I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly. I'm no Harvard MBA, but here's an easier way out – instead of asking small-time app developers to pay millions, put API access contingent on the account subscribing to Reddit Premium. That way users get to keep the experience they enjoy, independent developers can keep doing their thing, Reddit gets to make up for the lost ad revenue in the form of subscriptions, and if people complain about it they are the ones being cheap.
Yes! Speaking as a heavy Reddit, but non-sub user, this is exactly what would have gotten me to pay them $50 a year. Not NFTs, stickers and avatars.
I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd how dark they've been towards this user class. It's very similar to the Twitter changes.
The nuke approach they've done will send so many of their important, core users off the site.
Can someone explain what value new Reddit data has for LLMs?
Presumably the entire 2005-2023 (up to March) dataset which is (was) freely available on Pushshift / torrents is enough?
Also, not that Sam Altman is unbiased, but he did say that social media (Reddit, Twitter) were not super important for developing LLMs (But of course, that's exactly what he would say if they were useful!)
Depends what you're training it on, I suppose. If you're just wanting to train something to generically talk then sure, a slightly outdated data set is fine. If you're wanting it to be able to talk about recent things then it'll, naturally, not be fine. It's not so much a problem right now, only being a couple of months out of date, but once that turns into years it'd become more apparent.
But sure, there are plenty of other data sources as well. On top of the problem of not wanting to train your data on content you know is littered with bots.
I'm now envisioning a sci-fi future where the AIs are an embodiment of xkcd #606. Far better than humans at mundane tasks but with significantly outdated cultural knowledge.
There are humans today that refer to Africa as the 'third world' even though it's a continent with countries more developed than some US states or European countries.
Significant outdated cultural knowledge seems the norm for humans too.
As someone in a US state with blackouts to our power grid, I'm wondering what more developed things you might be referring to and I might be missing out on.
There's pretty much no scenario where Reddit wants to encourage 3rd party app developers to run their own intermediate "proxy" service for Reddit's API. For one it adds another barrier between Reddit and their own users, and two it would mean that there's just one more small step for the app developer to take to just implement the backend services themselves and stop using Reddit's APIs completely. I see a lot of suggestions already that app developers should do this. This of course is completely impractical for anything more than a trivial number of users unless the developers want to start paying millions to run their own infrastructure instead of just paying for access to Reddit's backend systems.
> Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers.
This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not that scrapers won't settle for html scraping).
Wouldn't you leave the API key, in the server and proxy thru?
That's what I was taught to do, and you give your own tokens to clients to track which client is making that request and block that client if needed.
It seems very dangerous to pass on the reddit API key to the client.
with Oauth2, the API credentials don't give you access to other users' accounts or data or anything of that sort - so the only problem with the client id/secret being in the client is malicious people pulling it and abusing the service while using those API credentials. In general this hasn't been a problem, but once it costs (for example) Apollo $x per million API calls, it could be a money drain, and it could cause headache for the service that now has to try to do abuse prevention via IP reputation / other tracking techniques.
And proxying api calls isn't an end-all solution. This introduces a large burden for the developer to not just run a scalable proxy for the API calls, but also must introduce and manage some abuse prevention system, maybe with their own user account system with reputation ratings based on number of times they've hit a rate limit or how many different subreddits they try to access every day.
It also is generally not good for users to have to deal with a proxy like this, since it means the app developer has the ability to log all of their users' usage, and could be compelled by law enforcement / courts to hand over user PII or activity logs.
While I have issues with mods of various forums being little hitlers, I can see why they are rebelling, evidently only the 3rd party apps provide a decent way to mod on mobile. They're already working many hours for free, why would they put up with using crappy tools to do a job they do for fun and for free?
That small time developer who discussed paying millions also said it came out to $2.5/month on average[1]. Which actually isn't that bad for the service Reddit is providing
One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying members their value. The developer now feels he cannot charge lifetime members an extra $2.5/month because he promised them he wouldn't
Beyond the discussion of is Reddit about to die or not, selling LIFETIME access to someone elses free API is a dumb move, which will always end badly
I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
Then Reddit can and should charge that to the user directly. Not screw over app developers like this.
Perhaps you should read Christian’s post on Reddit [1] where he described, in detail, what this truly means and how he was effectively lied to by Reddit; and an interview where he states that he actually understands Reddit charging for API access — he doesn’t understand why the burden is being put on the app developers and why they didn’t give app developers considerable more time to make the adjustment with respect to their own pricing [2].
