Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark

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.

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.
- The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
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.
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 also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
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.

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".
- Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.
  Reddit's traffic might not recover for a while.
- 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.
- A lot of subs did that , im sure reddit worked do make it finite .
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%.
- Not for long you won't. RES and old.reddit are on the chopping block too.
- Wait WHAT.
- 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.
- 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.
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/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)
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.

That's what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don't really see how Reddit recovers from this. It's sad because I loved it and there's nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 won’t 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 it’s 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
- Absolutely agree with this. Twitter is still going strong, in part because the fediverse is "too hard." Reddit isn't going anywhere.
- agree- reddit is a fucking big house that won't burn down to the ground in a day. we're should take comfort though in the fact that spez keri's throwing fuel in the fire hastening it's demise.
- Between this place, and https://squabbles.io/... Reddit is no longer relevant.
It's not 8838 total, I'm pretty sure it's the list of subs that said they'll participate
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!

Guess I'm sticking with Lemmy, then.

This is the way
- This is the way

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.

I'm so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
- Main reason why I'm gonna try and stick it out with Lemmy.
  Hard to corporate greed a decentralised system :D
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
This! I'm happy to pay more for my Apollo Ultra Subscribtion, but their prices aren't based in reality, they have the only purpose of driving 3rd Party Apps out of business. And then they also wanna limit NSFW content to the official App and nothing else, that's affecting a lot of Subs I'm in (a ton more if I count my throwaway porn account) It's just ridiculous.
Pissing on 3PAs and saying "it's raining only on reddit"

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)
This right here.

Just migrated here from reddit. Don't plan on going back. That platform is done.

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
Agreed. Reddit is a burning trainwreck you can't look away from at this point. I'm not gonna be in the trainwreck, but rather I'll just watch it from here (aka lemmy)
Why? The entire community is still there. Reverse the greedy API change, allow 3rd party apps continued full access, I’d be back on Apollo in a heartbeat.
- It was announced that Apollo is shutting down June 30th regardless of what reddit does. Too much bad blood now after spez’ attempted libel.
- I could be tempted but none of that is going to happen. Even though this move will kill the community, it won't kill it fast enough to cause a problem. There's just too much money to be made.

Well Steve, it's not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you'll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that'll be leaving.

Yeap. I'm also not working for free anymore.
They're too cheap. I'm sure they'll just replace you guys with less effective and active mods while the site just slowly smolders into a shadow of its former self.
- Besides being too cheap, it's honestly not even practical. There are about 21,000 active mods on any given day. Replacing even half of that number would increase their current staffing of ~700 by 15 fold which doesn't seem likely given they just laid off 90 of them. That doesn't even touch on the fact that those moderators would know nothing about the subs they're now supposed to be taking care of.
  Nah, you're totally right, this is the beginning of the end. The blackout might not do anything short term but they're certainly going to shed enough mods that quality will slip. Once that happens people will be looking for alternatives and Reddit will end up on the scrap heap of "used to be great" like so many that came before.
I stopped modding seriously long ago the moment I realized the community was getting too big and that the it is basically unpaid labour.
This means nothing to that lost CEO I started my sub over here but didn't come closer to the numbers on Reddit. I really don't know what to do now
- You'll have to wait. Reddit took a long time to get to where it is now. Lemmy can get there too, but it won't be overnight.

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/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman

Glad to know we're just 'noise', lol.
- One minute our content (through the API) is "very valuable" and "needs to be monetized". The next we're just "noise".
- If you can't be monetized, you're just noise. They don't see their community as people, they see them as data to be harvested and eyes to be advertised to.
Huffman says the blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”
lol it's hard to do that when you aren't making any money, Steve.
Dam this makes my blood boil. My sub went dark for no reason!!

There is literally no new information in this article and the title implies that it is in response to the acutal blackout, and not the threat of one. Bad article.

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 he’s making a huge mistake. It would be like the captain of the Titanic seeing the iceberg and thinking “It’ll move”.
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 👎
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'm hesitant to remove my Reddit bookmark. Too many good memories.
Might just burry it deep in my bookmarks
same here, the only reason I haven't completely deleted my reddit account is because I still wanna sell some stuff there. Other than that, I'm not planning on using it anymore

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.

"We are not profitable"

Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.

Also not a great thing for the CEO to say right before their IPO.
- Not at all. Most tech startups (if not all) are unprofitable at IPO. Plus they have to make their finances public, so it's not something that was a secret before.

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?

The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.

