Redditors Go To War With The Company As It Enforces Eye-Watering Prices For Reddit API
Redditors Go To War With The Company As It Enforces Eye-Watering Prices For Reddit API
The move is controversial, with many third-party apps having to shut down as a result, but the Reddit CEO has his reasons and doesn’t appear to be backing down
What these guys don't realize is the "value" of their website is their users content. They tend to feel like they're the value, that they've done something great. You see this in both Musk and Zuck. They feel like they're the heroes of the internet. Except what is Reddit exactly, what is it's value? It is only the users. These guys parade around the knowledge of other people as if it's their own value and want to become rich off it. I'm sick of this Silicon Valley bullshit, honestly. That whole mindset is toxic from start to finish. And we see the finish on all of them: screw over the people who create the content for the next round of VC cash, or IPO.
I hope Lemmy or whatever comes next can resist this culture of "burn it to the ground for the payday".
An old meme but checks out.
The scumbag Steve hat really gives it the age of a fine wine.
They think they are too big to fail and enough users will stick around up voting repost bots that it will be profitable.
That, and also they'll continue running their own bots to upvate the repost bots to make it look like there's lots of engagement right up until the very instant that somebody else is holding the bag.
I wouldn't be surprised if reddit's own employees short the company once it goes public.
They’ll be right. The quality of everything, not the least of which is internet scrolling, that the general public accepts is horrendous.
Somebody else put it best here that Reddit won’t die, it will still be around for all those people. Hopefully the rest of us move on and Reddit becomes “Oh huh? That place is still around?”
Sadly, I’m not sure they’re wrong.
Remember secret Santa?
I was talking to my tech kids (programmers for a very well known company) I told them how puzzled I was. The guy that created secret Santa was gung-ho to create a new one the second reddit announced they were closing it down. Then he disappeared.
The kids then explained non-compete and why it's always included with contracts.
Reddit closed secret Santa down but wouldn't let him bring a similar thing back.
Why? What is wrong with them?
PS this is conjecture only I haven't spoken to him as he truly is MIA
When the site treats you as product, but forgets you create the content they are trying to sell.
*You are the content they are trying to sell.
I think the difference that spez failed to realize when he decided to turn the enshittification dial up to 11 is that, unlike facebook, whatsapp, instagram, etc, we were not on reddit because of people we know. There was no peer pressure or awkward conversations. We did not rely on reddit as a means of communication that was irreplaceable. When the whatsapp drama happened, we couldn't really up and leave, because grandma doesn't know how to download signal. because the local market down the road has whatsapp set up for orders and doesn't really give a shit. the family group has important starred chats that we refer to, etc etc.
This is not at all the case with reddit. Reddit is where we went for content. But whether the content is on reddit, lemmy, or the back of a shampoo bottle in the bathroom, it made no difference whatsoever. In my jump from reddit I've had to explain to exactly zero people why I'm making this decision. You cannot do that with instagram or whatsapp; and it took me years to convince people that I will not use facebook (thankfully that's now a little more acceptable of a concept, but i digress). they wanted to play like the big social media boys, but they forgot that, in their core, they are not a social media platform.
Yup, perfectly said.
I hate to be harsh but can we stop fooling ourselves here? Many large subreddits have already ended their blackout and are continuing as if nothing ever happened. The mods are continuing to slave away for free. The blackout itself barely made a dent in activity. I usually don't care to comment but even Lemmy is getting infected with comments/posts of people patting themselves on the back for achieving virtually nothing.
I'm not saying Reddit isn't reliant on users but these blackout and "mass" exodus movements are meaningless gestures. I literally only moved to Lemmy because RiF is closing.
I get the feeling the new metric will be the loss of all the mod tools and accessibility for users. Difficulty moderating when the 3rd party apps die, combined with the inconveniences and frustration with the app and site may actually be a catalyst. Subreddits may be back now (not surprised) but I'm interested in seeing what happens over next month after changes. It really may be reddit shooting itself in the foot and genuinely believing loss of users is the publics fault.
2 day blackout really never looked like anything more than a warning
Having mainstream news sources reporting on this -- especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes -- is actually a pretty good sign. Even though I am enjoying Lemmy more now that I have tried it anyway.
Just a heads up that with their loosely moderated contributor model, you can find anything on Forbes these days. Up to and including outright scams and misinformation. It's a far cry from the reputable source it once was.
Forbes was never good
Having mainstream news sources reporting on this -- especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes -- is actually a pretty good sign.
I thought so too. Been searching news sites since yesterday waiting to see when investors were going to chime in.
Betcha spez is in a well-deserved crisis mode rn.
Still ain’t gonna back down.
How do you mean good sign? I don’t think they can put the genie back in the bottle at this point.
I assume this is "good" as in the protest is having the effect we want.
I think the thing that blows my mind about the pricing model is- AI using reddit for training data doesn't need to up vote, downvote, subscribe, comment, or constantly ingest new data. They could ingest everything on Reddit once and be done, or come back every 6 to 12 months for an update. 3rd Party App developers need to download the same posts from the front page for every user, multiple times a day, constantly. They actually interact with a website. A $1 billion LLM ai might pay $1 million to download all the reddit data they need. Meanwhile Apollo might be worth less than $1 million as a business and is being hit with $20 million per year as operating expenses. The pricing model is set up in such a way that LLM's are in a much better position to either pay a pretty insignificant fee to get all the data, or just build a scraper since they don't need to support multiple users or website interaction. Meanwhile the price to app developers is impossibly high.