Reddit isn’t wrong for trying to monetize their API to cover service and server costs. Reddit is absolutely wrong for lying to app developers, charging an egregious amount to the app developers, and for not giving them enough time to be able to change their pricing terms and not leave developers on the hook for millions while existing pricing tiers (such as someone who paid in advance) still have months before renewal.
Key word here is 'on average'. Most people are not going to spend $25/year for access to a third party reddit app. That leaves the hardcore users who are going to cost the dev much more than $2.50/mo, and when ads are no longer able to be served and NSFW content is also gone where is the profit then?
Putting aside the bad salesmanship and planning of selling a forever license, it is absolutely way too much money.
> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
That's my point though. Reddit is NOT charging $2.5/mo for API access. It is charging a set amount per app (based on overall usage), and the developer has to now be in the business of creating and charging for a whole new subscription themselves to make up for what they have to pay Reddit.
Major third party developers are all unanimous in saying that they do not want this autonomy. This puts too much of a burden on them, and they have virtually zero time to make broad changes to their apps before getting hit with huge bills.
It’s reductive to say Reddit is providing the service, the app developer is also providing a service. The value originally is provided by the communities, then Reddit adds something on top, and the indie app devs add some more value.
> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.
The _average_ user costs $2.50/mo in API requests. I’m willing to bet people who pay for the “ultra” tier of an app are above average users at best, especially when you consider Apollo also has free users.
lifetime memberships are useless because a corporation can be dissolved in seconds and you can bet that lifetime for free was bound to the the life of the corporation.
He won’t have to and I wouldn’t request it either. The cost was fairly minimal for the amount of hours I’ve spent in Apollo. The only app that makes Reddit usable on iOS (RIP Alien Blue)
The aim is not _just_ to make money, but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better. Sort of like what Twitter did. It’s also why they had like one dude working on their mobile website one hour a month for the last few years.
And the official Reddit apps sucks big ass in my opinion.
Combine this with the way Reddit nags and misleads you to install it, and that gave me enough reason to never use their fucking app.
Having tried to use Apollo several times over several years, I keep coming back to the official Reddit app. It works and I'm just used to it. I like the UI much better and it feels normal. Nothing Apollo provides was that much of an improvement over the default app IMO.
Are you a dev for the app or Reddit employee? The official app is a case study in bad UX design. The only positive reviews in the app store are easily identified as bot or part of paid for campaigns. The recent reviews though tell how more average users view the official app…and it’s not very good.
Nope, just a plain average user. And I never leave reviews for apps, positive or negative. Most people complaining are NOT average users. Which is why this is just a bunch of nonsense.
> but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better
That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app are materially better than the same users directly paying for the service they actually want.
One problem is the type of user who opts to pay even $5 is probably worth more than triple the average. There’s the users who have money to spend at the top and a very long tail of non-spenders at the bottom dragging that average value down.
They're hypothetically worth more in a world where they started out in the official app. In our universe where Reddit is fucking those users, they're far more likely to simply stop using Reddit altogether. And many of them will. Reddit will be lucky if they break even.
The design language follows all modern social media apps: engagement. Think TikTok. This means auto-playing videos, large elements instead of small elements (low information density) designed to draw attention, prioritising popular and contentious items in the feed instead of relevant items for the user, etc. This language is user-hostile. It uses psychological techniques to keep users on the platform for longer instead of presenting the information which they actually want.
There are technical issues too. Many users report issues playing videos and gifs.
> You can fix both these issues in the app settings. Turning off feed thumbnails is also a big improvement.
You cannot. The "classic" layout is still less information dense than Apollo, and disabling autoplay only disables autoplaying videos in the "card" layout. Videos still auto-play once a user taps a submission.
While we're here, I forgot how hostile their navigation menu is. At the bottom of the app Reddit has "Home," "Discover," "Create," "Chat," and "Inbox." The latter doesn't even take one to their inbox. It takes them to their *activity." These are clearly not the most used actions on Reddit. They're the actions Reddit wants to encourage.
The UI is absolutely awful. As just one example, if I want to view the karma count on a recent comment, in the official app I have to tap my user profile icon in the corner, tap "my profile" (didn't I just tap my profile icon?!), then tap "comments". So now to go back where I was I have to back swipe three times. If I'm in a comment thread and I tap on a user's name, a profile card slides up from the bottom of the screen. If I then want to view that users comment history, I have to tap on their username from the slide up card, and that brings me to the full user profile card, and then I have to tap on the comments tab for that user. To go back to the comment thread, I have to press the back arrow to leave their profile, then press the (x) button on the slide-up profile card - so I back swipe and then down-swipe/tap a button.