Yes I went there for a peek and it's so angry. Compared to the positive vibe here, reddit felt oppressive. I'm not going back. Let it simmer and boil. I love this place. It's so refreshing at lemmy. Such a positive vibe. Like the internet was before it all became centralised. Lemmy is the real Web 3.
Well, that demographic is always great for their advertiser acquisition goal
- Right? Nothing like a festering pile of bigotry & ignorance to get the advertisers signing up.
r/Canada was taken over by alt-right a long time ago. r/OnGuardForThee had to be made in response to that. I feel like Reddit in general is going that direction. The sheer volume of bot activity on most major subreddits is insane.
So its like Twitter?

I just want to point out that the article is dated 9 June, so before the actual blackout. Maybe they have changed their mind seeing the actual data

Yeah this is taken from the AMA, which was a waste of time for everyone
- 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.
- Yeah, I expected the AMA to be a way to find a compromise between reddit and 3P. After reading the answers I was genuinely pissed off
copium

Obligatory fuck /u/spez.

Be careful, you might be blocked by reddit \s

First comment here. Sad to Reddit go but also it's their own fault for pushing me away

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.
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, it’s ogre for Reddit.
- I’m 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. (Don’t feel like sideloading the Lemmy app). I’ll probably still be browsing with Apollo until I can’t any more. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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?

Free Reddit silver and a kick in the nuts.
- And some ugly-ass NFT snoo abomination
Yeah its weird that people keep talking about "Reddit's content" when they haven't created shit. At least Slashdot has always said "These comments are owned by whoever wrote them"
Not that slashdot hasn't become crap, but it's something.
- At least Slashdot has always said “These comments are owned by whoever wrote them”
  The same sort of thing is in the Reddit terms of service. They don't want to own the possibly-offensive, maybe-even-illegal speech that people post there. They just require as a term of service that they receive a perpetual license to do whatever they want with it.

The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.

It started out great at the times of Aaron Swartz, but just as with people, cancer sometimes hits. Anyway, it influenced projects like lemmy for which I'm thankful.
- 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.
- 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.
- Here's a thread where subreddit mods are announcing their subs going indefinitely dark: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/

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.
- Same. Not sure I would have ever heard of Lemmy otherwise.
- onward, and onto the next dopamine pathway.
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. I’d be interested to see if an indefinite strike could be powerful enough to reverse this plan
- Wow, that’s 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
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.
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.
- Blocking mobile web access and ending old reddit is going to bring more people here over time.
Do you have any numbers?
- https://reddark.untone.uk/
  8479/8838 subreddits are private as of this comment.
- https://reddark.untone.uk/
  8479/8838 subreddits are private as of this comment.
Yeah if they were serious, they'd go dark for good
and most people
What absolutely bends my mind is there's still confused people wandering into the blackout threads with absolutely no clue what's going on. How is this info not reaching these people?

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've decided I'm done. A complete and utter about face doesn't feel like it would be enough at this point. At some point a relationship/reputation becomes damaged beyond repair.
We should move. Even if we did a longer blackout, the admins can just replace the mods of the bigger subs and ignore the smaller ones. Even if the blackout is effective, they will pull something like this again.
I've lost trust in them. I'm not going back except maybe for information if I really need to.
I won't go back, with all the changes in the last few years. Reddit isn't moving in a direction I like.
It should have been indefinitely.

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 don’t 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 if there is no reaction from spez, a more severe protest will follow.
- 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.
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/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/

I guess Lemmy will be getting bigger then

Reddit & Twitter going crazy only few months appart, and with this attitude they deserve to vanish in trashbin of internet history

And that's why this is my first comment on lemmy! Just in case Reddit eats itself.

Aye, welcome! I’m still figuring things out myself. Mostly hoping the iOS client Mlem can find its footing because the whole Lemmy experience feels incomplete at the moment, but this all still feels like I’m on the ground floor of something potentially great.

This is great news. I want federation

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.

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)

Agreed, but it's 48 hours later, and it seems like more and more subreddits have decided to continue protesting indefinitely, which I'm really happy to see. I too have no clue how effective it'll be, but it's showing a much clearer message.
- Exactly - several of my favourite and most commonly visited subs are still private. What’s kept me on Reddit for the past few years has been the ability to carefully curate my feed, and the fact I could still access old, desktop Reddit through my phone browser.
  As those things disappear, so will I. Reddit is convenient, a one-stop-shop. I can go back to visiting various blogs, news sites and forums.
From how I understood it (I could be wrong), the initial blackout was planned for june 30th when the API changes come into effect, and the current (previous?) protest was due to Spez's AskReddit responses. Basically, this was the warning, the 30th is the big one.
The blackout is a way to engage in a way that makes things inconvenient for people not informed about the issue so that awareness is generated. Like picketting the mayor's office or blocking a public intersection.
I think a blackout has a much higher impact than deleting accounts.
There are so many users nobody notices when a few disappear. But when a subreddit goes dark it's most certainly noticeable.
It's evident by now Reddit management doesn't care. Two days raise awareness amongst users. Maybe the two days won't be the last for many subreddits or people. And I'm sure more people became more aware, or thought more about the situation and alternatives than without a two day blackout.

