I think the idea put out by some people here that Reddit might be in the process of radically changing tracks is plausible.
Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritized and dropped.
Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content.
Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.
All you have to do is look at what every other social media platform has done, which is devolve into an infinite scroll of the following:
- Kitty/puppy videos
- Exotic street food
- girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something)
- Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle
- Twerking or faux-twerking dances
- A person being kind to the homeless
- "you won't believe" compilations of various things like near car accidents
- Crazy/dangerous parkour
- Some green smoothie brand targeted at young people doing yoga
It's no wonder Reddit has been moving in this direction as well. People eat this shit up, they're more profitable as advertisements, require way less moderation, and are overall less of a hassle than hosting discussions.
- asking strangers in the street how much is their rent or what's their salary
- asking strangers in the street to do X for money (e.g. do 10 pull ups for $100)
- tourism videos in "dangerous" places such as South America, Africa, Middle Orient, East Europe, Asia (i.e. everywhere not in NA and West Europe)
- silent walking/driving 4K videos in Japan/China/South Korea
- "one day in the life of a programmer/student/[whatever] at [prestigious company/college name]" videos, showing a person waking up, taking a shower, eating breakfast, etc.
Though I'm not certain, my guess is Reddit is calling everyone's bluff; they've run the numbers and know that the long game is in their favor if they Tiktokify. Every social media platform eventually declines, and they must know that they have to adapt-or-die to maintain a similar rate of growth.
If there was a clear successor existing with a team that could scale fast, there wouldn't be a Reddit strike but a Reddit exodus. Lemmy and other garbage is not it...
How hard would it be to make a thing with the same API as Reddit so the apps that are currently about to shut down can instead change base domain and keep going?
Including existing OSS servers, assuming there already is some (complete!) open source one somewhere — I can google for the attempts ("plebbit" was submitted here for discussion only last week) but I can't trivially tell if they're any good.
Probably not hard to write an adapter at all. But it's not the API that made these apps popular and appealing. It's the Reddit community. The apps would write their own adapters if there was an alternative social media website with this community.
The amount that the market pays to inject adverts into youtube product reviews versus 'proper' content is staggering. A good guitarist is better doing a review on headphones, than actually playing a guitar. A runner is better doing a review on the latest Nikes rather than giving training advice.
> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal.
The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior.
Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.
> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"
This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.
1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam.
2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.
1) As always it depends on the query. For categories like cars/engines, gardening/landscaping and DIY stuff I've found that a Bing search often outperforms Google because it returns a dedicated section for internet discussions that isn't focused completely on Reddit. Here's an example of that section from a search about manifolds for an old engine[0].
There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely.
For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage.
2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ
For a subject like pesticides that is both emotionally fraught, and the subject of multi-billion dollar lawsuits, I'm genuinely not sure you can find accurate information anywhere. People are careful to say things like "not supported by credible science", because the industry has paid for some of the research.
> reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit.
Fascinating.
I've read so many comments here about how people search reddit specifically in order to get better results, but I've never understood this. I don't find reddit to be better enough for that sort of thing to be worth going to reddit as a first choice.
Perhaps this explains it? I stopped using Google search a few years back because I find it hard to get to useful sites using it.
Are people comparing reddit-specific searches to general Google search results? That would be the explanation, because if I had to chose between the two, I'd go with a reddit-first approach, too.
It really depends what you're looking for answers to.
If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page, or you're looking for how to fix an obscure problem with your 3d printer, it's damn reliable. Having the opportunity for open and anonymous conversation on these things increases the chance of meaningful discussion.
For the former, Google search results are a hodge podge of bought-and-paid for "best of" sites, and for the latter dominated by ancient niche forum posts and shitty Quora answers.
Half of the Internet is now soulless self promotion and devious attempts to advertise without you knowing you're being advertised to.
So two cheers to Reddit, frankly. We could do a hell of a lot worse.
> If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page
I totally believe that! But since I personally don't look for product reviews on the internet at all (and absolutely wouldn't look on Amazon), I wouldn't really know.
All I'm saying is that for the sorts of things I tend to search for, anyway, finding good resources on the web isn't that hard, so I never really understood why people prefer to search reddit (unless they already are reddit users anyway, of course).
It's really good for home type technical questions too. Like a stack overflow for plex or handyman type things for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.
DDG, although I think I'll be switching to Kagi in the future.
> for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.
I never use YouTube videos for that sort of thing because I don't really learn well from videos. I'm a text kind of guy. But even for those sorts of things, I never have a problem finding good resources on the web, so I have no reason to have to go to reddit for them.
That's just me, though. It's not a criticism of reddit, just a preference. Reddit is just not my kind of place, so I like to avoid it when I can.
it's a fairly common and incredible experience for me to see people on reddit assert the most inane drivel that collect hundreds or thousands of upvotes and enthusiastic agreement.
It makes me feel some combination of
1. Reddit is flooded with bots or brigades that seem to have cryptic agendas
2. My own reality is really far afield and the internet is bursting that bubble OR
3. The present young adult generation exists in a seriously orthogonal reality and absolutely sweeping societal changes are on the horizon (as may already be becoming evident)
I still find a lot of pleasant discourse on the smaller subreddits. But it's an absolute shock to visit some of the larger communities sometimes.
I think #3 is closest to the mark, but I don’t think it’s caged to young adults.
For example, if you were to look anywhere on Reddit and found yourself in a thread that just barely, tangentially, almost-not-in-this-plane-of-reality touches on something related to law, a hundred people will show up to give you all sorts of the most inane and dangerous legal advice.
Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney. That said, there are (were?) some places on Reddit where you could find advice or discussion attached to the reality shared by the rest of us. But that isn’t the current draw of the site to the masses.
I’m one of the people who (until this past week) used Reddit in a technical capacity.
That shouldn’t be taken as “I get my solutions from Reddit.” Rather, I posted and consumed niche technical information for unusual problems. There were (are?) a boatload of smaller, vendor specific, etc subreddits that _did_ (do?) have smart people who collaborate or rubber ducky tricky issues.
Most of Reddit is not and was not that.
And as I type that, I realize I must apologize for sort of hijacking your reply with a response to the parent comment. I’ll leave this and have prepended a direct response to the points you raise and added a reasonable segue.
> Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney.
Counterpoint, not everyone has access to an attorney, a mechanic, a doctor (sadly), tradesperson, or any number of expensive professionals when someone just needs to know if they can ignore something, can fix it themself, or if they should seek out professional advice. These communities can be of great help to people who just need to guided to the next step.
I also avoid the larger communities. The value in reddit is having a number of doors to open and shut at will. Can I find a better place for discussion in a specific forum? Probably, but reddit is great for being able to visit and consult with many different groups.
This is the crux of the problem and why free moderation doesn't scale. Communities simply can't exceed a particular size without attracting chuds, and smaller communities self regulate because "being a member" of something useful is valuable.
Online discussions communities since Usenet always suffer the same problem. They become useful, attract too many users of the wrong kind and die. Reddit will be no exception.
The Reddit algorithm of upvotes and downvotes means that, if >51% of voters agree with something, it's visible. If <49% do, it's at the bottom of the page or hidden.
This makes basically anything even remotely controversial within the specific demographic of the site invisible to reddit users.
One thing it's still useful for is getting user reviews that actually tell you if a product is junk or has recently been replaced with an inferior version. Store sites and review pages make it too easy for companies to get negative reviews hidden.