It's an absolutely insane and frustrating UX. Things slide in from different directions and there are multiple UI elements with similar (but not identical) functionality. That's on top of crap like not being able to download gifs and videos right to my device and the built in video player being broken. There are so many other major social media apps that do things so much better it just boggles my mind at how bad reddit's is. TikTok is so smooth and easy to use, even Facebook is better.
In Apollo on the other hand, I view my comments by tapping the "profile" button at the bottom of the screen. In a comment thread, to view a user's history, tap their name and their history pops up. It's smooth and intuitive and fast and simple. I always "go back" views by sliding from the left - the interactions never change depending on context so I always know exactly how to navigate intuitively.
Everything, similar to how crappy the new (now old) god awful and broken design. It’s not meant for users, but for advertisers. From abominable amount of tracking, to recommended community posts, to unnecessary avatars, to taking multiple clicks to view something, and on and on and on…
The reason why I dislike it is that, compared to 3rd party apps, it's slow and the design is overly busy. I prefer a more minimalistic design. The excessive tracking doesn't help.
At least on Android, the official app is terrible. Scrolling is very janky and feels unnatural, and the design is cluttered and soulless. Just need to look at Reddit is Fun to see how good it could be.
They say a product reflects the organization that produced it, and it's clear from the app that this is a company with unchecked Promo-Driven-Development and Resume-Driven-Development. There is no impressive metric that measures app jankiness or design clarity in isolation, and the effort to fix it is disproportionately larger than the line that it adds to your resume or promo package. So even though it's glaringly obvious that the app is broken within 3 seconds of opening it, not a single person anywhere in the org is incentivized to fix it.
Says who? They are only pushing the "official experience" to make up for lost ad revenue. If I pay Reddit $50/yr why would they care what app I use? YouTube does the same thing with Premium, and it is working out great.
It's about ads and tracking sure, but they're also trying to build a TikTok-style algorithm-powered black hole that keeps you sucked in by way of constantly shoving more things in front of you, including posts from subreddits you're not subscribed to. They also want to be able to force whatever new half-baked features they add to work with prominent positioning in their apps.
But to what end? You have a bunch of users who you know are willing to pay real dollars for a different experience. You couldn't ask for better segmentation getting people with wildly different desires and expectations to both be hooked on your platform.
I think it's probably because users paying to be able to use third party clients can't be sold as growth potential — it's a relatively static number, and they're paying for an entirely static experience. They don't want whatever gimmick Reddit is pushing at the moment (like NFT avatars), they want their simple chronological feed and that's it. The limit of worth for those users is the subscription they're paying, whereas if they're using the official app they're theoretically monetizable in N different ways.
That is an option, considering Reddit is charging third party developers the equivalent of ~$2.5/mo per user for API access, so the tracking argument already goes out of the window. They are already giving up control, for a very low price too, but just implementing it in the most brain dead way possible.
That is what the 3rd party dev has to implement, Reddit already has a premium feature, but there is no api-unlock, there is just dev payments. That’s a big part of the issue. If people paying Reddit would unlock api access, most issues would disappear.
Wait, what? This is news to me. Why is this not mentioned anywhere? How does this not solve this for almost everyone? I already authenticate through oAuth anyway, wouldn’t this then just require inputting my own API key?
edit: Ah, it also requires applying for an API key on their support website which may or may not be granted to you by Reddit and might take some amount of time. That is not comparable to having proper API access.
And even worse, it’s not clear you are even allowed to use your own API access with a third party API, the ToS might forbid that as it’s not your (the person requesting the API key) app you are using it for, but someone else. That would make the whole thing completely useless.
Do you think this desire is out of the goodness of their hearts and they genuinely think that it is the best? I cannot believe anyone would think that.
Possibly (but it's just a guess) it's about ads and/or data harvesting. If you access it via another app, they cannot get everything they're getting now.
I mean, I think even still charging (a reasonable amount) for the public API, and in return bringing it up to near the standards of the Reddit-built app’s private API, and possibly allowing some ad revenue split with the large apps where by showing Reddit ads (currently impossible with the current API!) is compensated with some minute fraction off the API bill/paid to dev if no outstanding balance.
Reddit won because it was the Digg-alternative, they’ve always been on shaky ground if people just start posting less. What ever per-impression value they get now on their own apps/website will plummet if people just start using it less, regardless if they’re making ad revenue off every user or only some users.
Plus, yeah it’s an awesome LLM training resource. Make it cheap, why not? Your competitors are expensive, and your data is well indexed by topic and conversational in tone.