Well at least they'll be more "profitable" with so many less users coming to the site and using third party apps.

Glad I've found Lemmy.

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.

just deleted my last account. fuck em lol

Yeah same here.

I'm sticking with lemmy then

Then my friend is truly dead.

Captain of the Titanic: "we're sticking to our course, despite the iceberg being dead ahead"

he is getting into Elon levels of denial

Hey Lemmy gang. Just signed up after seeing this.

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.

Valid question. Hate to say this, but if most subs reopen after 2 days, we're essentially handing reddit bosses an easy win. It's like protesting with no terms, and instead merely creating a brief storm that'll pass and quickly be forgotten. Might as well throw eggs at a tank with that thinking.
The only way this protest works, is if subs stay dark with no deadline, and terms that must be met to end the standoff. That's how these things work. That's how it's always worked.
- Some subs have already decided to go indefinite. They are coordinating in r/ModCoord.
Its hard to abandon a community that you’ve spent years cultivating. No money involved at all, just emotional baggage really.
- Always be willing to walk away, or you are working for free for somebody else's profit. If it isn't fun, quit.
Mostly I think it started as a show of how much reddit relies on the free labor while giving reddit an out, but as time goes on I'm inclined to believe it's also because mods know that if they "abandon" the subreddit, the admins will just open the subreddit up to new moderators a la r/redditrequest
There are already subs that have had users request being put on as mod despite barely becoming inactive.
Power is addictive. At least for some people.

Oh, I fucking hate CEO's.

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.

I’m team Apollo. When Apollo goes I’ll go.
It’s Lemmy for me from now on!
It’s been a good 10 years with Reddit but it’s time to be the bigger person and step away from toxicity.
- I feel so bad for Christian. He's been an absolute role model in handling this—calm demeanor, transparent communication and willingness to compromise (which Reddit obviously doesn't have).
  He's put so much work into Apollo and stayed composed so far during the shutdown process. What scares me for him is the risk of refunds now: whoever subscribed to a premium tier can have the purchase refunded since he won't be able to provide the service. I hope not too many will go the refund route.
I think you're probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don't see another viable alternative.
But I'm hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.
- I think there is a huge difference from going to a specific sub that doesn't have equivalents and just browsing aimlessly. The aimlessly browsing is where they get the real juicy user data on what people engage with.
  Fuck em.
- I relate to this, I am in a number of support groups on Reddit. I ended up just making the knitting community here because I didn't know what I was doing and now I'm a mod. I really want to set up a c/stopdrinking community here but that's a mod role I am not willing to take on.
- Perfectly valid reason to do so, everyone needs a place to recover. Those who need reddit as a lifeline shouldn't lose that. Be well friend!
This is me. If I can’t use Apollo or Narehal, Reddit is dead to me except when web search sends me to a Reddit thread.

Fuck spez

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.

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.
- Hear, hear! And welcome to your new home :)
- Well written 👍
- Take my upvote sir!
- 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.

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.

That and $12.50 gets you a cup of coffee.
I kinda wanna taste that coffee. And then try to never buy a $12.50 coffee again.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman

That fuck talks about the data as if he was responsible in creating any of it. It's the users and users should seriously leave reddit and delete their data en masse.
- He used to mod jailbait maybe he made some of that content
- Exactly what I did. I’ll find other sources as they pop up. Too much time wasted filtering the bickering away from the few reliables
Yes, this made me to seriously work on switching to Lemmy.
The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
Yeah okay
Kill other apps before yours is on par (will it ever happen) isn't improving the product.

no wonder since most of the subs are only going offline for 2 days

I couldn't be the only one who found 2 days to be a ridiculously low time as well.
- It's long enough to show impact and short enough that reddit will catch flak for replacing the mod teams.
Yeah its weird that it's only two days, but also many are going private forever (though reddit will just replace the mods unfortunately)

They absolutely detest their userbase :(

Common Lemmy Win

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.

Worked out so great for Tumblr. But apparently the plan is to take all the worst ideas from the past couple years and speedrun 'em, so I wouldn't be surprised.
- 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.
  Worked out so great for Tumblr. But apparently the plan is to take all the worst ideas from the past couple years and speedrun 'em, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
  It definitely feels like they're going for a world record in the "kill your golden goose as fast as possible" category.

"Money rules everything around me" -The CEO of Reddit

M.R.E.A.M. get the money!
Except according to him his website isnt even making any.... after like 20 years online.
Too bad higher prices doesn't necessarily mean more money.

