and other people will see the benefits and put in the same work too.
Hacker News, a link aggregator similar to oldschool reddit before subreddits were introduced. I find it often has some interesting discussions but it's not for everybody.
User education will be key. Letās face it, old time āRedditorsā will look at the simplicity of creating an account, and looking at sub-reddits and say āIām too old to learn a new way. This is too muchā.
The seniors wonāt leave, and the younger who donāt follow basic tech will be in the same boat. Just look around some of the subs there - they are entrenched.
They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.
It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn't some money better than no money?
It's because the planned IPO. Allowing third party apps, that are better designed, show no ads and don't collect the same amount of telemetry data (seriously the official app spies constantly for user data), doesn't look good in the eyes of potential investors.
The idea was to kill 3rd party apps, duh.
Idk I use relay and he thinks he can do it for 3 dollars a month, but that's still giving into reddit. I'd rather then switch and start making Lemmy apps, or adapt their app over, might be unreasonable but just a thought
3 dollars a month for a lesser experience, mind. What with reddit stopping access to NSFW/explicit stuff via non-official apps.
But honestly, even if my app of choice - Sync - could do it, I'm not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us. The whole thing stinks of the slow slide of social media into the gutter. Happened with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit is no different.
Federated social media might take a little while to take off, but it will be so much less toxic and much more enjoyable without the ever expanding need of a corporation to deliver more and more profit at the expense of the user.
Iām not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us
That's actually a good point. I don't mind paying for access to an app, since it costs money to maintain, but our posts draw people into the site to read advice, news, and funny stuff. If Reddit is going full-monetization, there should at least be some payment for... upvotes? Views?
Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.
Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they're hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don't care about anyone who can't afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the "chance" at BIG money is better than some money lol
If this is the case, I donāt understand why they wouldnāt just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.
they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.
Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.
I think it's simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this "discussion" is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn't care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.
This is what happens when a bunch of MBAs are detached from the product they're working on.
I was so repulsed by that AMA, what a joke. It really solidified my decision to look elsewhere. Reddit just is not Reddit anymore. Gone is that entity that lives on only in my memories. As with many things past, present and future, money tends to ruin it all for us.
I don't need reddit. Reddit doesn't generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
I really can't wait to see what's the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
Yeah it's gonna be quite an interesting event. Most of reddit's newer userbase doesn't seem to care, but then again the mods of major subreddits do.
Mods can be replaced. Remember r/TheDonald? Not that I have -any- sympathy at all for those trogs, but the admin dealt with them by deleting all the mods and appointing new ones that would toe the line. There's nothing to stop them from using that playbook again. A lot of people will leave, but a lot of people will shrug and go back to posting cat pictures.
Mods can be replaced. I saw a post today -- mods are being replaced.
Yeah, called it. But I was hardly alone in calling it.
The real fallout will be seeing what the numbers look like after July 1st. When all the third party users are given the unavoidable choice to switch to the official app or not. If engagement goes down then and stay lower, itās ogre for Reddit.
Iām going to try to ween myself off reddit. I added the Lemmy page to my Home Screen where Apollo used to be and deleted the reddit app. (Donāt feel like sideloading the Lemmy app). Iāll probably still be browsing with Apollo until I canāt any more. š¤·š»āāļø
Edit to add: the death of reddit will be slow. Theyāre going to stick to their guns, the people who actually make reddit good will move leaving only bots, scammers, and idiots. The idiots will realize theyāre surrounded by idiots, while not realizing theyāre idiots, and they wonāt like that so theyāll try to move here. Depending on how easy it is to move to Lemmy by the time that happens will dictate how many idiots move here. I feel like the current level of difficulty sets a high enough bar to keep the idiots outā¦ for now.
Already having a fantastic time on the fediverse. Fuck em!
I'm literally so excited to be here. Feels like we're a part of a big shift in the future of social media.
It is actually kind of exciting. A lot of people have already jumped ship, and this has a good user experience.
I wonder if advice posts will start appearing in search results.
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
Yes I'm aware of the history. The only way to kill cancer is excise it. Lemmy realistically can't take a full migration from Reddit but that needs to change. I too am super grateful. Part of me wonders if this platform could end the same way but given it's decentralised nature, I highly doubt it. Reddit was open source once. I really want this to succeed. Seize the means of communication.
One thing that worries me is Lemmy's dedication to non-advertisement funding. Lemmy will never be able to handle a ton of people without money for server space and bandwidth. I hate ads as much as anyone, but there are ways to do it that aren't intrusive or toxic or damage your integrity.