That would still get a lot of backlash as a lot of users just aren't going to be willing to pay just to use a different app. Turning this around isn't so easy as you make it appear too it's still reddit effectively shutting out 3rd party apps.
Reddit Premium costs more per month ($7) than the expected cost per user for the API ($2). If third party apps can’t make it work with the request-based pricing model, limiting access to just premium users isn’t going to work any better.
As per the usual they should have chosen the middle way and forced reasonable charges for subscriptions for those people who want to use 3rd party aps $3-5 a month. Instead they now have a rebellion, that might turn into a movement to ditch reddit like people ditched digg. I'm not sure where they'd go though, I don't know of any platform out there that is similar to reddit that could handle a large influx.
As an until-recently premium Redditor, exactly this. I voluntarily subscribed. I didn't derive value from subscribing. I just didn't want to be a freeloader since I enjoy the site so much.
Because of Reddit's current practices, I've cancelled my premium membership. I'll likely move on from Reddit unless they chart a path where I and others can continue to use our third party clients happily.
> I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly.
Are we living in different universes?
Less than 1% of Reddit users will be impacted by these changes. If all the people who are upset at this leave, it will have almost no impact to Reddit. A few niche subreddits may die, but that's it.
Facebook's North America revenue is around $50 a quarter per user ("ARPU"), which is ~$15/month. You'd have to charge quite a bit to clear that, given most users won't pay. (Plus 30% to pay for App Store fees.)
Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.
Reddit is garbage these days anyways. Even communities that are scientific/technical seem to be toxic these days. If you want to get to a comment that has any substance regarding some topic or article, you have to scroll all the way down.
Reddit is really mismanaged, the community, contributors and moderators have basically taken over in the past five years or so. People are quick to point out that there are really good subreddit, and I have no doubt that's true, the larger subreddits however have all developed in a pretty toxic direction. There are clearly right and wrong opinions, don't based on fact, "rules" enforced arbitrarily and everyone seems to have some type of diagnosis or social issues.
The lacking management of Reddit have allowed it to become a pretty weird place, not quite as bad as Imgur, but the idea is much the same. The community have been left to it's own devices for many years, and now the owners are trying to get some control back, in an attempt to make a profit. They're a just so far removed from what the community have built that they have no idea how to manage the site anymore.
Not really, there are a bunch of small reddits that really is a good source of information and community. E.g. r/leathercraft, r/learnmath, r/godot and so on...
The sub also needs to get big enough to get out of the "Facebook group" mentality, and have at least one competent mod that keeps it from turning into memes and shitposting.
It's a tricky balance. I've been in small (~sub 500) subreddits that are worse than larger ones just because the mods don't enforce any posting requirements.
The pandemic also ruined a lot of subreddits, especially ones for municipalities. Over 3 years of "OMG COVID" and "we ar liek literally in a pandemic" and "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DON'T SUPPORT MORE LOCKDOWNS" made me give up on a lot of subreddit communities, especially the Los Angeles one. But yeah, the metastasization of Reddit's broad politics also made things worse.
The municipality boards the world over were all similarly overwhelmed with sanctimony and paranoia. I think this mostly speaks to the demographic of Reddit. Which is to say, the fact that Reddit is home to any edifying discussion at all is in spite of its demographic, not because of it.
/r/iowa has actually improved but that's only because we are no longer first in the primaries. I hope south carolina has a plan to deal with astroturfing the likes of which they have never imagined.
The issue is that the admins only selectively enforce their rules, and are very ideologically driven at that (see the general rule of not allowing bans for other subreddit participation). This sets the tone for the moderation.
The administrators still maintain that racism can only be by an oppressor group to an oppressed group. That is, they ignore reports of racism against white people. Last year I saw a user get a temporary ban for reporting racism against white people. The rot is from the top down.
Bardfinn is a really, really good representation of this. They're a nutter who controls a huge number of subreddits, talks like they're on a ton of speed, and bans even minor questioning of The Narrative.
Ironically she's a felon who lives in her parents basement. Probably shouldn't be moralizing.
I'm a casual user and it's fine. The specific subs I'm on have very few toxic people, and I either ignore them or block them.
It seems heavily made up of very young people, which means a reliable trope is "I'm just getting into <genre> -- what are some good artists I should check out?"
But that's pretty harmless; you can just ignore them.
The nice thing about Reddit is that you can scroll down. Even if the top voted comments are garbage, you can just continue reading, and read answers from a very diverse audience, even if they are downvoted.
