just so this doesn’t overwhelm our front page too much, i think now’s a good time to start consolidating discussions. existing threads will be kept up, but unless a big update comes let’s try to keep what’s happening in this thread instead of across 10.
developments to this point:
- Apollo for Reddit is shutting down
- Reddit is Fun will also shut down
- Reddit CEO (/u/spez) is going to hold a AMA about the API update
- Sync has announced it is shutting down
- ReddPlanet has announced it is shutting down
- Reddit creates an API exemption for noncommercial accessibility apps
- /r/videos is planning to shut down indefinitely, beginning June 11
- A subreddit dedicated to migrating to kbin.social has been closed by Reddit
The Verge is on it as usual, also–here’s their latest coverage (h/t @dirtmayor@beehaw.org):
other media coverage:
Reddit just feels dirty to me now, not in a good dirty way… Just dirty, I want nothing to do with it. I see no coming back from this even if the backlash leads to Reddit reversing the decisions. Kind of new the IPO would do something like this. Looking forward to seeing this place bloom.
In my opinion, we’re reaching a moment where people are realizing that having lots of users doesn’t matter that much if you can’t monetize them. We took a lot of services for granted that maybe don’t make any financial sense, which probably only survived because both the company and investors hoped that as long you could attract users, you could monetize them later.
I think that “later” is now.
Today I noticed that youtube has a new feature that unlocks more bitrate, but only for premium users (there’s two 1080p options, one normal and another with more bitrate). I’m expecting that these social medias and other tech companies will try to monetize us further
Yeah exactly. I think what we need is decentralization and a move back to smaller hobbyist message boards - the costs of running such communities is more sustainable for individual owners and they are not so big that their owners would look to sell them out.
That’s certainly my hope for the federated model. Scope and scale have been issues since the advent of social media, which encouraged users to centralize all of their interactions in one spot. One hundred people shooting the shit on a specific interest will always be a better experience than orders of magnitude more people who know nothing of the context spouting off to feel good about themselves.
I found the quality of my Reddit interactions had gone so far downhill that I took a month off to start the year. I’d gotten sucked into the belief that upvotes == quality of what I was writing, which creates perverse motivations completely unrelated to being more informed about the world.
I mean upvotes are related to how old a post is.
Anyways I don’t expect places like Lemmy to fix the ills of social media - eventually running something like this will cost their owners too much money and something will have to give. Also moderation has always been an issue, even with the message boards of old.
Agreed on the last point. That’s part of what I was alluding to in terms of scope and scale. The smaller communities from early internet days (my experience overlaps with the time of BBSs but never included them) were pretty light on moderation. If you were a dick on IRC, you got booted. If you spouted off about politics in places that weren’t about politics on phpBB, you were ignored then booted. These days, that sort of dynamic has moved to Discord, with people expecting that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want everywhere else.
But I feel you’re begging the question on funding. The ownership and profit model is the problem. User subscriptions can solve that funding issue in a vacuum; reality tends to be a bit messier, but I’m hoping we’ll find that it works.
Well on the Lemmy subreddit, some people are already complaining about moderation issues here, and how you can’t block federated servers you don’t want to see individually - that is up to the federated server itself. Honestly, while Lemmy seems cool, I can see issues arising as it scales, especially with regards to moderation.
Beehaw seems to be fine, but some users have explained that they take issue with Lemmy.ml’s moderation - chiefly from the main developer who created this platform to begin with. And that’s troubling too. For example, on Lemmy.ml, any talk about Russia or China (or anything similar) is banned. You can’t safely talk about the war in Ukraine here without getting banned from the main federated server.
As Lemmy gets bigger there will be more and larger communities that aren’t on Lemmy.ml, and if you’re worried about the software itself, aside from being open source, there’s also already a fediverse alternative called kbin. You can even used it to follow Lemmy communities if you want.
The whole point of the fediverse is that it can’t reaaly get screwed up by a small number of people.
@rimlogger @tango_octogono there is good argument to be made that these “unified services” were created to monetize them in first place.