> People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years.
Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?
The internet I came from (in the days of discussion forums) didn't suffer this problem because there were no internet points attached to posts, and posts were ordered oldest to newest. Incorrect information was called out. On Reddit, the "right kind" of incorrect information is upvoted and boosted to the top, and anyone calling out this misinformation is downvoted.
The worst part to me is the binary nature of internet points.
Up or down. No difference between something one simply doesn't agree with vs utter and complete bullshit.
On the other hand I am not sure what the old internet forums I loved would look like if you scaled up the users 100X and then linked all these random forums together so one username interacted across message boards. That would have basically been a disaster and internet points would not have been the major problem.
There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.
I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post.
Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process.
> I’ve seen entire comment chains on a repost that were re-created verbatim from an older post.
I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.
> Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original
What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it.
As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".
People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person.
That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.
Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.
Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.
That's my point though: how often do people do that check? I don't think I personally ever have. Maybe I'm just weird though? I tend to not just go with a single user/comment/thread, but rather try to find multiple different answers and gestalt from there, so individual trustworthiness is less important.
You have to remember that with spam, they're looking for gullible people, and the marginal cost of the spam activity is extremely low. To some extent, the Nigerian prince scam works not in spite of, but because it's nonsense.
there are definitely browser extensions that will call the API to check account age and highlight suspicious accounts, that's how "checking" generally happens except in egregious cases.
Karma on Reddit is used as a proxy for "this user makes good contributions". At smaller scales in the past this might have been a useful proxy but when a pithy joke on a huge subreddit can get thousands of upvotes it's not longer a good proxy. But since people still use it as a proxy astroturfers wants as much karma and activity as they can manage because it makes the account look more realistic.
Outside of buying accounts, some people literally just want control. For the same reason that people will spend countless hours moderating large subs for free. They want to push certain narratives on subs, so you'll see large accounts where all they post are generic filler distractions or inciteful links. It's not all super nefarious or political, often it's things like mindless fanboy wars, where they only post things that make their favorite companies look good.
For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways.
If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.
Did you see all those "where can I buy this flavor of snack in $location", or some weird anecdote involving a flavor of chips or similar. Tons of astroturfing on reddit.
I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.
Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section.
They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.
I wanted to make one for a joke and see how long it takes for people to notice but I guess people did that already for nefarious purposes.
That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.
I'm on the fence about Lemmy/Kbin, but I think it has a better shot than Mastodon.
Twitter's thing was "giant conversation with everyone" - federation interferes with that.
Reddit was inherently fragmented (subreddits, and heavy redditors tended to describe groupings of related subreddits). Federation seems pretty natural here (community names can just have an @ symbol somewhere in there).
There are UI and discoverability issues, but those seem rather tractable.
I think performance at scale will be a real issue though.
Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.
Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.
FTP servers were easy...except for actually finding content on them where Napster was better. You literally described why Napster was better. FTP was only concerned with moving bytes. Napster added a search functionality on top of the moving bytes which is the thing most people actually wanted. Napster could have just been a fancy Archie front end and it would have been just about as popular.
FTP servers at that time for MP3s were ratio servers. You had to upload something in order to download and at a specific ratio of kb. Most wouldn't give you credit for uploading something they already had as well.
Finding the songs was no problem. I can remember some kind of web search engine. It was just too hard to get a collection going to even be able to download something though. I guess the idea was to rip your cd collection but that idea simply didn't occur to me at the time.
Napster took off because it was a free record store at a time when everyone was use to paying $13 an album in 2000 USD($23 adjusted for inflation).
napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.
> You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from
True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.
> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything
I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.
> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?
Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.
Apparently I'm mis-remembering Scour, but Audiogalaxy was definitely just a FTP site index. FTP isn't hard to use, but finding the files you were looking for and downloading them via FTP servers were definitely more difficult pre-napster. There weren't many that were just open, you'd have to upload content to be able to download something else. A lot of them were 10-1 ratios, or people were looking for specific things to trade.
> I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction.
Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. I have set up a public Lemmy instance. Registration is open currently. Would be nice to see a handful of people join my instance.
Napster was actually made up of a large number of servers that didn't really communicate much, especially for chat.
You couldn't choose your server on the official application, but others allowed you to do you could always meet the same persons. I was on the Orange server.
i’m feeling like i don’t understand the language around this recently. Lemmy/Kbin takes 1000’s of previously disparate forums and brings them into one UI and identity system: isn’t that more “centralized” than the old phpbb/forum way?
i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.
Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.
I agree with you. /r/legaladvice is the peak example of this; as someone who enjoys reading threads there and generally avoids commenting as I'm no lawyer nor legal expert they've become practically unbearable as more and more ignorant people comment freely and without restraint.
My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data
This is the key. Reddit owns nothing except a very poorly performant app that no one wants and a very forced and shitty web experience unless you are on old.reddit.com.
Its mind boggling how wrong they've been getting it for as long as they've been getting it wrong. Like how can any company/ CEO be that dense?
Doesn't Reddit own the data now?
That's the unfortunate truth of these platforms. They offer your a platform and pay for hosting and you give them your attention and content.
Legally, they don't own the data, but they do have a perpetual license to the data and can do basically whatever they want it with it. Not much of a difference but it's one of these things where the details might be crucial.
I haven't tested it but if as a user you were to ask for your days to be deleted they'd have to comply, at least in EU. So if there was a mass walkout a lot of comments and post would disappear.
Yes, this is true. However, the fact that reddit was where they got it means OpenAI capitalized on something that was given for free, and now reddit is trying to do the same and failing (because they have no value proposition).
It's sad that the place where all the users stored their data is getting burned down because it offered free access.
There's no way to win this battle, though. Are they going to ... stop the Internet? People will find a way to siphon data from sites where people contribute large volumes of data.
>Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
That would align with the changes Reddit seemed to have made to their algorithm. They changed something last year that affected what posts were promoted to the top of sub.
In the r/movies sub, text posts were frequently getting to the top, which is fine is these were quality posts. Spoiler: they weren't. They'd be dumb questions like "DAE think X movie is underrated" where X movie is highly rated by everyone or a cult classic, or meaningless observations like "Y movie is now 30 years old!!" as if someone just discovered how time works. In the past, most top posts were links to articles, trailers, posters, etc. Discussion naturally happened in those posts. These low effort posts did spur a lot of discussion, but none of it was new or meaningful.
I think the mods are now filtering out these type of posts, because the sub is more or less back to how it used to be.
>Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
What the current decision makers within Reddit Inc. want is to make the site look profitable until the IPO, and then they don't care about what happens with it. Be it discussion site with cats, or cats feed with discussion, it doesn't really matter for them, as long as it looks profitable.
The main problem is a lot of those sites started as web 2.0 platforms which should never be about deciding the content. only user generated content, but provide the platform
then the last 3-5 years, they are slowly creeping towards a curated model, and with that disrespecitng their userbase
Reddit hasn't been hands off for about 6-7 years.... A lot of the hate, racism and legally ambiguous stuff left years ago for better or worse. Kind of unhappy they left a lot of the degen fetish stuff though, that's the thing stopping me admitting to using the service in public.
Now they have the lowest value user data of any social media company and are firing people from jobs they do for free (lol) to get the site working again.