It's a lot more diverse than Twitter, where it seems that only right wing bullshit is shown any more, or HN, where 90% of posters are men aged 20-40.
There is a great deal of diversity in thought on Reddit that is just banned outright by moderators. To pick a non-inflammatory example, a lot of dog subreddits will not allow any references to aversive training methods, which in their eyes include things like snapping your fingers or saying "no" in a sharp voice. What this means is you get a bunch of rival subreddits with different dogmatic beliefs, and people are banned for linking or even alluding to the existence of the others.
There are examples of this kind of strict imposition of dogma by fiat in every reddit community, on matters large and small.
Reddit conversations are mostly memes at this point. I have two geographic subreddits for my city. One is owned by a dude in another city, I'm pretty sure Detroit, who just doesn't moderate anything. The other is owned by a group of people who will straight up ban people for even marginal dissent from their favored ideology. Most of the people active on those subreddits aren't even from Portland. They're conservatives, liberals, and leftists who view Portland as this gateway of cultural relevance. It's the internet equivalent of Ballmer and his wife buying political influence in Portland, a city they don't live in, much less the state.
The rot is root deep at this point if it's let things like this happen.
The problem I see with lemmy, mastodon and similar services (anybody remember the also open source "Facebook killer" from like 10 years ago?) is that they are confusing: is it one service or a bunch of servers? Which server is the good one?
The average is lost on the first page, and you need her for these social based apps. You need the non tech savvy people to get communities like r/medicine.
Otherwise you get shat you see on IRC LiberaChat nowadays: the channels with people are mainly technical or technically related ones. ... which like, is good for people like us. But I come to HN for quality tech related discussions... I want a place for quality InstantPot talk, or quality ChildFree chat.
To argue your point, today on Lemmy.ml the owner advised users the server could not handle the load, and told users to register on other instances (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). This would mean multiple logins. There is no way to migrate or synchronise accounts. Federation is a cool idea but Lemmy's implementation is a terrible user experience.
Someone should do a UI kind of like Emule: the main idea was the same: You fired your client and could connect to one of several servers, but end users didn't care, they just clicked on "connect" and the client will do whatever was necessary. Of course that client could be Web based, not necessary an application (although for mobile, applications are all the rage now)
Mastadon's is as well. Like it's cool that you can follow somebody if you already know their handle, but the discovery aspect of social media is at least half the point of it. Without some form of mechanism holding everything together, it's never going to be a great experience.
I wish these federated systems would put a bit more effort into the user experience.
I mean, even though you’ve directly linked to the server list (instead of their even less straightforward front page), it’s still confusing. What is a new user supposed to do with this? It’s all incredibly opaque.
Reddit's app has terrible UI/UX, as does the website redesign (new.reddit.com, which is the default www.reddit.com). The only good UI/UX is old.reddit.com, which isn't very good on mobile.
Yes! I think the difference is between people who use Reddit as a feed versus a forum. For a Hacker News audience seeking to engage with forum-like content, the new redesigns clearly do not fit their needs. However, to a general audience seeking to find a feed of content and interesting comment sections, the new redesigns are much more palatable.
Both. I can't imagine a company being so successful and so influential being badly run.
Of course, if someone uses a moral, ethics, or personal political and societal view to judge if a company is well run, then I agree it may appear to many people that Twitter is badly run. But if we take a company valuation and consider the time it took it to achieve it, it's certainly one of the best run companies.
> I can't imagine a company being so successful and so influential being badly run.
I'd argue this is a failure of imagination more than an endorsement of Twitter. Twitter has inertia - it's going to keep going until it literally can't, and that doesn't mean it's been run well.
It's been chaotic there since acquisition, with major policies being changed on a whim and then retracted and whole functions of the company disappearing entirely or almost entirely. Major news outlets are dropping their twitter presence, and stocks have dropped - if you define that as "good" management, what would bad management even look like?
I believe the estimate is 18-20%. This is roughly 86 billion monthly active users. More than enough to populate an active community. I hazard to guess that third party app users are also more active.
That's what killing a social media is, people leaving.
Which is realistically not going to happen.
The average user doesnt care, yeah reddit is geeky but all they want is money.
or you know, just ask people to pay $2.50/month to cover their share? I have a weird feeling this is exactly what the Apollo dev will be doing. In order to charge everyone a monthly fee, they need to shut down Apollo and create a new app
If I had an app with 1.5 million monthly active users and the platform I piggy- backed off asked me to pay them $20 million yearly for the privilege, I would start asking VCs for money to pay the bill and hire a couple folks to build the platform my users are going to migrate to before someone else does.
