Technology @beehaw.org Gaywallet (they/it) @beehaw.org 1y ago

Megathread for Reddit Blackouts and News - Week 1

Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!

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I’ve been posting this to subs that haven’t blacked out:

Reddit wants to begin selling API data access to large AI companies at a really high margin so those AI companies can train their data on the content we generate and contribute to reddit, and reddit can make a shit ton of money on that.

This data API is also how third party apps and mod tools access reddit. Rather than charging apps a lower tier and AI companies a large one, reddit has instead decided to charge everyone for that data access.

As a result, not only are third party reddit apps going away because they’d have to charge huge fees to their users, but so are a lot of the tools that reddit’s unpaid volunteer moderators use to moderate subs, which means moderation quality is going to drastically drop soon.

In addition, the official reddit app is terrible for accessibility, and does not work with things like screen readers that blind or partially-sighted people use. These issues have been reported to reddit since alienblue became the official reddit app, reddit does not care to put money into fixing them. third party apps do this. people who rely on these apps to be able to even use reddit are basically getting kicked off reddit for being disabled.

All so reddit can cash in on all the content the communities of reddit produce, without compensating the content creators nor paying the unpaid volunteer moderators whose lives they just made way more difficult.
- Louis Rossmann described it as “FU pricing“. This is a product they don’t want to sell. If someone is actually crazy enough to pay that price, they can certainly provide the service very easily with a huge margin.
  
  Gathering all the remaining users under the same ad infested app was the main goal here. That’s where the real money is.
  
  Source: A word on reddit, blackouts, & effective protesting
  
  Although it's worth pointing out how this is a strange way to monetize if any of their claimed numbers are right. If they're getting 12 cents a user on their app per month, why not try and get idk 20 cents per user on api, or make the access via reddit sub at that 3 dollars a month tier directed at the users rather than the apps.
  
  This almost cannot be strictly about money, it's about control at the cost of subscription opportunities imo.
- since data is so valuable because ai's are trained on it, i wonder what the impact would be when redditors edit their data (not delete it since it will still show up in google) to nonsense. ie, how much would chatgpt answers change? it already hallucinates... anyway, imagine if a lot of people decided to lie about something, what would happen?
  
  and if /rchatgpt was working... i'd go there :(....... speaking of, i wonder if there are any chatgpt subs here.
  
  https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite this tool lets you do something similar.
  
  I plan to make mine an explanation why i left, and an intro to lemmy etc
  
  Thanks for the Power Delete Suite link! It seems like a very helpful tool. I appreciate it!
- (anyone can c/p this to post themselves if you want to, with or without edits)

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