What degen stuff are you referencing. I found reddit allowed me to explore my sexuality and discover new things about myself. I'm glad it was never very judgemental about people's sexuality.
I'm not going to rattle off the whole gross list but two which float to the top are all the MAP and Furry subs.
Now if children and animals are your bag of chips all power to you, its just not a website ill admit to using or potentially invest in if an IPO happened.
I use to be very judgemental of the furry community until I got to know some of them. I don't think most of them actually want to fuck real animals. One thing popular in those communities is the Harness Test[1]. Basically, sex is okay between indoviduals where consent is possible, which seems reasonable. If that's the case, what purpose does our judgement server?
Something interesting about the furry community is that it has been welcoming to LGBTQ+ people and folks who are not neurotypical for decades. It's been a safe space for those peole. The furry community has been "ahead" of the rest of us in that regard. I think we could all learn something from them about tempering our impulse to judge with empathy and tolerance.
I had to look up MAP. I'm pretty sure that is against the reddit ToS, and I've never seen it on reddit since jailbait was shut down years ago.
TikTok and Instagram both limit comments to a single layer of "answering".
I guess that's a "good" alternative if your goal is to prevent the evolution of deep discussion and instead get people to move on and scroll over more ads.
multiple threads discussing different topics, or different aspects of a topic. Instead of "HUB 4090 review" where people are discussing everything about the 4090 in a single giant comment tree, you create a thread asking about the 4090's efficiency and people can discuss that one aspect.
the reason we do the "one big omnithread" for everything nowadays is because we have moved to a fundamentally reactive model, where youtube opinion leaders or news articles say a thing and people react to it, most people are the metaphorical AIs who don't have any independent thoughts until prompted by an external stimulus.
Actually in practice any internally-generated questions tend to be smashed down on reddit. Self-posts end up downvoted heavily. Some of that is that they're often low-quality content asking dumb shit that should have been a comment on some other related post rather than a full thread, so it's the "stupid newbie" downvote. But they also don't have anything to consume, and again, the 90-9-1 model applies. 90% of your users are readers, 10% are commenters. And actually beyond being a reader, they usually are not reading the comments either, they're reading the articles. While in fact the commenters often are the exact opposite, they don't read the article/watch the video because they're there to talk.
But the fact that 90% are not there to talk, and actually they don't even care about the comments at all - that's why Reddit is pivoting. Forums discussion is a smaller niche than content drips.
--
when you do a single megathread and content is moving super fast within a single thread (eg - politics debate-night threads), you have to resign yourself to not seeing every single comment in a thread, because it's literally going faster than you can read. And that's also true of reddit - you're not seeing every comments, you're seeing the top 50 comments. And if you sort by "new" it's a similarly torrential feed, and you stand no real chance of reading everything let alone replying to everything - but the "top" and "hot" and "best" sorts do a good job of surfacing the content that readers want to see, and it feels stable, so it cures that FOMO.
Technically there's no reason that's not a feature you couldn't build into a forum though. Surface me a view of a thread that's only comments above 10 karma, or with more than a certain number of replies, and show me a "top threads" view of a given forum. And reply notifications are not a novel feature.
but anyway, your question gets at another tangential point, which is that reddit and reddit-style models have become so dominant over the last 15 years that people literally don't know the ways to interact efficiently on web-1.0 forums anymore. People know how to work reddit, they know how to work twitter, they know how to work discord... does the average user know how to work phpBB anymore? probably not really!
The problem is that I want “unpleasant and controversial [legal] content”. Even if it isn’t something that I personally want to see, it prevents the creation of the echo chamber that Reddit and most other social media platforms have become.
I significantly improved my Reddit experience simply by filtering out the word “Trump”. This also had the effect of hiding a good 20% of Reddit, as there were dozens of stories every day about orange man bad. It’s been 3 years into a different guy’s presidency and Trump still gets more attention on Reddit than Biden does.
So when you avoid filtering as much, you end up with something closer to the chans, where you could see a post contemplating bestiality, and the next post proclaiming that pedophiles belong in woodchippers. Not a fan of the former, but you just ignore it and move on. There’s always something fresh and interesting.
Talking about human brains, issues come up when someone claims their rights are being trampled on when an AI or human (correctly or not) removes their post for not being a cat.
What went wrong is that after being divested from Condé Nast, reddit went and raised a huge round that ensured they would have to go down the route of synthetic growth tactics.
This whole operation could be wildly profitable with a team of 50-100 people and no major investors to appease.
Instead they read the room wrong, or just didn't care, and now we're here.
Reddit should have stuck to the Craigslist model of simply just existing as-is, selling a reasonable amount of ads and premium subscriptions, and only having the minimum number of employees required to keep the site up. It never needed to be and shouldn't have been anything more than that.
Yet another brand gone to shit in the name of "exponential growth" or some other term investors want to hear. No one considers whether their business should fit a model that prioritizes sustainability.
I was thinking of craigslist too. They resisted ebay, and change for change's sake, and ... well lots of things:
People tell us what they like about craigslist including:
- Giving people a voice
- A sense of trust and even intimacy
- Consistency of down-to-earth values
- Simplicity
- No charges, except for job postings
- Freshness of the material
- No ads, particularly no banner ads
In hindsight it's easy to say, but I bet they would be extremely profitable if they had taken less VC funding and kept self-hosting of content to the minimum. Serve a few ads here and there, let companies do their guerilla marketing for a "small donation" and have people pay for their Reddit gold.
But that probably wouldn't put them on track for a few billion dollar IPO, so of course you can't do it.
I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea
Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits
Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting
The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one
Part of the complexity of moderating on Reddit vs. moderating on Facebook is Reddit's open-by-default nature and limited control provided to moderators.
For example: Optionally requiring a questionnaire before being able to post to a Facebook group significantly cuts down on spam. Reddit doesn't really have an equivalent. If a Reddit mod wants to implement similar? They could use the API to write something that blackholes new members' comments until they respond to an automated message. Not a great user experience and what happens if Reddit pricing changes now make that integration prohibitively expensive?
Some mods certainly power-trip but ultimately the role isn't a glamorous one: You're a volunteer customer success agent. Most of the work isn't hard or controversial, but at the scale of Reddit there's a _lot_ of it. The hardest part of recruiting new moderators is finding people who'll remain even minimally engaged. Replacing them certainly isn't impossible but the process of replacing proven-engaged moderators with newcomers that need to be vetted can be a ton of work in itself.
> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good.
There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.
Certainly Reddit's setup does incentivize name squatting, but there's been plenty of cases where the obvious name is run by a team so ineffective that it gets outcompeted (r/marijuana vs r/trees, r/lgbt vs r/ainbow, r/moddedmc vs r/feedthebeast are some examples). And plenty of communities get by with non-obvious names, like r/DestinyTheGame, r/Pathfinder_RPG, so it's not purely a name race.
>There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.
Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs just fine
And now sticky with mods declaring "well, we will not do anything about the situation" sits at 0 upvotes (in reddit speak: it got more downvotes and upvotes), with a bunch of well-upvoted comments about how sub should participate in the protest. They are completely detached from their userbase.
r/worldpolitics gradually became overtaken by US politics since Reddit is so dominated by US users. This displeased international users, as r/politics was already US-centric politics, and so r/worldpolitics had been seen as a place to discuss rest of world politics.
