Reddit protestation is making more noise than I expected!

Didnt know the apollo dev is from halifax.... Makes me even more angry that reddit CEO tried to make him look like a liar

I wonder if they’ll make a Lemmy client like how the tweetbot devs made ivory for mastodon
- I'm trying Jerboa, on the f-droid app store (Android).
- I'd love it if the 3rd party developers burned by Reddit started developing for Lemmy/kbin/Mastodon. First, there is lots of opportunity to make Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse more user friendly without sacrificing the benefits of federation. Second, it's an open source ecosystem. The more developers in the space, the better for everyone.
everyone on the internet is secretly Canadian .

publicity is good, but wish they would have taken two exta seconds to explain the nuance of the issue.

It's not just that Reddit will start charging for API calls, but that the price was outrageously high, extortionate even.

Many will read this article, and others like it, and automatically side with Reddit, because "it sounds fair that apps with heavy API usage should contribute to the cost", completely missing the part the Reddit is trying to bankrupt the third part app developers.

wish they would have taken two exta seconds to explain the nuance of the issue.
Most users on Reddit don't really understand the nuance, either.
Even though there has been tons of threads in most of the subreddits trying to explain it.
I'm annoyed that the imgur pricing didn't make the article, which I thought was the most illuminating comparison. Leading the pricing details with $2.50/person/month sounds very "that's all?" at surface level

Too bad there was no mention of decentralised alternates like Lemmy or kbin.

As discussed elsewhere, that might not be such a bad thing. Ramping up slowly will work much better than all of Reddit suddenly showing up at lemmy.ml and expecting it to be a fully polished* Reddit.
- Agreed. This will take awhile, but once it gets going I think it'll slowly take over.
- I remember the exodus to mastodon being a bit of a shitshow with nobody knowing how it worked, the whole network slowing to a crawl, and then a lot of them leaving a couple weeks later. It did boost the amount of users, just in a bad way.
- The Digg to Reddit migration was also a trickle at first. Reddit hasn't had their "Digg 4.0" moment yet.
They likely didn't go very deep in their research. Like others mentioned they didn't go into the details of the extremely high prices of the API access price.
We should be the change
Noticed this too. They didn't mention Lemmy :(

Not a bad article. A bit light on details and the effects and consequences of Reddit's changes. However, many articles I've seen from other mainstream news organizations were slanted towards the corporate bias and made it sound like the concerns were no big deal.

I agree on both counts. I thought the CBC article was one of the best, it covers both sides and leans more towards how this might matter for people who don't even use Reddit.
Particular bonus points for the commentary by Cory Doctorow.
CBC often does this with Business reporting. In their story about the InstantPot bankruptcy they neglected to mention that the reason the company was $500 million in debt is because they were acquired by a private equity firm who then took out a $500 million loan in the company's name and used it to pay themselves a huge dividend, earning about $150 million in instant profit.

How come Reddit's hosting costs are so high? It's a content aggregator so mostly directs to other sites. While for original content, it used to rely on Imgur for hosting images, does it not anymore? And text content shouldn't use that much resources or maybe I'm wrong?