"we're going dark for two days!" isn't going to change anything. reddit mods live for reddit. Why would they leave?

"Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded."
Really, though. What's the point of contributing to a thread that already has hundreds of top level posts. Something new and fresh is worth a try.
It changed something for me. Sure I might have changed sooner or later anyway but the 48 hours created awareness and provided a moment of time in which to look into alternatives.

Say whatever you want about spez, he is the best thing that ever happened to Lemmy.

EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!
Funny how Reddit's peak happened to be during the time their two "co-founders" had nothing to do with the site itself.

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 what’s really best for our society and killing the animal Reddit has become
It's all money related. The higher ups at Reddit are probably just trying to make it to an IPO so they can liquidate and make some cash.

I'm so glad they're unwavering in their commitment to foster growth of the fediverse!

Shame they killed it like this, but fuck 'm! First comment on Lemmy 👌

simplify so they can lay off mods and let ai go on autopilot. like an automatic cow milker.

This will be funny how bad it'll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.
Then come the AI bots who comment...

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.

The reality is they can scrape the content for "free" into another database without using API's index it and then train off it. A high price tag is not a road block for AI development. The just need real user interactions and it's the moderated forums that make it valuable as most toxicity is removed.
- AI training has nothing whatsoever to do with API charges.
  AIs can be trained on stale data, or data slowly downloaded over days and weeks through slow & cheap bulk API calls. That's not the situation with (e.g.) a third-party mobile app, which needs to make fast API calls to service user requests.
- So our next goal should be to embed "fuck spez" as a valid response into the AI.
  If we all run a script that changes all our comments to 'fuck spez" I believe we can do it

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.

Article from June 9, before the outages

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.

Heres a community for you https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
- and here's a sh.itjust.works like to the same subreddit so you don't have to jump through hoops to subscribe to it.
  https://sh.itjust.works/c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase
Do those API prices make Reddit profitable? I highly doubt it.
I'd never repeat their claims as if they were true. It's just bullshit reasoning. Mismanagement.

Kbye!

Yeah, this sounds like the reddit I've come to know 😒

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.

Well, rif is shutting down on June 30th, and I won't use the desktop site or Reddit's own app, so I'm just jumping ship now. Deleted my rif app on the 11th, just after 9pm when the first subreddit I subbed to went dark. So now I'm here.
- RIF user as well.
  The day I saw confirmation 3rd party apps were closing I was done with Reddit. My two favourite subs have spawned homes here so I'm more than happy here trying to learn the ropes.
Remember, this is stage 1, the next wave is the 30th. Many subs already arent going back.

My first post on lemmy! RIP Reddit and fuck you Pez.

Pez is a wonderful candy, don't be so disrespectful. 😀
- xD
Yes! F that Pez guy or whatever it called itself. My first post on Lemmy as well!

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"?

First Lemmy comment lfg. Fuck you Spez and excited to help build this community!

Wow they’re really doubling down. Guess this means the end of Reddit.

Fuck spez!

Well, looks great for Lemmy!!

Spez personally banned me for harasent because I reported a child porn seller

Well, Spez was a mod of /r/jailbait before advertisers made them take it down....
- Wait, really? Not that I'm actually surprised but it's almost to perfect...
You probably outed his alt
- Haha probably

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.

Honestly fuck that guy. I'm glad that I don't need to continue supporting this person.

Tbh, I'm really enjoying this small feel of Lemmy. I'm not even mad I left.
- The only thing missing for me personally is some small niche groups like sffpc for example. Luckily a lot of these groups have discord servers as well, so I've started using those in place of the subreddits if there is no lemmy community.

Looks like you may have gotten lost on your way to Truth Social Media
Judging by your downvotes, so is Lemmy world. 🙂
- Reality has a liberal bias.
Sounds like you should stay there. You know, to trigger them.
Real life must be very scary for you. Maybe just stay in the basement
._.

Bye, bitch!

Good, I hope it crashes and burns. They forgot their origins.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Ayo, fuck you spez!

What a jerk

F

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.

Just shows how much reddit cares about it's users.

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.

What a clown show. Glad I'm gone.

Fuck u/spez

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 the next thing to so is mass delete your posts and comments and then the account. Scorched earth and all that jazz

I think at this point Reddit just wings all their decisions. They’re too deep into the embarrassment, they could never redeem themselves.
- Ahhh, the Elon approach
I'm hearing that deleting just hides the content. It's better to edit the comments to something else, preferably an invitation to Lemmy.
- "deleting" only flags the comments as such in the database, but that still makes them unreadable. That means unreadable conversations and lost information for users.

Yep, lol