The head mod did not agree, and after a couple of years of the sub being basically unmoderated and 90% US politics, and generating user complaints as a result, threw a tantrum and said anything goes, and posted a load of anime porn.
Since the subreddit named world politics was now full of anime porn, and a little inspired by the subreddit r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the subreddit about Botany, since r/trees was taken by the weed people), a bunch of users decided to create a subreddit called r/anime_titties for discussing non-US politics.
> There is some competition between subreddits for attention
The existing sub-subreddits organically evolved from disputes between more primary subreddits about the type of content users wanted to see; e.g. r/atheism decides they don't want low-quality meme posts, so r/atheismmemes is created. If reddit were to simply remove the mods from thousands of subreddits, it could easily sour those communities.
r/fragrance for example decided to stay open, but the mods just would quit doing anything. That'll show us!
What happened: no spam. A few silly posts. A lot of good posts. A lot of people remarking how much better the sub is without mods. Mods returned, promising to 'consider community feedback' once they realized they lost control of the narrative.
That's only in the short term. Long term, we've seen what happens to unmoderated discussions: spam, (child) porn, violent/illegal images, and more. The worst humanity has to offer.
It's like taking your hands off the wheel when driving. A few seconds and you're probably okay. An hour? You're in a ditch!
Oh, I completely agree that some moderation is needed, make no mistake about that. Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.
Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.
Sure, but modding is something you don't need...until you absolutely do. Just takes one person who wants to spam porn/gore/etc to a subreddit/forum/etc and without a human able to ban/limit those actions, it's trivial to takeover a smaller community.
I suspect that Reddit's own automated systems catch a lot of that. There are strong indicators of that type of spam.
I moderate a few small, and mostly inactive, subs. They don't see a whole lot of activity.
On the odd moments I do drop into mod mode (a few times a year, if that), what I see is a fair bit of flagged spam ... and a lot of off-topic posts. One sub in particular seems to have had its topic (a software application of use to Google+ users saving data, which was last relevant on 1 April 2019) with an exam of some sort in India.
Topic drift, relevance drift, and lightweight content displacing substantive posts are far more likely without dedicated, mission-aware mods. AskScience and AskHistorians would be most especially subject to that, as well known examples. I can think of numerous others.
The other issue would be various forms of abuse and brigading, below the thresholds which Reddit's automated systems would detect. Unmoderated forums would far more likely become unpleasant places to participate.
I'm curious. Do you know of a class of "illegal images" that aren't also "child porn"? Or are you just listing this twice?
To be specific, I'm referring to in non-crazy western countries with something resembling freedom of speech, not PRC "Winnie the Pooh is banned" places.
> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good.
In fact it is well known that current Reddit moderators are often very bad and contribute to the worst parts of Reddit culture. It has been discussed here, and on Reddit, how big of a problem current moderator practices are. Yet due to this protest we seem to have developed a collective amnesia and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story. Baffling. Most of Reddit would be improved by a large-scale shake-up of moderators.
> and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story.
It's like the British Empire, Soviet Union, and United States in World War II - it's not that they don't have a long and storied history of crimes against humanity (or the internet as the case may be) themselves; it's that their opponents are so despicable we're happy to see anyone picking a fight with them. If the moderators (respectively allies) want to call themselves the heroes of that story... well, in strictly relative terms they are.
Or you're wrong and there's an actual reason that 90% of the subreddits went on strike such that any new mods wouldn't accept these conditions either. Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that? No, there are limits.
> Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that?
Isn't that exactly what people have been doing for well over a decade?
No, third parties made tools for them (and some automated things themselves.) Now those tools are being taken away from them. They would basically have to pay to be mods to continue doing things the way they were being done. That's my understanding of the situation anyway.
then resigning would have been the way to go. shutting off access to the knowledge base others contributed to is a power play
if you volunteer at a dog shelter, and find you don't agree with some of their practices anymore. do you stop volunteering? or do you just set all the dogs free
No, strikes have always been the way to effectively deal with these things. Setting the dogs free is not a strike. You can read up on how effective strikes have been executed ethically when critical care is involved; this isn't one of them though. It's naive to call it a "power play" though since literally every alternative by every actor involved is a "power play", just some are more effective than others.
> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones.
Regardless of how high-quality the replacements might be under ideal conditions, I think it would be very surprising if average quality didn't suffer when trying to replace hundreds or thousands of them very quickly, versus the slower, incremental growth that resulted in the original bunch.
I could make a huge list of what Reddit design gets wrong, or at least outdated or suboptimal. But the land grab for names turned into one of its biggest, fixable weaknesses.
Reddit should boot up another letter, /d/ or something, and give the communities numbers or hex identifiers, (which they already sort of do with the short urls) and make the names irrelevant. Communities can choose to port over and redirect. Over time, the ones that don’t fade to disappearing from all and eventually go private.
Tying name to community url makes discoverability of replacement communities shitty for new users. Politics is easy to understand. Whatever people come up with as a substitute word for a forked community, will be less clear. Of forked communities, maybe only trees and rainbow came up with a better name.
So there would be 200 communities called "Politics" that are differentiated only by url hashes? How is that make it any easier for users to discover or understand the communities? There are dozens of different brands of laundry detergent at the grocery store — it's much easier to communicate and discover "Tide", "Gain", "Ecos" than it is "Detergent#17", "Detergent#08", "Detergent#32"...
There are some strong arguments to be made for disambiguating identifiers from semantics.
Hacker News is interesting in that it somewhat splits the difference. Post and comments are both represented by "itemID" (and there's no distinction between What Is a Post and What Is a Comment that can be made simply based on the contentID). For example, I'm currently replying to itemID 36329954.
But profile identifiers are semantically-sensible strings. In your case "blehn", in mine, "dredmorbius".
(There may well be, and all but certainly is, an internal userID or similar, but it's not exposed at least through the Web interface, I've not looked at the API in detail for this.)
This means, amongst other things, that it's possible to traverse all extant HN posts either sequentially (beginning with <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1>) or randomly (say, by generating a list and sorting it randomly, or by algorithmically calculating itemIDs without repetition).
Google+ did this for both posts and profile IDs, assigning each what appeared to be a hash, which was not sequential, and was sparsely filled. Profile names / labels could be reassigned independently of that identifier (with limits as to how frequently this was allowed), and multiple profiles with the same name were permitted, addressing the "John Smith" or "Maria Gonzalez" problems (commonly-occurring names where all but the first-arriving party must choose something different). It was not possible to trivially traverse the (large, hashed) namespace, though Google being Google these were itemised in some 50,000 or so sitemap files, a fact I exploited to some benefit.[1]
In the case of a discussion site in which forum identifiers are arbitrary but labels are semantic, issues such as discovery, relevance, and trust would be mediated by some other mechanism. Note that the extant Reddit practice already has numerous issues, e.g., /r/ClimateChange is a sub devoted to denialism (under the pretext of "rational" discussion and skepticism) whilst the scientific consensus is far better represented at /r/climate.[2]
What the intermediation of arbitrary identifiers vs. descriptive labels provides is defence against squatting or appropriation of high-value, high-salience identifiers by malevolent actors. If your label is independent of your description and reputation, it's less tractable as a means of disinformation or propaganda.
2. And regards the present Reddit Blackout, I'll note that the denialist subreddit is available, the consensus subreddit is blacked out. Which raises interesting points about the challenges of adhering to moral principles in an immoral world. I also note that ClimateChange's long-standing moderator appears to have been inactive for the past 9 months, though they are still listed as chef moderator. It's possivle, though uncertain, that former characterisation of that sub may well have changed.
