The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit
The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit
“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”
funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is
If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.
The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it's EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong
Corrected headline: The Reddit API Cash Grab is Breaking Reddit
True! Put the blame on the one's that earned it
Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”
Brilliant. Reddit looks out at a crowd of people at a packed show and says "ok we could lose 5%". But those are the ones who return another night as musicians. And you cant run a music venue long term with open mic 7 nights per week.
Plus, you shut down the pipeline. No one's going to make the jump from the other 95% if the content sucks.
Plus they dont want to pay bouncers so the number of assholes is going to keep creeping up
I hope Redditors don't cave and cease protesting, clearly it's working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.
I haven't been on since the 10th and I was on it near constantly before that. If reddit sync isn't going to be around 10 days from now then I have no plans to use the site anything like I used to. I literally have no desire to learn their crappy app and lose the curated experience I had set up for myself. The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.
The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.
Same, though you could possibly find some non Reddit answers to your questions
I went back on briefly today for the first time to:
I didn't read any posts (except in the Boost subreddit to confirm that it was being shut down) and definitely didn't comment or post anything. After that brief check in, I'm not going back for some time.
Same here. I'm trying to find other ways to support the protests. The community I'm moderating there will migrate over to here (yay!) but I don't expect more than a couple hundred to move. I will keep moderating the community over there (because we're a gay community and a safe space for trans men which is sorely lacking on Reddit), but I've deleted the app from my phone and only use old.reddit.com with uBlock origin to make sure I'm not contributing to Reddit's bottom line.
What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).
The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.
I honestly can't believe he's being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as "landed gentry" and users' concerns as "noise" - those are literally the people that have created this "valuable dataset" he's coveting so greedily.
That's why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.
Fidelity dropping reddit's valuation by ~40% made me go "oh boy that's bad news" when I saw it at the start of the month.
Imagine thinking you're cashing out at 10 billion and now you're only getting 6. The horror.
Except that it already has been. They've already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.
They didn't pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It's no great loss.
“Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”
I'm looking at you too, Netflix.
stares at capitalism
I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they're doing this now because they've run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won't be noticed in a month.
Look, I am happy as long as there are enough people on lemmy and kbin to have a fun website here. I can go and visit reddit now and then to see what kind of stuff they're upvoting, that's not a problem. But I want the potentially better alternatives to grow.
That's the spirit. We don't need to complete obliterate reddit to make it the better alternatives viable. We just need to get a minimal mass of people here to keep momentum growing.
I keep thinking of Taleb's essay where he talks about how effective a intolerant minority can be on affecting change in general behavior.
Exactly. Reddit itself should be a case study. Lemmy and Kbin offer an opportunity to build something great and learn from what made current Reddit (the good and the terrible) what it is and some things to avoid.
Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It's simply "If I'm a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!"
Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn't mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.
I doubt anyone on the Reddit payroll tells spez the unvarnished truth right now. Musk's employees infamously curate their interactions with him. I read somewhere about one (I want to say working in info-sec for Tesla) who kept an extra monitor with a Matrix style scroll of bullshit because it matched Musk's perception of what a busy person in that field should have up.
To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.
Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.
I'm not too concerned about this though. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won't be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).
Presumably Twitter also crunched the numbers
Twitter is responding to official inquiries from authorities with poop emojis. The people running numbers have been fired.
Regular users don't care about the mod drama. The real backlash will start on July 1st when all the apps stop working.
I hope the real thing is more just stop doing their volunteer work. I hope spam and bots run amok, NSFW gets posted everywhere, reports to unanswered and people devolve into screaming matches.
When the "vocal minority" are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.
Power users maybe, but the last days have shown how little spine some mods have. The moment Reddit threatens to kick them as a mod they tuck their tail and say "We we're all in until they threatened to take out mod positions. This sub now goes back to normal because there's no world where we get removed as mods."
I think that is true that most people will not leave reddit. I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore. It definitely feels like a niche thing, but I think it’s okay. Reddit won’t last forever, and in the meantime, we can be seeing if fediverse is the way forward. This isn’t the first time reddit screwed up and it won’t be the last.
They’re also I think trying to become like tiktok and give lots of forever scrollable content, but I think tiktok/youtube shorts already fill that niche
I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore.