It really realllly shouldn't be they host comment sections for links to other more technically impressive websites.
Like we are talking about a cost they willing absorbed for like 10 years running without noteworthy complaint. Yet now as of like this month the cost is suddenly so onerous that everyone has to start paying an extortionate rate at the end of this month.
Good faith business arrangements are not typically changed with one months notice. And they is no plan for accessibility or mod tools or the backlash. They didn't even have time to couch the CEO on how to handle the questions in the AMA.
Idk I don't really buy it.
They wanted to be the next Tiktok/Youtube Shorts/Instagram Reels and added expensive video hosting. Yay for ad impressions and mainstream adoption of mindless scrollers, but a good chance the costs drove up well beyond the influx of ad revenue/premium.
That and Reddit admins have to scrounge every penny to look pretty for their IPO.
- and avatars, NFT support, chat groups, and.. and.. and..
  Endless growth, without a use case.
I don't believe their hosting costs are that high. But they did go from about 700 employees to somewhere around 2000 employees. I suspect a lot of their overhead is headcount.
- instead of giving the site a working search feature after 15 years, they doubled down on year end wrap ups, vertical videos, chat, and other nonsense
- This doesn't get mentioned enough. They drastically increased their workforce during covid. That is a massive new expense and what exactly do they have to show for it? Has Reddit improved in that time? I don't see that it has. Now suddenly this bizarre API move. None of it adds up to good leadership to me.
- They also could have taken loans to reinvest in growth. From buying alien blue, to their api, to backend changes to add new ad offerings and whatever else they sell to companies... They're all major efforts, and probably include marketing campaigns
  If they took loans to grow... Well if you grow explosively it's a huge win, but if you don't you're weighted down moving forward. And investors are going to love it, since they don't care about breaking even, they care about that one investment that's going to go 100x or more
it used to rely on Imgur for hosting images, does it not anymore?
People still use imgur, but reddit hosts a fair amount of content directly now. It's video player is notoriously bad. Imgur has slowly turned into a socia media in it's own right and is slowly starting to move off reddit (deleting images uploaded by non-account holders for instance).
- I was thinking Imgur could have pivoted and become like Reddit.
How come Reddit’s hosting costs are so high?
Presumably the volume of traffic their servers need to handle?
One database call is pretty lightweight, but millions a second add up to some serious processing. Which, presumably, needs a lot of servers.
- Stackoverflow and Hackernews have very low hosting costs. Reddit is serving text, which is incredibly cheap.
They still have to host users, feeds, and comments which can add up very quickly. Also, they do host some images as well like when people upload to them.
- Worth noting that for the 11 years, Reddit didn't host any images.
  It's hard to say why Reddit thought it was necessary to host their own images.

One of my older family members even mentioned that they heard about a Reddit blackout, so it definitely is being talked about.

My local sub did a "brown out" and they even messed that up lol
- Are you Filipino?
The Reddit CEO was just on NPR being interviewed.

Listed as the 3rd most popular article rn too

Arrrrrr Canada! God bless the CBC, and Hockey Night in Canada (the real version, not that jack off Rogers version)

amen!

And yet I read something about them taking over one of the popular subs (adviceanimals or something) and removing all the mods and making it public again...

What happened was the top mod, who had been inactive for a while, came online and overrode the other mod's decision to stay open. This caused a moderator dispute, which caused the admins to step in, and they decided to remove the top mod and reopen the sub.
https://lemmy.intai.tech/comment/31833
(And if Reddit was maliciously forcing subs open, why would they choose r/AdviceAnimals?)
- If the CEO got caught editing comments and posts, how do I know he didn't just pretend to be a defunct mod lol
  Probably because it's one of their front page subs? My guess at least. Maybe the CEOs favorite 🤣
The mods knew this was a risk going in. If anything, it just shows that reddit doesn't care about its users. They're ostracizing a large portion of their mods. If there is no one to moderate their site, they're going to realize why they needed their users very quickly.
- Think it would have been a more effective protest if mods got together (think it was 24k from all the blackout subs?) and said they would remove themselves as moderators if reddit didn't budge. Reddit would in no way function if that amount of mods stopped moderating

I'm glad, hopefully it's more pressure on reddit to change their tune, we will see though

I hope they keep making bad decisions and more people move to decentralised platforms.
- If there’s one thing Reddit’s known for, it’s checks notes listening to community views and responding with policy improvements

not the first reddit blackout they've covered

The blackout also was also the cause behind a general Reddit outage this morning, during which all content on the site was inaccessible — a Reddit spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that "a significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues."

Any guesses on why switching things private might cause predictable issues? Wouldn't that be easier than loading the content? Plus it would discourage further browsing.

I'm guessing a lot of them all at once requires all the various CDN caches to be refreshed, so higher load on the database(s)
- I saw someone speculate elsewhere that it could be that some high-profile subreddits were hard-coded for the front page, and them going private could have crashed the system. That would be a bad implementation, but is a reasonable explanation for why everything stopped working.