Reddit should allow shadow moderation teams to fork a subreddit--easily findable on the subreddit's page rather than through the grapevine about the alt's existence, which users can opt into--to address the issue of name squatting and overbearing moderation. If a critical mass of users vote with their feet, they can flip the subreddit. It would also let users be aware of what the issue in contention are and choose what they want to read, whereas currently the mod teams are pretty quick to squelch all dissent so that their captive audience isn't even aware of the drama.
I've had thoughts along similar lines. My idea was that users should have the ability to select their favoured mod team from a range of teams. So all moderating the same namespace but swapping out different mod teams would give you a different view of the content in that namespace.
Even counting just large groups, there likely several thousand subreddits which have individually-specific focuses and moderation criteria. Reddit reports 100+ million active subreddits.[1]
The two problems with moving to an in-house, wage-labour moderation team are that this is expensive and wage labour at prices Reddit is likely willing to pay will not meet the standards of dedicated volunteer teams.
From various sources I've encountered over the years, human-based moderation peaks at somewhere between 500--1,000 items/day (multiple sources put a peak at about 700--800, though that's with very thin review). Reddit ... doesn't seem to offer stats on daily / monthly comment volume, though it claims ~60m DAU and 13 billion posts and comments overall. I'm going to SWAG[2] and assume roughly half of those have occurred in the past five years, which would mean that there are ... about 3,300 posts / comments day. Which seems low, so my SWAG's probably wrong. If 13 billion items are posted per year, then there are ~35 million items posted per day. That seems possibly high, though Facebook's claim is 5 billion items/day, so ... maybe? shrug
One criteria I've suggested for moderation elsewhere is based on prevalence, which is the number of times an item is viewed. Short version: prevalence follows a power-law distribution, and as the views threshold is raised, the number of items falls off drastically. With some tuning and adjustments (e.g., risk-rating comments to raise or lower estimated harms), it's possible for a finite moderation team to offer an SLA[3] that content with a given prevalence threshold will be reviewed. It's also possible to set holds such that content reaching that threshold is withheld from further visibility until it is reviewed (say, if some specific item starts taking off), which effectively throttles visibility of content and scales it to the limited moderation resource.
(I'm not aware of any UGC[1] service applying this model to moderation, but it is one which strongly suggests itself. It is effectively what a gate-kept editorial model applies, e.g., where an editor specifically reviews all incoming entries from a "slush pile"[5].)
Going back to my content numbers above, a 35 million items/day content stream and a moderation team capable of reviewing 500 items/day (roughly 1 minute per item on average) ... would requite a 70,000 member moderation team, which is likely prohibitive for Reddit.[6] A prevalence set such that 10% of all items require human review reduces that to 7,000, still likely high, and a 1% review which would still cover the overwhelming majority of all content presentations) a somewhat more tractable 700. From third party and my own sources there's a roughly inverse relationship between content items* and prevalence, such that increasing prevalence 10x reduces the number of individual content items by a factor of 10. For reference, looking at Hacker News historical front pages and votes and comments of the 1st and 30th ranked stories, we see about 6.3x more votes, and 3.8x more comments on the 1st-ranked story.[7] For Google+, a near-logrithmic scaling of number of communities vs. size was noted.[8]
7. Own data based on a crawl of all HN front page "past" listings from 2007-2-20 through 2023-6-13, with 178,642 stories.
8. Own data based on a crawl of all extant ~8.1 million Google+ Communities, data provided by Friends+Me creator. The data actually show far fewer large communities than a strictly log-log relation would suggest, for reasons that are unclear. See: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/ab6a5470f57001368d4002...>
A discussion elsewhere had me looking at how much front-page HN activity is attributable to what number of profiles. Using my crawl data mentioned above:
That very nearly perfectly follows the rule I'd given above: reducing the items by a factor of ten (here: number of front-page posts) increases the submitters by about a factor of 10 (roughly: 2, 200, 2,000, 20,000).
Half of all HN front-page stories since 2007 were submitted by just 2,092 profiles, of 43,598 represented in all front-page stories. As of 2021, Whaly.io found 767,496 active profiles since 2005: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>. (Post or comment activity.)
Basically they forgot they built a site built on community and then tried to sell those communities like inanimate objects. No surprise it blew up in there face.
What evidence do we have that it blew up in their face? There is clearly a large backlash, but it's not at all clear how much that will impact their key metrics, which is probably all they care about moving into IPO.
I agree they made awful decisions, my usage patterns will definitely be changing due to a re-enable /etc/hosts entry. However, what is the impact on a broader scale? This is like Twitter firing a ton of engineers - we can't really evaluate until much further down the road.
We don't have numbers, but if it hadn't blown up in their face then we wouldn't be talking about it. What is reddit's product? The users. What happens IPO valuation when the users leave?
We're talking about it because some percentage of users are very pissed, not because it necessarily impacts the business. I agree there is a line where reddit would be worried for their IPO, but we have no idea if 1% of reddit traffic will drop (not a problem for them) or 50% (big problem).
We (and reddit) also don't know whether users will return, ie: will this just blow over?
Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.
We will see in few months what is the situation and if someone manages to advertise an alternative for millions of people.
Then, Reddit IPO is doomed. If there is no new significant alternative where people will go, then IPO will probably continue as planned and API change went well from the Reddit’s perspective.
>Reddit, like any other social media platform is worthless without users.
Worthless under their current model. What if their new model is to simulate other users with ChatGPT? Many users don't engage with comments beyond voting/reading. How long would it take them to notice, and if they notice would they care?
Can Huffman coast to IPO, grab the money, then bail?
Because there are a great many people that have legitimately used Reddit as their "frontpage of the internet" for years and don't enjoy the form factor that other websites / apps provide. Places like Twitter and TikTok aren't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content.
>if you're not the type of person that just mindlessly ingests content
My take is that this type of person is more likely to not need to replace their feed fix with another feed and is more likely to pursue fulfillment in other areas of life.
If someone is using Reddit just for scrolling endless feeds, I would say that they have no strong ideological foundations to quit the platform based on the API changes. Unless they think that official app is really useless.
I spend 5 minutes today with some user CSS to reskin Lemmy to be more like Reddit with RES. Another half-hour of effort and at least the form-factor will be pretty similar.
The main thing Reddit has that is not available elsewhere is a massive relatively unbiased backlog of discussions and community wikis covering topics like what are the best delis/restaurants/bars in city X or car recommendations, or how to find good deals on menswear, or almost any other thing imaginable, this is truly valuable and worth having in society.
The CEO's message has no information content, because regardless of what was actually going on that is what he would say.
I'm not even saying he's lying. He could be telling the absolute truth. However, that post would not constitute evidence for him telling the truth, because it is what he would say if it was the truth, and it is what he would say if traffic dropped 98%.
This sort of thing is true of a lot of corporate and political communications. The only thing that carries information content is things they didn't have to say and couldn't be predicted in advance.
In this case, the only tidbit of information in that post is that they still intend to ignore the community(/communities).
Of course the CEO during an IPO year is going to downplay the shutdown. That said, there's no way the shutdown is going to change reddit in this case. They will replace the mods on the bigger subs.