The privacy movement can't sell out to private entities or all bets are off again, I think no advertisements is wholly nessasary. I think taking out Reddit is much more achievable than many people think. Yes it will take some money and resources.
As more and more people host their own federated instances it won't be as big of a problem as it was for web 2.0 legacy sites like reddit. The Fediverse really is the future.
There are ways to do advertising that works and is not annoying (or at least less annoying). Context advertising are ads that are directly related to the subject matter of interest. For example, ads from companies that are in the business of meeting the needs of the boatbuilding community would be welcome or at least tolerated in a boatbuilding community. Those same ads shown to a programming community would be less welcome, even if there happens to be significant shared membership.
For example, the paper magazine "Small Craft Advisor" recently transitioned to online only via Substack. It didn't take long for subscribers to actually complain about the loss of advertising and SCA had to respond with self-promotion articles from former advertisers.
Context advertising requires no user profiling, no user tracking, and no data collection. "Oh, you sell epoxy (or sails or plans)? Well here is a community (as distinct from a user profile) that is likely looking for what you sell and probably already discussing products in your line of business."
Open source and decentralized are two different things, as long as it's just a bunch of independent server instances which are small enough each to handle the traffic load you can't really buy that out.
The question is if it'll take off, more or less.
The question is if itāll take off, more or less.
It already has.
yes, its origins were great, it's finale is not so great. I suspect if Aaron were alive he'd be livid. I also think reddit's demise might be the intended outcome, like BCG is at the helm or somesuch.
Unfortunately they aren't since the ones who cared couldn't be bothered for more than two days.
The death of Reddit will be a slow bleeding process. Expect waves. Not floods.
I think it will be more like the tide moving out slowly ... no one will really notice and the CEO and owners will keep telling everyone everything will be fine even as their ship sits beached on a sandbar and the water will never return.
Here's a thread where subreddit mods are announcing their subs going indefinitely dark: https://old.reddit.com/...
Just shows how much reddit cares about it's users.
I mean... the discussion is reddit, isn't it?
If I wanted to scroll mindlessly through the flea market of the internet, I'd open Mastodon. I often do, but, reddit is, er... was the community. The community is reddit. The memes, the jokes, the little phrases. They don't own any of that.
This Reddit board thinks they can fence people in but don't see that al of what they are is build by people that likely just go elsewhere if they're continually treated like shit
Why? The entire community is still there. Reverse the greedy API change, allow 3rd party apps continued full access, Iād be back on Apollo in a heartbeat.
WE should blackout for longer, i own a very small subreddit, but 2 days is not enough!! im not backing down tomorrow, i ask over subs do the same. lets stick it to reddit
I guess Lemmy will be getting bigger then
Power users is how any and all social media started. The power users make something cool, which gains momentum and draws in others.
Corporate social media has shown across the board that they are user-hostile, hence exoduses from Facebook and Twitter. (And would have happened to YouTube too if their was a viable place to go to - but I guess video hosting is a more costly challenge.)
Had the subs gone off for longer (2 weeks) or indefinitely, the risk of Google bots dropping links may have shaken things up more. Personally, I donāt see Reddit going anywhere. There frankly is not enough backing for a sustained enough period of time. Reddit knows tomorrow subs who joined for 2 days will re-open.
Also, I think the people who stay after the blackouts are the ones Reddit wants: the ones least likely to care about being subjected to ads and hostile UI. The ones least likely to leave or protest. The ones with least critical thinking. The ones consuming the most trivial content and guerrilla marketing. The holy grail of any money-hungry social network.
That's true, they're filtering out the people they can't bully around. Smaller population of users but you can be relatively certain about their behavior.
It's like when a scammer intentionally misspells things so that people who are more aware are filtered out off the bat.
Hopefully, but somehow I doubt the same amount would join. Those that are indefinite are not enough.
Once I got Lemmy working on mobile I just deleted my reddit account straight up, a two day protest was always a stupid move. The only way to get their attention is permanently stopping the use of the platform.
Unfortunately in order to actually make a dent in anything under capitalism you simply can't partake of it at all.
I deleted my Reddit account as well. People deleting 10-year-plus accounts will make a larger statement than a couple of days of silent subs.
Reddit has control over granting mod access to new people for rebellious subs. It doesn't have control over my use or non-use of the platform.
