/u/spez finds out

Do you expect this is a reflection of how Reddit will handle relations with its investors?

Holy shit, they killed him right there. They have put the thread in "sort by new" mode and I bet it's just to bury that bomb as deep as they can.

Apollo didn’t auto switch it for me so it was at the top lol. Of course Spez ignored that one. He actually took a shot at Christian in another comment
- Saw that. Glad lemmy is taking off.
- My favourite part is when Christian
The absolute destruction of the man. And to make things even worse he continued to dig in the Apollo dev. Unbelievable!
Sort by new mode? I guess I haven't heard of that... on account of using a 3rd party app for years.

Why the fuck did they even remotely think this would be a good idea anyway? There is literally 0 good will towards reddit right now and for good reason.

I'm on Lemmy now, so actually it was a brilliant idea
- I just checked and my account on lemmy is 3 years old, I was waiting for all of you. At moments lemmy looked like it will take of by it self, but last few months was pretty quiet. I hope this is the push this community needs to succeed.
  Reddit got too big for my taste since digg joined in, I don't think this will kill it ( they have the data how many people is using it outiside official apps), but let's make space out of it.
It's the IPO. This has been the plan since day one (or at least since Conde Nast). Reddit hasn't been operating at a loss for almost twenty years out of the goodness of their heart. It doesn't matter how much the users hate it, the users are what is for sale.

I feel like this move has nothing to do with investors and everything to do with setting the standard for big corps like Microsoft and Google to be able to scrape their massive amount of data to train next gen AIs. They know they have HUGE amount of data from now and for years and years ago. Content, created by others, then sold for enormous profit.

I mean AI is already stealing all art and images on the web without paying anything. They could just literally scrape and pay nothing. Web scraping isn't illegal, they already do it, why would they pay anyone? Unless the law catches up about the rights to manufacture AI content based on ill-gotten data, then why would they pay what they don't have to?
- What do you mean by stealing? The data remains, all they do is learning from something which is public
  What is different to Googles approach, they are just watching and learning Why is it treated so differently when it essentially does nothing new, but uses the data in a different way
The thing I worry about whenever someone mentions this angle: What about Lemmy content? As the community moves away from the commercial platforms in favor of Lemmy, Bluesky, Mastodon etc. Then does that lower the legal barrier for AI companies to train on all this content for free? Is that shift in the legal vulnerability of public content something that users consider? Is that desirable to most users? Are people thinking about that?
That's an interesting but definitely plausible take on the whole thing. 12000$ for 50mio requests is B2B pricing. For a company like Openai/Microsoft that's not even worth thinking about if you get all of that precious training data for it...
If he thinks locking down the API is going to stop them, he's bumped his head. These companies have more than enough manpower to write and maintain an HTML scraper for Reddit.
- Man, even I can do that and I'm hardly a programmer.
- Creating a web scraper vs actually maintaining one that is effective and works is two different things. It's very easy to fight web scraping if you know what you are doing.
If big tech trains AI using reddit interactions, out species is doomed 🤣
Interesting. I wonder if they already got an offer that matches their new API pricing, and they decided to up everything to match that cost and avoid being sued later.
Like, there seems to be some urgency between them announcing and upping the price. What was it? Is this the reason? A confirmed, extremely wealthy and extremly naive buyer?
- The API pricing likely has something to do with the revenue per user calculations. Reddit is aiming for IPO but their valuation tanked over the past two years. That might be why the admins have decided to strong arm this with such a short notice.

I was reading an article from The Verge - they've linked all the juicy parts of the AMA. I don't have a Reddit account anymore since hearing about what their plans were a few weeks ago. It looks like Reddit is facing a very real, self inflicted meltdown.

Fyi - it looks like the reviews for Reddit on the Google Play Store have been locked as well to prevent review bombing.

For others: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755640/reddit-api-changes-apps-apollo-shut-down-ama-spez-steve-huffman
- Ah well done. Apologies for not linking the article myself. I've been too distracted by the above crapfest.
@lemmysteve @AineLasagna it’s such an obvious cash grab and not at all fair to the communities or moderators that provide content and manage communities for FREE. Sad to see it go.
Also not sure how to go about making my mastodon feed closer to Reddit but that’s at least my first plan
- try Kbin!
- I think the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Reddit, in it's stupidity, likely underestimated the response / backlash from its users. Next, I'm guessing spez will step down or get fired.