They may downplay it but it is likely true. On the Google Play Store alone, the Reddit app has 100 million+ downloads, third party apps have <5 million downloads each. Like it or not, third party users are in a bubble, most people don't care to use third party apps and will see ads just fine.
And yes, due to these kinds of numbers, the shutdown will do nothing. Hell, many subs opened up today and r/all is back to normal.
I wonder if participation rates are disparate across those apps, i.e. maybe official app is popular for lurking, but all content posted from mobile actually comes from better third-party apps. (In general, a small number of people produce overwhelming fraction of content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule?useskin=monobook )
On the other hand, if you count downloads of all the 3rd party Reddit apps on Google Play, it'll sum up to at least 10m. So 3rd party apps users might actually be in range of 10%-20% of users, which is far from negligible
That's only on Android, on iOS it's likely another 100 million or likely more (Reddit has around 500 million to 1.5 billion monthly active users, the vast majority of which are mobile, based on their stats). Apollo is around 10 million, so 20 million total / 200 million is 10%, which is high but not that high compared to overall.
> Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who
> lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter
> provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs.
> He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through
> third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.
That's 17% of _engagement._ I strongly expect that with both Twitter and Reddit there's a sort of double Pareto distribution going on: the majority of _users_ go through the first-party site/tools/clients, but the majority of _valuable_ users go through the third-party site/tools/clients. The users who are invested enough in the platform to have strong opinions about how things should be done and who use the platform enough that they seek out tools that actively meet their needs rather than just taking the default tools, are also users who are worth, at the very least, _placating_ because those are also the users most able to cause problems if the platform stabs them in the face the way Reddit and Twitter have done.
That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol, but people still got outraged at that. The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API, so even if the Apollo dev is exaggerating, $2.50 is not that high if people really want to user third party apps.
> That's exactly what they are doing with the API lol
No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable."
If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.
It's not only the API cost (indeed, spez mentioned that the cost is minor for serving the actual API) but also how much it'd be to show ads as well. It's no different than an app that's free with ads and an app that charges 5 dollars a month without ads.
> The Apollo dev said that he would have to charge every user $2.50 a month to cover costs of the API
He did not say that, he said
> Apollo's price would be approximately $2.50 per month per user
which is an estimate of how much they'd have to pay Reddit for each user in API costs alone. But it doesn't take into account cost of Apollo's own servers and infrastructure, Apple's fees, or the fact that there are people with paid for yearly subscriptions that'd have to be served:
> Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
>
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible.
All in all it's a much different thing if Reddit said they want to charge the users $2.5/mo for API access, given them their own key and let use whatever 3rd party app they want. They want to charge the 3rd party apps directly, which is a whole different story that can't really be summed up as to "$2.5 is not that high if people really want to use third party apps"
Reddit is allowing any user to have their own API key is they so choose, not just third party devs. If the devs want to make a new version that only works with a paid API key, they could. Perhaps not in 30 days which I agree is a tough deadline, but they could.
For one, it's a message from Reddit — of course they'll want to pretend like it's a no big deal, and one could expect such memo would leak.
But what I'm more curious about is that this memo went out not even a day after the protests started. Both revenue indicators and impact itself might be delayed, especially now that many subreddits chose to extend the protest indefinitely
Indeed, the fact that Apollo can use the API for free then turn around and charge users for a premium version all while giving nothing back to Reddit is simply insane, you would never see Facebook, Instagram or other services allowing the same thing. And before one says that third party app users drive user driven content, what kind of content do you think Facebook and Instagram have?
The Apollo dev agrees! Free api is not sustainable. It’s the proposed price that’s killing all major third party apps, and most minor ones, and Reddit has not only insisted that they won’t budge, but have even gone on to attack the Apollo dev directly while also stating in public that they do not offer analytics about an apps api usage nor will they help app developers (partners!) identify inefficiencies in their api usage- just tell them (publicly, with no warning) that their app is inefficient.
I don't think anyone disagrees. The rate they were charging, and every. single. message. that has come from Reddit's CEO since that announcement have been so full of shit that they'd make the porto potties at woodstock (or the shit pits at Fyre festival) look like flower pots.
They could have changed NOTHING about the move except their messaging and attitude and things would've gone a lot better.
Umm, isn't that exactly what Facebook apps like FarmVille were? I don't think Facebook charges app developers to publish apps on their platform, and the app was monetized.
Farmville is ancillary to Facebook as a whole. Those users might play Farmville but also read up on their feed or click through their friends' posts, thereby allowing Facebook the chance to show ads.
Apollo et al are different in that they are packaging up the entire experience wholesale, they are not ancillary. There is no way for Reddit the company to show ads through third party clients (the client could simply block ad posts if they wanted to).
> Had*. Ever since Aaron died, it's become a censorious bubble.
Aaron Swartz had very little involvement with Reddit for several years before his death, and also some of Reddit's most notorious (at least at the time) "censorship" actions took place before his death.
It's a little unfair to his memory to conflate the two things, especially given that he spent the last five years of his life doing things he deeply cared about (and which had nothing to do with Reddit corporate strategy or policy).
I agree with this. SOPA, PIPA, Net Neutrality (RIP), Bernie Sanders gaining national recognition, and so many other positive Reddit things happened after his death.
> Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated
All have definitely not been reinstated. They banned my 13 year old account without warning because I dared to make an alternative API for Reddit[1]. Even after agreeing to suspend the service they are still yet to unban my account.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are others in the same boat.
If you saw that title a month ago, you might read "Reddit" there as "the people talking on Reddit".
Whether it was people's emerging consensus/behavior on a noteworthy incident, a more general zeitgeist or Reddit Hive Mind exhibited over time there, or whatever.
Reading "Reddit" in the title instead as "Reddit, the company" is less familiar to me.
Highlights how hands off Reddit generally was until now that while we say “Twitter” vs “on Twitter” or “YouTube” vs “YouTuber”, until now we rarely distinguished between “Reddit” and “on Reddit”. Reddit was an invisible benefactor until it wasn’t…
It's not what Reddit got wrong, it's what we -- the public -- got wrong. Again.
We can't expect profit motivated companies to provide a true public shared space with shared public values. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google -- all of them naturally have their own interests at heart -- not yours -- and as Doctorow explained in the "Enshittification" article, they all go through it. Their shareholders will demand it.
We evolved traditional state run postal services for a reason; but I won't enrage the libertarians here by suggesting we need the same for online forums and suffer the downvotes. I would submit that it's delusional to expect private corporations to provide these kinds of services on the terms we expect once they've gone beyond initial market capture.
Somehow the message needs to get out to stop trusting and embracing these kinds of fake public spaces.
The EFF article submits that "Content moderation doesn’t work at scale"; I'd take a stronger position: social networking does not "work" at scale. It degrades into "social media" and/or walled gardens and/or automated mob manipulation. I hope one of the results of the last year -- with Twitter and now Reddit going through this kind of crazy -- is the partial return of some smaller scale more intimate spaces to replace their use.
Addendum: With LLMs and automated "content" production going seriously"webscale", I expect things to get worse before they get better
Absolutely, though this ignores the fact that Reddit's own actions determine its expenses. Reddit's expenses would decrease dramatically if it didn't support image or video uploading and focused only on being a text-based forum. Of course, this would drive away a lot of people who want to consume image and video content, which is unacceptable to the investors who want to maximize user growth now and figure out profitability later.