Yep, I've had a few different accounts over the years. I tended to delete mine when I hit 100k karma and start over. My last one was barely a year old but whatever, it's gone now and they know why if they read the "why are you leaving?" Thing.
This article and quote is from june 9, before the outages. That said, I agree a planned 2 day blackout is not as powerful as an indefinite strike until plans are reversed
Here's a thread where mods are announcing that they're going indefinitely dark: https://old.reddit.com/...
Yeah, at this point. All these big tech companies are succumbing to their greed.
Good that FOSS are being made to be the shelter for this wasteland that is big tech.
Ayo, fuck you spez!
The disrespect that the average person gets from corporations these days is fucking unbelievable. This current thing with reddit is something especially BS. ALL of the work in the various subreddits were done by the community, supported by third-party apps ALSO built by the community.
This kind of protest is meaningless, going back online after 48 hours? It's just a way for communities to feel good about themselves. The best way to protest is to delete the account / subreddit going offline indefinitely (although I doubt the effectiveness of this)
My first post on lemmy! RIP Reddit and fuck you Pez.
Because they know that ultimately the layuser will stay on reddit. Super sad to see, but maybe if subreddits like r/movies stay dark indefinitely it may push them to make at least some changes to their current stance.
If not and they just swap moderators, the outcry might be pretty bad.
Then my friend is truly dead.
Captain of the Titanic: "we're sticking to our course, despite the iceberg being dead ahead"
Funny thing if they had done that and the iceberg hit frontally like the engineers planned for it would probably not have sunken the ship.
What the engineers didn't foresee was an iceberg strafing the side and cutting open too many sections for the ship to stay afloat.
Denial of what though?
Really curious to see how long the more popular subreddits will remain private. Surely the admin won't just turn them public again without having any mods, right? I kinda would love to see that dumpster fire.
There's a stupid question I have (c/NoStupidQuestions?)
What do mods gain from reopening the subs after two days, even if demands are not met? Are they gaining money or something? Perhaps the bigger ones.
Hey Lemmy gang. Just signed up after seeing this.
Oh, I fucking hate CEO's.
Is anyone surprised? The "blackout" seems to have been a total flop most subs don't give a shit.
The blackout helped me to leave.
It's difficult to rewire a dopamine pathway you've been traveling for 14 years.
Knowing that other people care enough to abstain for two days is useful in that process.
I never expected Reddit to change their policy. I have been surprised at how petulant, dishonest and unprofessional they've been. I would have expected a bland corporate response.
Anyway, onward and upward.
onward, and onto the next dopamine pathway.
Same. Not sure I would have ever heard of Lemmy otherwise.
100% same.
Not surprised, still disappointed. Will discuss with other mods the idea of nuking our community as a "fuck you" to Reddit.
Do it. For the lulz. For great justice. Move every zig.
I think it's more important to bring the subs over here to convince people to migrate
7750/8300 subreddits are blacked out. Plus the server issues caused by the blackout yesterday. Iād be interested to see if an indefinite strike could be powerful enough to reverse this plan
Wow, thatās way higher than I expected. I hope just as many people transfer over to nee platforms so we can get those communities restarted.
Reddit has MANY more than 8300 subreddits. That 8300 is the number of subreddits who SAID they would shutdown.
How did the blackout cause an error?
I expected they would see less utilization, so the servers would be coasting compared to a regular day
It was never going to do more than get people talking, the number of subreddits isn't as important as what the long term impact to users and quality will be. They have signaled their interests are not user centric, it wont be the last outrage I'm sure but they'll keep getting away with it if there isn't a clear alternative and people keep going back.
That's true. The changes don't really effect me in any immediate way, but the blackout gave me a reason to uninstall Reddit for a few days and try Lemmy.
My Google searches are in SHAMBLES rn
Blocking mobile web access and ending old reddit is going to bring more people here over time.
I wouldn't say it was a flop. A massive number of subs and users are participating at the moment (some forced due to the blackouts). But I do agree that reddit executives definitely don't give a shit, and will eventually just start booting mods to bring the subs back if they don't fall in line.
8479/8838 subreddits are private as of this comment.
The number on the page is a bit misleading. If you comb through the website's code on GitHub, you'll see that the 8,838 is actually the number of subreddits that agreed to participate in the blackout.
Calling it a flop isn't accurate either, though.
Sure, most subreddits don't care, but the largest and most active subreddits are overwhelmingly in support of the blackout, but they are also much more affected by Reddit's changes than smaller subreddits.