Said that, federation as a concept of new era of social networking is good foundation. Hope it sticks and we work out quirks and people learn how to use it.That’s what I’ve been thinking, as well – if a message board (or any other service) doesn’t reach that critical user mass where it’s no longer sustainable, then there’s less chances of it selling out
It’s because of market conditions. Low interest -> Companies spend money and chase growth High interest -> Companies try to monetize users
@tango_octogono @alyaza YouTube basically spams ads and begs to sign up for Premium.
Thanks to adblock i never see those on PC. Wouldn’t dream of opening u-toob on mobile though…
I use YouTube almost exclusively on mobile and TV devices, but I also filter my DNS requests to block things that I don’t like.
Something that seems to be missing: Someone is working on an API compatibility/translation layer to help in porting reddit apps to lemmy and have already got some basic features working in RedReader. The RedReader (opensource Android reddit client) dev has expressed some interest in this along with the user base.
https://v.redd.it/xzvh8kih8d4b1
I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:
“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.
What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?
Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.
It’s going to become a barren wasteland of bots communicating with each other.
Haha, you just reminded me of this cartoon:
yeah. this one’s always relevant
Love it lol
This right here. I’m not scared of AI itself. I’m scared of what humans will do with it.
100%. I’ve said exactly that to friends.
@myk @alyaza “Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?”
Goes to show how important it is we use FOSS and decentralized tools for real community communications.
yeah, and multilingual on top of that, there are content in so many languages on reddit.
fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
Isn’t it a bit late for that?
I mean, GPT is on its fourth iteration, they’ve been working on it for years, I don’t know about Bing Chat but MS surely didn’t start develop it only yesterday.
How can Reddit be so sure “AI bros” haven’t already got the data they needed to train their models?
There’s going to be lots of other challengers out there: I’m sure every ML postgrad with any nous has spent the last couple of months contacting every funder they can track down to explain how their model is going to knock the socks off the old fashioned models used by these lumbering corporations.
And even the established models have been shown to contain content obtained in violation of user licences and copyright laws, leaving them open to all sorts of legal and political challenges. They will all be scrambling now to demonstrate that they’ve got clean hands in future models.
It will be like the NFT gold rush all over again—the only sure way to get rich is to sell the shovels.
I’ve been getting used to lemmy for the last couple days, going back and forth between here and reddit and following what’s going on, and I think I just realized something that I hadn’t been able to put into words.
The lemmy community feels responsive and fun to talk to, and I think that’s because the people who are coming here from reddit are the people who are motivated to communicate, and are people who care about the topics in each community. That’s pretty cool.
I’ve been feeling weird about leaving Reddit; mainly because it’s been my main source of entertainment, news, and community for over 10 years but this is a really good point about any ‘social’ network. Even the link aggregator sites like Reddit. Over the past couple of years, I feel like my engagement has dropped significantly because it hasn’t been FUN to engage with the communities I was a part of the same way it was when I first joined. I’m hoping to recapture that a bit here specifically on Lemmy and in the fediverse at large.
There is an energy here that I haven’t really felt from reddit as a whole in years…
Certain (smaller) subs could still get that same feeling sometimes, but so far I am very much enjoying lemmy. Yeah there’s a bit of a learning curve to figuring things out but I think people will catch on fast!
Exactly! Reddit turned in a whine site.
I think you hit the nail on the head for me. I’m excited to see what comes from this community far more than Reddit.
Yes!
I can post and comment here without getting yelled at or worthless, and off topic, replies. I hope they keeps the trolls to a minimum and encourage meaningful contributions.
Great point. There will be a big wave i’m sure (it happened w/ Mastodon/microblogging fediverse platforms) and after a few months, some of the people tried it and left. The people who remained are such an engaging and fun group to talk to.
Sharing this because it should be shared
This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo’s woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.
Ditto. I saw that, I deleted all my posts/comments and then my 11+ year old account.
Wait what! Things have gotten this bad!? Like, this actually happened? I’m guessing there was no follow up question.
I mean, it’s either a dumb corporate strategy to discredit or psychopathic behaviour, or, sadly, both.
Also something weird, when I saw this combo, iamthatis was the first reply. Now it’s way down there, despite the upvotes and gilds.
I really don’t like putting on the tin foil hat, but since spez admitted in the past that he changed other users comments, I’m calling it, this guy is still messing around with things behind the scenes
Christian should sue him for that, looks like libel to me.