But then they don’t get the sweet sweet tracking metrics from their app. Once you pay for Reddit , you don’t see ads in the OEM app either, they can squeeze more value out of people by forcing their app and sucking as much data and analytics about you as possible. They’ve already begun A/B trials of disallowing mobile browsers to access their website, and forcing the app download.
This is less about ad revenue than it is jealousy over closed communities like Instagram and tiktok where you are locked into their app.
What tracking metrics do you get from the app that wouldn't get by logging API calls? It can't be the valuable to track metrics when you aren't serving ads (since if you have Reddit Premium you don't get ads).
I think things like time spent looking at an ad, time spent in comments, time spent replying. Capturing all entered data even if its deleted prior to send, etc.....
I agree this is why they are doing it, but they cant be blind to how bad their app is in comparison to what their power users are using? Is an exodus worth it if you keep 25% of the people in the app and the remainder move on? I think you can get metrics via the api, maybe not apples to apples but it can be addressed in the future.
Right now they are sticking their head in the sand, middle finger in the air and daring people to leave. Poor community relations and messaging for a community based website.
They made their bed by accepting VC money. There is more than one way to skin a cat and I think they choose poorly.
Because they want user's off of 3rd party apps completely. Their API pricing is such that its not realistic for anyone to use it, that is entirely intentional.
They want to completely control the experience, so they an extract as much user data as possible to drive ads.
So long as user's are in 3rd party apps those 3rd parties control the relationship, which Reddit has deemed is unacceptable.
Im not sure. I feel Reddit does deserve to be profitable. The bad choice they made was how they went about it. I feel there were a couple reasonable paths to profitability. But charging app makers for api access didnt seem like a good one.
It might have stuck a chord with some users, but I think overall it would have been net positive for Reddit and the narrative from leadership much more palatable
Could Reddit not have gone the 501(c)(3) route like the Wikimedia Foundation? Wikipedia has an immense amount of content, moderation, high traffic, open API, and they manage to keep the lights on.
Or maybe people will realize they were not happy with the amount of time they were spending on Reddit and go habituate themselves to something completely different with that time.
And yet, very many people are terminally online in one way or another. Even if the term "terminally online" has very strong stigma and most people would not consider to be a part of that group, they still spend hours every day on social media, and have no means of quitting it even knowing the harmful effects.
Those folks are likely going back to Facebook/IG/Twitter/TikTok etc.
If they're craving content and don't want to spend the time going to distinct sites, they're likely not going to all of a sudden pick up a new hobby. I hope I'm wrong.
The main problem with this article is that it's only handling the current events, without taking into account that Reddit has a long-standing history of user-hostile decisions.
For example... let's talk about The_Donald, shall we? (inb4: I'm not from USA, "Trump" and "Biden" for me are just "some leaders from some tacoland", so I'm not emotionally attached into this matter.)
Some users were protesting that The_Donald should be banned on the grounds of hate speech. Some said that it should be allowed to exist, for the sake of free speech.
What did Reddit do? Quarantined it, showing that it doesn't care about hate speech _nor_ free speech, while paying lip service to both. And using a bullshit reason to do so (a single post encouraging people to beat cops, or crap like that.)
Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)? A: because it doesn't fucking care about its users. That issue predates the 3rd party apps killing, and it will postdate it.
By the way: there are talks that Reddit might finally implement limits on how many subs a mod can moderate. An old request from people concerned about power mods. Why now? (A: because it happens to align with Reddit Inc.'s interests - userbase be damned.)
I'm fucking glad that I've migrated.
[[And the fediverse is nice, the fediverse is great, but if you're a Reddit user and can't stand the fediverse: migrate elsewhere. Don't stay in that sinking ship.]]
Reddit Inc in my perception is amoral, tending towards immoral.
In general they want to do as little policing as possible, and only do the least amount they can when their hand is forced. But there's also some signs of the higher ups actually being okay with things that are icky and of very doubtful appeal to advertisers, like r/jailbait
I'd say overall the leadership is just not good. It neither has any sort of moral center, nor is even properly business oriented because their efforts on that regard seem very lacking as well.
Eg, I think this API move makes little economical sense. If one were to be ruthlessly profit oriented I think an approach might be to introduce an API price and gradually raise it little by little. Milk the market for all it's worth. Rather than killing it from the start, either extract every dollar people are willing to pay, or kill it by squeezing all the profit that can be had from the maneuver by doing it slowly and gradually.
I doubt the likes of Google and Microsoft care in the slightest about the API.
Both already run search engines that index all of Reddit. They don't need any API. And Reddit can't block their crawler if it wants to remain relevant.
And OpenAI is a company with $10B investment and 375 employees. I'm sure they can figure out web scraping.
Third party apps need to do a lot of API calls, every time that the user sees content, upvote content, comment content. If you're just retrieving it though? We can simplify it to one API call = one comment.
With that in mind, $0.24 for every 1,000 API calls is damn cheap. It means just $2,400 for 10M comments. It's pocket money, and likely cheaper than to hire a codemonkey to sort web-crawled stuff.
> Why doesn't Reddit outright tell its users its values? Why is it always lying? Why does it put a CEO to disdain the community, with a "we snoos" (something redditors never use)?
The real answer is that everyone asking this question is just revving up for a fight. It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.
The right approach in this situation is always to walk the path where no one can tell what's up. Do not define the situation. You're going to get raked over the coals anyway, so get the best you can out of it.
>It's like apologizing for something that you said as a teenager that was found on social media: the only people asking for the apology don't really care whether or not you apologize.
It's more like apologising for something that you kept doing, since your teenager times, and that you keep doing. In this case at least some people asking for an apology want to see a difference, not just "revving up for a fight".
That said, even not saying your values would be better than lying about them. And worse than lying - lying in an obvious way, that is bound to be interpreted as "you're such braindead trash that we can throw any bullshit on your snouts and you'll eat it".
The simple solution to the "censorship" problem is to not have a landing page that aggregates the highest voted content: the only content users should see should be from the subreddits they are subscribed to. In this scenario, there is no need for censorship or vote manipulation to reach the front page (because there should be no front page).
Some might say this approach would result in echo chambers, but guess what...echo chambers are going to happen anyway, whether it's restricting your intake of news to certain news networks, restricting internet browsing to only specific websites, or your local/offline real world community gatherings. There is no way to stop echo chambers.
You know who handled this really well and got pilloried for it? Ellen Pao. She took a solid stand on the right side of the issue and got shredded by the user base for it. I think she was very forward thinking in how the problem could spiral and that the business was predicated on being an enjoyable environment with absolutely no obligation to dangerous or hurtful users.
If it was possible to uphold every fundamental human right and be commercially successful at the same time, we wouldn't need a government.
Her job was to come in, make a bunch of unpopular changes and then move on, leaving the existing management who wanted those changes free of any associated blame. Quite literally her job was to be a scape-goat, it's quite a common strategy for companies who want to do unpopular restructuring or other large changes, and I'm pretty sure one she was well-compensated for.
Which is not to say that the amount of hatred and bile she received wasn't - unsurprisingly - wildly excessive and disgustingly misogynistic.
> Unlike moderators on Reddit, who have no established way to seek support from the platform or its users
The article brings up a good point regarding how Reddit relies a lot on free labor to work. The incentives for operating the communities are primarily built on good will.