EDIT: Some words for clarity.
Yeah if they were serious, they'd go dark for good
no wonder since most of the subs are only going offline for 2 days
It's long enough to show impact and short enough that reddit will catch flak for replacing the mod teams.
I can see subs being dark becoming a permanent thing, hopefully coders update reddit to html updater or similar tools to pull from archived zsv files.
Imagine a lemmy instance with reddit's archives
What I don't get is who they're posturing for now.
They showed the developers that the game was fixed and there was no plan to negotiate in good faith.
They've shown the userbase they aren't responsive to strongly held concerns.
They've shown a potential IPO audience that they're capable of burning down the platform in record time and not even waiting until after they cashed out to do so.
They've shown everyone they don't even have the most basic understanding of corporate bullshit speak. It's not hard to put together "We hear your concerns and will assemble a committee of top minds who will proceed to ignore these concerns."
I guess they just want to say they didn't back down. That and $12.50 gets you a cup of coffee.
I'll be interested to see if they try to keep the money happy by trying to kill porn on reddit. If they try that reddit would be in worse shape than Trump.
It's going to be an uphill battle and maybe even a siege. It's going to mean these sub-reddits are going to have to be dark for the foreseeable future if they want to make it painful for Spez and team.
I have officially migrated here from reddit, after nearly 15 years over there. This is my 1st comment and the 1st post I've viewed.
For me, it's irrelevant whether or not my decision makes a discernable impact; I simply won't support them with my traffic and won't settle for the default app. No 3rd party apps simply equates to no reddit for me.
And even if they walked back their decision regarding their API, I still wouldn't return unless there was a change in management.
I don't think reddit will walk back their decision, and I don't think they'll be going anywhere either. But I think this is a tipping point in reddit's quality as a site/community. Analogously to russia's brain drain, I believe we will see that the core of the redditors who are leaving are made up of redditors who promote a healthy functioning site/communities.
I was a very core member of several subreddits and did some moderation, but also contributed to reporting content, etc. that most users neglect, but are integral to limiting spam, trolls, and hate. It's not the users shitposting on r/funny or r/gaming that are going to leave. It's the long-time users who have been propping up this paper tiger.
If enough mods and healthy community members leave, reddit is going to devolve into a cesspool. Reddit will be hard off if they lose the free labor of mods that have propped up their site for years.
Trying this out for the first time, Its honestly really similar. No Apollo app means no reddit for me, unfortunately. If Lemmy can make a good mobile app and the community grows a bit I could see being a semi-daily user here.
It will be more like a downhill slide for them. Without third party apps how are mods going to moderate? There will be so much more spam, trolls, and scams, the already tenuous experience will become even worse.
If they stick with these changes they're already dead, they're just living on borrowed time.
"we're going dark for two days!" isn't going to change anything. reddit mods live for reddit. Why would they leave?
I'm so glad they're unwavering in their commitment to foster growth of the fediverse!
Spez personally banned me for harasent because I reported a child porn seller
I find it funny that a 3rd party app can be "profitable" but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase.
Reddit has increasingly become a cesspit of racism and bigotry anyways, and I find Im going there less and less.
I need to get used to how lemmy works and find my 3d printing people here.
I wonder if they expect to be able to have chatGPT supply all the memes.
Just a textbook case of not knowing the free labor was the product.
Yeah, this sounds like the reddit I've come to know š
Article from June 9, before the outages
Man, this is so dumb; unfortunately, if they open up all the subs, people are just gonna rush back because there's no reason to try to make anything else work.
You gotta respect the dedication on some level
The thing is I don't, though. Besides, what's to respect? He's just a corporate front-man and the board and the money-men have his balls in a vice. He'll say what they tell him to or they'll take turns on the handle.
I respect him doing whatās really best for our society and killing the animal Reddit has become
Critical support for comrade spez in his struggle against Reddit!
First Lemmy comment lfg. Fuck you Spez and excited to help build this community!
Fuck spez!
Well of course not. their mistake is that they're trying to make profit on something that's not profitable. Musk made the same mistake. Unfortunately the general mass can't comprehend the complexity (!) of multiple instances of a same platform because no one uses emails so I don't actually believe Lemmy or Kbin will become mainstream. People will slowly trickle back to Reddit once they realize they have no alternatives.
Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.
Reality has a liberal bias.
Real life must be very scary for you. Maybe just stay in the basement
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Follow us for server news š
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For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
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It's not that you're charging for API access; it's that you're charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
save