While I appreciate Spez being burned at the stake, why are there so many fucking awards on things. People know that those directly contribute to Reddits revenue right?

I hope most of them are those random free awards Reddit gives out sometimes
- If there is a god then maybe.
  unfortunately I think we're pretty certain that god is dead and we killed him so...
- Youre probably right. Man how cringe is that, the idea that Reddit staff is giving themselves rewards.
I'm sure there are some people purchasing those, but you also get some for free. Looks like I have 800 worth I could give out.
- Fair enough I suppose. I havent looked into awards in a minute, I assumed they'd gotten rid of all the free ones?
They also gave plenty of awards or coins away couple of years ago, just for installing the 1st party client and logging in.
I do like to think people aren't buying these as of now and just emptying them

The enshittification of Reddit has been evident ever since the new design rolled out. Unusable on mobile devices. Does less, using more memory and bandwidth.

When "New" Reddit came out, it was just shockingly bad. If they didn't keep old.reddit.com online, they would have killed the site then. Until very recently I couldn't even view all child comments within the main thread, and it still takes at least twice as long to load any page.
Coming to Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air. The site is much more responsive than Reddit despite most instances running on a single VPS or something.
- That's because the Lemmy webapp focuses on being lean and functional rather than shoving as much telemetry and megabytes of JavaScript bloat as they can to do LESS than the old Reddit webapp could while using 10-20 times MORE resources.
  New Reddit is not completely unusable on an intermittent, crammed full 3G connection where Old Reddit just works, but is known to be actively user hostile and somehow cramming full a huge 1080p phone display with only 2 or 3 comments and having to preload for hours for a full thread.
  Lemmy server is also blazing fast and being written in Rust which encourages memory safety does help it function better on smaller instances and serve both local and federated clients faster despite having less resources to do so. I really really hope this replaces Reddit in the mainstream and people learn basic concepts about federated media to future proof the free Internet.
  It has been a real breath of fresh air and so far it seems more sustainable to spread the bandwidth between smaller instances than let a megacorp fund the infrastructure to serve everyone in a walled garden which will later be enshittified into garbage once a critical mass is already lured in.
- The first issue I noticed with new reddit was the missing sidebar. Is that functionality that I should have easily found or is it still missing after all this time?
I was actually shocked when I've discovered how much data Reddit app uses compared to RiF for example.

Spez: "This is an askmeanything, not an answeranything." sits in the corner eating popcorn the whole time

Spez:
- There was even a comment from spez that contained an "A: " at the beginning, proving that those answers are just copy-pasted. lmao
- Meanwhile, the sound of microwaves and popcorn ring through the halls of Google HQ.
I thought it was AskMeAnythingAboutRampart

I've been following that non AMA for a few hours, and it's been a bloodbath. Spez really needed to hire a PR team because that was a clown show of epic proportions.

He was caught copy/pasting the softball answers he’d been giving too! He accidentally copied the “A:” in front of one. 😂
- General failure answering question A:
  Abort, retry, ignore?
- 😂☠️
  Reddit, it's time for an immediate restructuring and damage control. But it's probably too late.
Always has been

found a script that deletes all your posts and comments after scrambling them fuck spez and reddit at this point

I want a script that edits all my posts and comments to "Fuck /u/Spez"
- Powerdeletesuite can do that. You get to choose what to overwrite all your comments with
- Did you find one?
Power delete suite?

Burn it to the ground! I wish all top subreddits had the balls to go dark indefinitely to the point they have to backpedal or forcibly take over the subreddits. Burn it to the fucking ground!

r/ProgrammerHumor going permanently dark was a watershed moment for me
- I don't think any subs will stay permanently dark, their mods will be replaced eventually.

I'm surprised they didn't replace /u/spez with woman; then have her make this announcement. Then he could triumphantly return and claim they will do better from now on. ... you know, like the last time they made unpopular changes.

yep, I had a similar train of thought
[spez] screwed up so bad, and it's obvious he's quite stupid...I'm wondering if he was given the Ellen Poa treatment. The investor's knew what changes they wanted to implement to increase revenue, had him implement it, then made him take all the flak. Next, they'll replace spez with someone else, seemingly roll back a few of the changes, and say they're working with the reddit community. The thing is that it's obvious that reddit is irreparably infected. The diseases cannot be eradicated because the disease is corporate greed. Reddit began its time in hospice the moment they shared they were going public. It's over. Done. Say you final goodbyes. RIP in pieces.