Correct. Spez is either a pathological liar, or incomprehensibly stupid. But probably both.
I'd go with pathological liar given how he alleged that the Apollo developer threatened Reddit - allegations which the Apollo developer proved false by releasing the audio of the phone call - and then Spez doubled down on the allegations while saying the developer shouldn't have released the audio. Basically, "I'm going to defame you and you providing proof of me lying about you isn't allowed."
They are just lying. Blaming LLMs is just a convenient, topical target. If that was really a problem, why did they not react anytime in the last few years when thimgs like ChatGPT were actually gathering their initial data? It's not like this tech popped up or of nowhere, it's been around for awhile but just recently became a mainstream story due to the increased access.
I don't get your argument. A service that uses the api once or twice a year, and uses much less of the offered features, and generally stresses the website much less... Is to pay more, simply because the application is worth more?
I think he's calling out the fact that the justification for the API pricing changes was partially "we've got to stop AI training bots from scraping Reddit." However, the pricing changes were actually made to hit third party developers hard and not hit the AI modelers that hard.
Well if Reddit thinks that the people contributing to Reddit's content are wasting resources, I agree.
The stupid part is nobody really cares how much they want to charge to organizations wanting to train AI models. Literally all they have to do is offer a reasonable price for third party app developers. It's not that hard to have different price tiers for different use cases.
And I don’t get why they never served their adds over the API if they were that desperate. If it was about the money they would have done that already. It’s about cutting out 3rd parties.
This. If they really wanted ads they could insert them into the posts at the back end so when retrieved there would just be posts, some of which would have been ads. Anyway fuck 'em. None of these corporations give a shot about the users not their employees . Its better to invest in user controlled alternatives.
correct title should be ‘Reddit declares war on its users and community developers’
I deleted every comment, every upvote and every post I ever made on Reddit. Fuck /u/spez, fuck Reddit.
:(( Fuck every one who appreciates context in a thread as well then
It's the only avenue that redditors have to fight back. If reddit gets its value from content and engagement, then by stripping reddit of its value is the only way to hurt it.
It's very unfortunate, but redditors took the usefulness of it for granted it seems, as almost a 1 stop shop for archiving meaningful discussions. If enough discussions are destroyed, then less people will lean on it to get what they're looking for and hopefully look elsewhere.
They could have easily handled this better, but a 30 day notice and just their behavior surrounding it? I hope they suffer from it. Just the way they handled the Apollo dev should speak volumes to how much goodwill they're willing to burn for the sake of their goals.
Some archiving work has been done, how much is hard to say, but I'm pretty sure a lot of the more important stuff has been saved on the web archive...
A bit borderline in terms of personal data and stuff, but hey
I’m really dying to find out if this blackout continues past the first 48 hours and if it has any impact on their decision.
It sort of doesn’t matter to me since the Apollo dev already said he wasn’t going to keep his app up due to how spez handled the whole situation.
I think he said June 30 it's done, barring spez changing his mandate ofc.
Several large subs are not private anymore according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ 80 not private anymore out of 372 ones that went private (of the top 500 by number of subscribers).
I hate to be a pessimist, but it's not gonna work.
Most big subs will reopen, and those that don't will get their moderators replaced. The bulk of the user base is gonna switch to the official app and meme about how bad it is right on Reddit and get Reddit Gold for it.
I'm still gonna stick to either Lemmy or Kbin. I like the smaller community here; it reminds me of Reddit's olden days when everyone wasn't a cynical asshole.
I agree that it probably won't work but I'm trying to be hopeful that people will see that there are other places to post content and interact with each other that don't view us as cattle.
I can't stand the stock Reddit app and more importantly I think it's disgusting the way Reddit has treated the Apollo dev so I won't be going back regardless of what happens. If people go to lemmy or kbin or whatever other alternatives I'll join but if not I guess I just won't participate and this kind of content anymore.
Apollo, Sync, RIF and others have all announced that they are closing permanently. Some of the big subs have done the same.
I fully expect others to join. There were more subs that went dark by the end of yesterday than began the day!
So the article states that spez has made this decision in order to prevent/capture ai from taking data from his business for free. So to monetize reditor work to train AI models, and provide data. I am sure that there is an EULA out there that says reddit owns your contributions on the plate form. But ultimately that will be for the content creators to decide on if they want to participate in that, especially considering that they threw the baby out with the bath water if they didn’t intend to target this party apps.
But lets be honest here, he wants people to use the reddit app for the same reason he wants AI capture.
Eye-watering? That's such a strange way to put it.
So I'm the strange one here. I hadn't heard this phrase before now. Thanks for the explantations yall.
It’s a pretty common turn of phrase that describes the pricing pretty well. It’s common in the UK at least don’t know about elsewhere in the world.
pricing so bad it makes me cry
as if we would back down - or even need to
all glory to the Fediverse!