Reddit the company has shown to completely misunderstand the userbase that created their website and they're slaughtering it to make a buck to payoff their own investors. So why not prove them wrong and do it yourself?
I agree. The Apollo dev arguably owns the user last-mile. It wouldn't be a stretch to offer users an alternative. Reddit was open source until 2017 (https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit) so most of the heavy dev lifting is already done. The major cost would be in infrastructure.
A large portion of reddit contributors use 3rd party apps. Will reddit even be worth using if those people leave? That’s a huge risk, and I’m not confident Reddit has fully evaluated the second order effects of this API change.
I’d be willing to be the opposite given how hard Reddit is pushing this. But like you said, it’s impossible to tell without a separate category for third party apps.
Assuming the 90-9-1 rule for reddit, chances are that the 1% that post [quality/highly-popular] content are more likely to be invested enough to improve their experience via a better app experience.
I hope something new comes along. I'm getting sick of reddit. They way they allow moderators to run subreddits nowadays is ridiculous. Especially city subreddits that should be completely unbiased and welcoming to all in the region.
The r/Toronto city subreddit is absolute garbage now because of what the mods have done. They decided they would have "no-crime January" as a trial to see what the subreddit looks like if users weren't allowed to post articles about petty crime throughout the city. When someone gets stabbed in a high-profile area it couldn't be posted under the no-crime January rules. They said they would run it as a trial and offer a survey to see what people thought. They didn't run the survey and the rule is now in place permanently. Of course, when a white guy or incel commits a crime it's allowed, but if it's a BIPOC? Deleted.
Now the mods are trying to astroturf the municipal election we have coming up and push one of the candidates. It's the "progressive" candidate and in true Canadian fashion, if you don't vote for the progressive the reddit mob wants you to vote for you might as well be a Conservative because you're handing them the election. The mods allow people to make posts that say nonsense such as:
> To all Progressives - we need to consolidate behind [redacted] now. [He/she] might not be my first choice but this is finally an election where we can put a people-first person in. We can't screw this up by splitting the vote.
To suggest you can be a progressive but want another candidate will result in downvotes and insults. Funny enough, those insults would get you banned under their famous Rule 2 which basically allows them to delete or ban anything they deem as "not excellent" but when directed at someone who is seen as "conservative" they are allowed. The subreddit has been like this for about 5-6 years, it's only the political polarization that's got more extreme lately.
Don't forget that if you don't like Trudeau, you must want Canada to join the states because you're a truck driving gun-nut bigot who also wants to ban abortion and hates lgbt people.
There is enough variety with wider regional subreddits on the national/provincial scale so that doesn't bother me much. The Toronto subreddit is by far the most dominant and the only general Toronto subreddit worth subscribing to which makes the censorship more aggravating because you can't really get Toronto news elsewhere on reddit.
I’ve seen this on Reddit and every other online community over the past few years. Zero tolerance for any sort of nuance or thought. It is concerning. HN is the last hold out.
Has anyone heard if the changes will affect the current JSON API available by appending `.json` to the end of web URLs (i.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/all.json)? I can't find any documentation about it so hopefully not. If anyone is looking for an extension to replace their third-party app, Reddit Theme Studio[1] might be of interest.
If I understand this correctly, these third party apps are drawing tons of ad money away from Reddit while at the same time increasing their hosting costs and dev costs for maintaining the API, right? How is this not a win-win for Reddit? They lower the traffic that was costing them money. I know it's user-hostile and that's the crux of the complaints, but it seems a little naive that these communities are basically boycotting and asking "keeping wasting a lot of money so we can hang out here for free". Am I missing something?
Imagine you own a store. Every week 2 people come in. They talk and shop for a long time. You spend a lot of money showing them all the products and answering their questions. One of the two spends always buys a ton of stuff and the other one never buys anything. You realize you can save a lot of time and money by banning the other person since they never buy anything. Next week, neither of them come in.
Thats reddit. The people that use the first party app and click ads and make money do it because of the content created by both the first party and third party app users.
Reddit is built on free labor from mods. Without the mods they would have to pay people to moderate thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities. Most mods use old reddit on desktop or third party apps on mobile because their app and new site suck for modding. Alienating the mods means their subreddits go to shit, and reddit exists for content. Doesn't sounds like a 'win' to me.
It seems inevitable that Reddit is going to need to start hiring professional moderators. But given the difficulties in making that work economically, it would only be for the very largest subreddits. And perhaps even then, it would just be a professional lead moderator, with some volunteer help.