I’m not a lawyer though.
doesnt that require monetary losses?
sure, he lost out revenue from the spp, but that is due to the api changes and not due to the libel. might be difficult to argue otherwise, but Im also not a lawyer
In the US, with slander and libel, there are two standards.
If someone is a public figure, they need to show actual damages in order to be successful, this is the scenario you’re describing.
If you are not a public figure, then you can sue for slander or libel without needing to show actual damages, just harm to your reputation or similar.
So the answer on that turns on whether Christian Selig is a public figure or not - I do not know the answer to that question.
IANAL but even though their statements are “in public” but I doubt either of them would qualify as public figures - that is reserved for politicians and such.
That being said, spez here seems to have actually slandered iamthatis. This occurred when when spez claimed that iamthatis was “blackmailing” reddit for 10M$, which incidentally lead iamthatis to post audio recordings proving that spez was lying.
Maybe I’ve got some of those details wrong, so correct me if I’m wrong.
oh interesting, I didnt know there is a difference there.
Christian is Canadian so the laws might be a bit different. I know a few people in Reddit mentioned that the laws would be more favorable to Christian since he’s Canadian, but I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know how accurate that is.
I think it can be just damage to your reputation but yeah… not sure really 😕
Any lawyers reading this?
'nuff said i guess, who doesn’t want to leave someone this full of shit.
Yeah this AMA was eye opening for sure
Christian also responded to another comment made my Spez
I keep sitting here waiting for Reddit to backtrack. But it keeps not happening.
Reddit isn’t going back. Even if they did I’m sure they just convinced multiple users to not go back. I hope the blackout and tons of users moving will have a big enough impact to devalue Reddit even if somewhat.
I predict Reddit backing out, lowering the API price to something realistic, and then everyone forgets what happened, like every other time something like this has happened.
If they choose to lower the API price after all the 3rd party apps have already been disconnected for a day or two, it’s already too late. At that point the damage is done and there’s no going back
yeah but people are addicted and will forget. most users here will eventually return to reddit, that’s just how it works.
It depends on how much people care about UX.
Some people don’t care at all. They’re probably very casual users, and the default app is good enough for them. They will continue using Reddit as if nothing happened, but they’ll notice that a lot of subs are gone for good and junk to quality post ratio has changed. That’s not really a problem as long as these people can get their cat gifs.
Some people care a bit, and they will be slightly bothered by the significant drop in UX and the quality of all subs. These people will probably spend less time, since Reddit is unable to provide what it used to.
Some people care a great deal and they will be gone by the end of the month. Actually some have already deleted their account.
I predict that Reddit has already lost a lot of users for good. Only reason I’m going back is to promote lemmy over there
I really hope not. Switching to a new platform has made me realize how much I wasn’t being social on a social media site. Because of all the toxicity I was only going to a few subreddits. I’ve already created my first community here in Lemmy and I’m commenting and engaging again.
if there can be a coordinated migration to the fediverse during blackout, that’d be the dream.
wouldn’t it be amazing when all of spez’s attempts to make reddit look pretty for shareholders completely fail so they ruined their community for absolutely nothing
Yeah I think this is going to be the event that finally causes a critical mass exodus. I mean, digg tried to keep going after the migration to reddit, but it was never the same again. Reddit is dead, it’s only a matter of time until it’s a called.
Question:
How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
This is where I lost all hope.
There’d be all kinds of better ways to go about making profit / becoming financially sustainable. This is blatant ignorance and mismanagement, without hearing or seeing anything. Complete mismanagement.
That comment had real “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” energy.
I’m doubtful because I feel like the business goons did the math, found the expected profit of killing 3rd party apps and taking the backlash was higher than keeping the status quo, and have committed to the more profitable option.
I’m glad at least one site is taking off the kid gloves with the title.
There was a response on the AMA where u/spez said “Reddit would always be profit driven and currently does not make a profit. Unlike TP apps”
You can no longer see this on the Reddit app, it is obscured in someway. Perhaps because of the potential impact for the IPO?
He is essentially saying, “we are unable to make a profit, so our plan is to use someone else’s profit to make money.”