I imagine that's because they all jumped ship already.
honestly, part of the reason I made a lemmy account at all is because it feels a little like reddit when I first started using it -- pretty niche, and less toxic and low-quality because of it.
reddit in the last few years has become very toxic. The smaller communities are still okay, but on all of the main subs it's just page after page of the same snarky jokes and tired memes.
so while more growth would be nice, I'm fine if most of reddit stays on reddit in the short-term. the fediverse can be its own thing.
The Lemmy and Lemmymigration subs have like 2k users, which also didn't really change over the last few days. If that is anything to go by I don't expect a digg like exodus anytime soon.
I think it's fine. If Reddits All page is anything to go by, I won't miss it.
That’s been my attitude to this since it started to ramp up.
The top brass at Reddit know that ultimately all of this will die down, and while they might lose some value in the short term, the long term will see them bounce back enough to make some coin on the IPO. Then they’ll sail off into the sunset aboard expensive mega yachts, and never think about Reddit again.
Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public
Correction: Reddit's plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.
Not trying to sound like La Palice but in all the articles and posts about this issue, they seem to miss the core of what is making users mad (the mods fight is different, although in the same direction, but solvable).
The thing to the user who's generating content and not only swiping their finger is: they don't want to experience Reddit as other users experience Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. They follow issues, not people. If you get in the middle of this relationship between the anonymous user and their discussion on an issue, with your tricks to show them your promoted content, you'll be told to fuck off.
There's nothing to improve in the Reddit Official App. Everybody hates the principles it's created on, much ahead of the poor design choices and lack of features.
Glad it is doing something.
Lol I love this shrew, my friends and I loved this video in high school
For Reddit, it is not even specific people. It is people interested in a topic. So easy to go elsewhere.
If it wasn't hurting them they wouldn't be doing damage control.
It's working, keep it up.
It's seriously hilarious that the "damage control" has been more damaging than the blackout itself
Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.
Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community
There’s a term for that. The Streisand Effect, I think.
That's in the same vein as "it's not the crime it's the cover-up"
"Damaging, controlling" behavior.
Haha yeah well I didn't say they were doing a good job of it!
I don't usually fault companies for messing up if they own up to their mistakes and make it right. Everyone is going to make mistakes and things will go wrong at times. It's how a company handles events when everything goes sideways that shows whether they are good or bad.
In Reddit's case, they could have acknowledged that their API plans were too aggressive and overpriced. They could have paused any API pricing changes and worked with third party developers to come to a solution where Reddit is paid, but third party developers don't have to shut down due to immediate and insanely high costs being demanded. Everyone could have walked away benefiting and Reddit's reputation (in my eyes) would have been intact. I'd likely be posting there right now instead of here on Lemmy.
Instead, Reddit decided to double and triple down. Their CEO decided to accuse the developer of Apollo of threatening Reddit and, when phone call audio proved this was a lie, blamed the developer for "leaking personal phone calls." Then, that same CEO claimed that the API was never meant for third party apps (ignoring and trying to rewrite history) and said that any moderators who kept their subreddits blacked out would be replaced. All while claiming that the moderators should rest easy because Reddit would definitely provide tool themselves to replace lost third party tools despite no sign of this happening and trust being totally shattered. (And so much more that I'm not including because this comment is too long already.)
So Reddit messing up? That could have been forgiven had they done the right thing afterwards. But now, after completely botching the response? I hope Reddit withers away to nothing and the CEO's IPO dreams die on the vine.
Its fascinating watching him keep digging. He bullshits, gets caught out, so he bullshits about a different dev. Rinse. Repeat.
I haven't been to Reddit for a few days and they did these stuff already? Let's keep this up.
https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/43599/Reddit-censoring-information-about-kbin
Thanks I've been trying to fill in those claims with links so this one is great :)
I want to know more about this, i haven't heard of this yet.
This appears at the top of the page until you dismiss it (at least for me): https://i.imgur.com/Uo3t2TI.jpg
Here’s what it links to: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
Yesterday they were linking to some much more blatant propaganda/history whitewash, here's the link: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
I'm so glad that me deleting my account made them mad, I'm so glad it hurt them