As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reasons other than "build a thriving community of diverse, good faith discussion."
> As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reasons other than "build a thriving community of diverse, good faith discussion."
People say this, but I find it completely untrue. Many people do a lot of things for good reasons, or else we wouldn't have charities. This cynical outlook is toxic and it is a reason why a lot of the people with 'good motives' get burned out. When no one gives you the benefit of consideration that you actually care about your community and want to see it thrive then you lose those motives. This is coming from someone who moderates many (>15) subreddits, with the largest one having 674,038 subscribers as of this posting.
For an easy example -- how many of the largest [non-political] subreddits are openly political? By that I mean they either have participation rules or auto-moderators that explicitly tell you that you will be banned for non-conformance? You think only moderators are getting burned out?
I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another. On neither side do normal, sane people want to participate.
Reddit moderation isn't some altruistic effort. It's people shaping the discussion of their subreddit. They are participants as much as any other user.
Reddit is a user-generated content app, and many users in the comments have already expressed their plan to stop using reddit if they can't use their favorite third-party app.
There are better ways to handle this without just saying "give us millions of dollars". Something like requiring that users pay a subscription to reddit to use it, for example.
I think most of those threats are hollow though as there are not really any good alternatives to reddit. Users will complain and threaten to leave, but in the end most will likely stick around and just adjust.
> there are not really any good alternatives to reddit.
Sure there is, you can simply stop using reddit. You don't have to replace it with something new. Take whatever other hobbies and activities you already have and extend the time you devote to them into the time-slot formerly occupied by reddit.
When you choose where to host your Wordpress or whatever, you don’t worry about someone shutting off the API keys. On this page is a video explaining how that would work:
Isn’t that lovely? The screenshot of HN complaining bitterly about someone controlling their own giant platform that we have all come to rely on. And the only solution is “switch to {{their competitor}}” as if that will solve it. This is just one of thousands of examples.
> We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market
A free market literally overrun by Nazis is what that means in the end. It's best seen on all the Twitter clone attempts that marketed themselves as "free speech" alternatives - most notably Parler, Gab and Truth Social: they all ended up being echo chambers of Nazis, where no one but them would want to hang out. The "board scene" had similar moments... from OG 4chan to 8chan and others, as soon as the current "hot" platform began to moderate away the worst of the worst (usually due to some terrorist focusing the police and general public spotlight on it), they simply moved away.
The other way, federation of instances like with Mastodon, has a different problem set: while Nazi, CSAM and otherwise problematic instances get cut off from the larger instances, discovery absolutely sucks compared to the elephant (or rather, bird) in the room - there's no way to run "trending topic" campaigns, which was the feature that made Twitter so successful among protesters and dissidents: it allowed them to easily reach a global audience to put a spotlight on government abuses.
The solution to go forward is what the EU is doing with the DSA/DMA: allow big, centralized platforms, and force the operators to adhere to a common baseline of moderation standards.
Perhaps not being able to run trending topic campaigns is a _draw_ for Masto users. Not being able to create your own means you don't have to be spammed with attempts from others.
For me, the experience of Mastodon is worse than Twitter - essentially, either you follow the global firehose feed, or you're limited to the small amount of content your direct followings create or re-toot.
First of all — if you are so worried about being overrun by nazis, you should worry about being overrun by bots, who could gradually astruturf any ideology including nazism or 4chan QAnon or recruiting of incels into jihadism or something as simple as “let’s go to war against China”. (And furthermore, Carthage delendum est.) It is far more insidious because it would be done as a coordinated, long-term swarm attack. A persistent advanced threat, in all communities, available to anyone to deploy. All open communities would turn into a dark forest and you’ll cry out to Zuck and Elon to save you, and trust them even more.
That is why we will soon all be moving to private communities where we — not Zuck or Elon’s algorithms — select who we hear from, and where membership is grandfathered in and/or depends on actually showing up to events in person once in a while and interacting (gasp, you mean like, BEFORE the Internet? When people had fulfilling social lives?)
Rather than preventing people from forming their own communities, you should support open source tools that give them access to their own infrastructure. If they want to label Nagorno-Karabakh on their copy of OpenStreetMap “Armenia” or “Azerbaijan”, they can, and don’t have to kill each other in the name of The State flags.
How about if we each have our own private keychains to sign what we say, rather than Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy (which Google apologized for) or their centralized sign-in which basicallly controls your identity? Or CBDCs and National IDs from The State which are coming? Or even worse, scanning your eyeballs by “Worldcoin” founded by the same OpenAI guys who promised to be open nonprofit and later became closed for-profit?