I've been working on a Reddit/Discord/Patreon style hybrid community platform that puts a focus on the community owner/admins getting paid. It feels like the people running the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
The takeaway for me, is that the moderation tools were neglected, despite the site being essentially dependent on them. Note the accessibility complaints from blind subreddits. They couldn't be bothered to make it work with a screen reader.
Important to remember some of the people moderating this stuff have had to deal with spam/bot activity severe enough to make the news (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wallstreetbets-reddit-bot-activ...). It's unsurprising some ended up dependent on external apps.
Nice article, but too much focus on federation as a potential solution.
The problem with federated networks ("Fediverse"?) like Mastodon and Matrix is that you still rely on a (sub)domain and someone running a server. That someone could be yourself, but that's just an option for a small minority. That domain could be shut down.
Nostr may solve this: instead of usernames the user has a private/public key. And instead of relying on a specific server your data can flow through many servers (relays).
Their claim that reddit got it right by using community/volunteer moderation really doesn't take into account the fact that the moderators in some communities are actually employees of some interest group who want to influence things.
The moderators of some of the political subs work for certain parties or political groups and it is blatantly obvious.
The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting.
They want to quit but they can't. They likely even realize they are addicted. They likely even realize the content they view is censored and curated to manipulate them.
If you mean want to quit but can't in the sense that there is no other place on the Internet to have a like-minded community forum around fountain pens or a particular bank or third-tier game shows, yes, this is true.
But if you mean in a broader sense, of "I just can't quit you!", then no. Reddit steamrolled all of the older forums--and, before that, Usenet and Echomail groups--I used to participate in. Much like how so many sellers of niche products have moved to Amazon, Reddit is where the quirky forums have moved to.
I don't use Reddit as a general-purpose site. It's simply the place where the community that discusses the topics I want to gas on about live. And, yes, I object to what Reddit is doing so I will leave it if the changes come to pass.
> The only reason people are protesting api pricing is because they want to protest. The actual concern here isn't what they are protesting.
No...? It's a decision that impacts millions of people that rely solely on third-party apps to have any decent experience on Reddit at all. The "official" app is a hot dumpster fire and lacks incredibly basic accessibility features, among other shortcomings. The official app is a joke but instead of making it better to entice more users onto it (and thus see more ads), they just exploded the entire community.
It mostly wasn't the rank and file users making the most noise. It was the moderators who rely on the API for a series of tools (including third party tools like Apollo) to moderate the larger subreddits.
For me, it absolutely was a sign to evaluate my usage. I may go back, I may not. The local city subreddit is a good counterpart to my local newspaper, but the real dangers for reddit are twofold: individuals will be less likely to provide free labor (on which Reddit depends both for content generation and moderation), and it gave its most passionate users a timeout on which they started evaluating alternatives.
I'm purposely avoiding reddit right now even though several niche communities only exist there. I've been using 3rd party apps for maybe 15 years now (Alien Blue first and now Relay for 10 years). I'm directly affected by this and I think they handled it poorly.
Posted this a while back, but maybe someone will want to pick this up and run with it now:
I specced out a decentralized spam-resistant reddit alternative a while ago, and posted it here a few months ago. Please build this, happy to sign away non-exclusive IP rights if you have an idea of how to monetize.
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I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Ex.
Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
I said the same about Mastodon v Twitter, but decentralized solves nothing. It just makes it impossible to complain to anyone. We absolutely need centralized and uniform moderation rules and guidelines. And it needs sustainable funding to operate. There are not really any major tech challenges to achieve this. You could build a 140-character microblog in a weekend. The problem is attracting enough users to generate the requisite network effects and building trust amongst those users. Both of which are human problems and very, very hard to do.
This model makes every user moderate their own follow list: if you're transitively pushing spam/hatespeech/garbage to the people who follow you, they will unfollow you or be at risk of pushing the same to their followers. Upvotes are effectively 'vouching' for content, and so you should only upvote judiciously.
That's beautiful! Inverts the whole process, flips the script. I can see it splitting bi-modal in a bad way though. Friends are one thing, but most following will probably be of aggregators / known figures, and they're going to be either lowest-common-denominator, or highly specialized. Basically gonna look like old reddit, where your options are AskScience or rage comics.
Yeah, my goal for this would be to develop an open protocol (similarish to email) that can solve reddit-like use cases. I think something along these lines could accomplish both lowest common denominator and specialized use cases (perhaps needing users ability to have separate 'personas' with different follow weights).
I think there could be different clients for different kinds of users - do you want to curate your follow list and transitively republish? Or do you mostly want to only consume and only publish your direct upvotes?
But I haven't gamed out the network effects very deeply, could be some pernicious scaling problems I have handwaved away.
So RSS aggregators with friends list. I think it could be interesting but on top of being probably a bitch to tune in a way that makes people happy, still someone needs to host at least the aggregates and the per user info, even if the aggregation was done entirely client-side.
Whether they truly got it wrong depends on exactly what their (publicly unstated) goals really are. It's possible that this is driven by incompetence and ego as has been seen elsewhere in social media in the past year, but it's also possible that apps weren't a target and were just a bystander. A LOT of this depends on the question 'who are they wanting to have paying?'
Personally, I think they got focused on one particular thing (AI firms and any other content vacuums) and lost sight of other options for making money. In that context, trying to do volume-based charging to the third party apps makes sense, because in a lot of ways you're just treating them like all the new customers you're targeting.
I think this completely misses the potential for monetizing their users beyond ad impressions, but maybe they did analysis and decided it just couldn't happen - or maybe they just dismissed it because they had different customers in mind.
It still seems to me that they could (now could have?) converted a significant percentage of mobile app users into paying customers - perhaps not at the Premium price point of $50+/year, but likely at a lower price point of $18/year (still way more than they were getting from ads) they'd have taken a ton of free users and turned them into paying customers, and they'd have done it while keeping the lion's share of the money themselves instead of having app devs and app stores thrown into the mix. In addition, once you've got them paying you have plenty of options to try to steer them to higher plans - someone wants to have multiple accounts for family or privacy reasons? That's only available with Premium, or with a Family plan. Want higher API limits? We can sell you that. Spending time moderating a popular subreddit? Thanks, would a free subscription make that easier for you?
But maybe potential investors don't actually care about having paying clients.
At this point I hope Reddit kicks out mods from all major subreddits still set to private and places their own people. I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively.
I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue.
Maybe they don't need to. Maybe Reddit realized they can make "dead Internet theory" a reality, for profit.
Why not embrace the "subreddit simulator" meme and simply make users argue with GPT-X, trained on previous Reddit posts? No moderation required — every user is corralled into a tiny bubble, perhaps consisting of a single real person, all while consuming ads.
Regardless of your thoughts on the actual changes made, I think most would agree that Reddit is distinctly in the wrong thanks to the bald-faced lies that the CEO has tried to use to pin the blame for his decisions on innocent parties. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435
Reddit was always very hands-off. They had lots of very unpleasant and controversial content until their hand was forced. Overall they seem to want a site that runs itself as much as possible and over time content that required interaction and management (eg, AMAs, Secret Santa) got de-prioritized and dropped.
Also, Reddit has quite a lot of mindless consumption content.
Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.
Such a site would require minimal care, and might even be possible to maintain with AI moderation. For moderating something like r/DebateReligion human brains are needed. But for deciding whether something is a cat or not, probably not.