Tell me, when you are jacked into a metaverse for 10 hours a day (eg for work and some fun), would you want it to be owned by a corporation, their world and you just live in it? Are you preferring to trust Facebook, a company that has surreptitiously spied on your audio and your camera every chance they got until they got caught?
We have perfectly good Web2 solutions like Verified Claims and certificate chains, for many of these things, and you can watch my interviews with the technologists who actually roll it out, such as:
While I’m sure Reddit has some wonderful woodworking or music discussions, its main function is to be the shit that attracts flys and keeps them away from sites like this.
The same argument can be applied to itself: popular subreddits attract users away from niche subreddits.
There are many thriving niche subreddits. Maybe the "main function" of Reddit is categorization? If so, it seems reasonably effective, so long as people feel motivated enough to moderate those subreddits. That's the issue at hand.
In this day and age, after fiasco of the likes of Twitter, I wonder how developers choose to spend their time to develop apps for companies that own the content.
It is going to be a bumpy ride, and the content owners dont give a damn about third party apps.
I solely blame the developers of the apps, for trusting a mega corporation that is set on path of profiteering and data secrecy.
I don't understand the point of a protest like this without some sort of concrete demand. If you're going to take down most of a popular site, you should:
1. Articulate the reason for your action
2. Explain what specific things need to happen to redress the problem
I haven't seen any clear statement of (2). Am I missing something?
I think that's good advice in principle, but the practical limitation is the ability of a bunch of redditors to come to an agreement on point #2 on short notice.
Maybe they figure the implied message of "you are doing a bad thing we don't like. Don't do the bad thing" may be enough to get some change to happen, if change is a real possibility.
If you can't come together around even one demand, then the message your protest conveys to management is that you are momentarily upset but there is zero risk in ignoring you.
I agree that making a clear demand seems more effective if possible, but I don't think disorganization necessarily implies that displeasure is only momentary and involves no risk. Many people can be upset about something and agree on a way to protest it without agreeing on what the solution should be.
I feel like it's obvious? They want 3rd party apps to stay in some reasonable capacity. The definition of reasonable can vary, (free - low cost API usage), but it's not that important.
I don't follow reddit too closely. But I remember there was another big fiasco a while ago and a bunch of clones/spinoff sites were started. Have any of those survived? (and not been completely overrun with fringe political content that's banned everywhere else)
I mentioned this elsewhere: ruqqus and saidit seem to have failed getting traction. The latter one still exists (the former one doesn't, it seems), but is a cesspool of trolling, anti-everything-ism and conspiracy theorists.
Previous Reddit controversies have mostly been about Reddit banning abhorrent content. This lead to clones which were, more or less from the start, just full of the worst people you can imagine. This limited their general attractiveness; normal people probably won’t want to use a Reddit clone which is populated mostly by Nazis, or by people who are creepily fixated on moaning about fat people, or by the upskirt people, or what have you.
This would potentially be rather different, in that the group being driven away is more _normal_.
Seems that if there is a way to unlink social networks (users, friends, etc) and content networks, we would have a better time keeping the goals of users and end corporations aligned.
With the networks separated, users should, theoretically, be able to switch content networks at will.
I presume that going dark means that there will be less traffic on the site, which ostensibly would put pressure on the ad revenue. How long would this have to go on before it was a noticeable effect on read its balance sheet?
I don’t think the ad revenue for these two days is the important bit here. Reddit wants to IPO later this year and this protest highlights a very real existential risk behind Reddit’s business model.
Reddit is entirely dependent on a large number of unpaid volunteers to moderate their site. Without moderation the site will turn into a cesspool of spam and other unsavory content. No brand is going to want to put their adds next to that.
The problem is that unpaid volunteer have no obligations towards Reddit. They aren’t employees so you can’t fire them, they aren’t depending on Reddit for their livelihood and you can’t easily replace them (you’d have to find another sucker to provide free labor for you). They certainly can’t afford to hire enough people to replace the volunteer moderators.
So Reddit is now pissing off the very group of people they depend on for their existence, a group of people that can walk away from Reddit with zero consequences. They have shown time and again to not care about the people they need the most to remain in business. They are one dumb-ass move by the admins away from going belly up. Does this company sound like a good investment opportunity to you ?
We're talking about over 1,000 subreddits (and growing rapidly), including some of the very largest (~6 of the top 10, such as /r/pics, /r/aww, and /r/videos).
It will almost certainly have a noticeable effect, especially if many of these subreddits decide to hold the blackout indefinitely.