What I think he’s going for is sympathy points, but he did not read that back lol
I think at point it’s the sole goal of Reddit to pump their ad revenue numbers until the IPO.
I would not be surprised if a lawyer jumped in and said that revealing even profitability vs not is something they should do through official channels.
He just admitted, just as they’re trying to IPO, that they’re still not profitable. If these third party apps that make up a fraction of their users – their most engaged, active users, by the way – are the difference between profit and loss, they need a better model.
If it is true than he literally shot himself in the foot.
Just like you said if it is true that the “1-3%” of the users that use 3rd party apps (by spez his word) can actually provide a profit for the 3rd party apps and the 90+% that uses official reddit channels still cannot… then they have a very big problem.
I wouldn’t even be surprised though. His whole demeanor reeks of jealousy and contempt.
The fact that a 3rd party app was actually featured on the Apple event multiple times and name dropped multiple times as “the” way to use reddit, has to absolutely sting as hell.
Edit; experiencing some lag ;)
deleted by /u/spez
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Hilarious I can still see it on Apollo. I did notice while refreshing on spez’s comments that on that particular comment his name changed from red (normal admin color) to black, and then a few minutes later red again. I don’t know what it means, but it smells.
I also noticed the time posted got fuckity on that comment. I’m looking at comments sorted newest on top but the time of that comment is out of order
The AMA doesn’t even show up on spez’s profile. Lmfao.
do you have a direct link to this one
While tangentially related, if this shouldnt be here, let me know.
Reddit also appears to be experimenting with disabling mobile web access to circumvent ads.
Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You’d think spez was new to reddit with the way he’s commenting.
deleted by creator
Pao was used by design to piss people off. They made her CEO and had her implement on the changes they knew would be unpopular with the community, then “fired” her, complete with her own golden parachute.
And kept all of “her” changes.
It’s bizarre to read his comment on that. It’s either psychopath behaviour, or… I just don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. It is worrying though, to see a human in charge of a social company act like that. He should probably be removed by some legal means just for that comment alone.
I do not know much details about the internal power structures of a company like reddit, but it seems like this guy seems to be a real liability at the moment. I wonder why he is being allowed to go around doing this.
Maybe they are giving him enough rope to hang himself so he can be removed from his position in a few days. Firing a disliked manager is a common union busting tactic. If he can be made into the centre of gravity for all the ire, canning him and making some small backtrack could have a lot of people reconsidering leaving reddit.
Or maybe there truly is no plan…
Wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done that
He is one of the founders and likely holds a big amount of shares.
I don’t get what his angle is. Is it just dumb ego or am I missing something?
He’s selling and he’s going to point his investors to his AMA comments.
Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors’ confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he’s trying to sell them damaged goods.
Again anything public facing is a lie. The rich investment firms know that it’s designed just to try and placate an unruly userbase. Now if something comes of it? Then they’ll care. If the blackout happens I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s wholesale usurpation of the mod teams to reopen the big ones.
e: typo
I fully expect that subs with major frontpage presences are going to get taken over by the mothership and reopened almost immediately. They may even be able to find some poor saps to mod them, at least for a couple weeks until they realize that’s a full-time job. But the smaller subs are what long-time and power users end up diffusing to and what keeps them engaged with the site over time, and those are likely going to be dead or zombies shortly. Any investor putting money into Reddit for any reason other than short-term trading or hoping to be at the front of the line to pick over the corpse in a few years has failed to do their due diligence.
Now is the perfect time to short reddit stock :o
I think the way I see it is that the vast majority of Reddit users have no idea that any of this is going on, and wouldn’t care if they did.
So from Corporate’s perspective, all they have to do is deal with a few weeks of whining and teeth gnashing, before everything calms down again and they can get on with whoring Reddit out.
Ultimately they’ll end up back in the black again, and making enough money from the IPO to not give the tiniest rats ass about any of this. They’ll sail off into the sunset on a fleet of expensive yachts, and never give Reddit another thought.
The people who don’t notice are probably not the people bringing the content or moderating the subs though.
It’s all corpspeak. It means nothing except to lie and gaslight users into staying so he can cash out.
classic bully behavior
Yeah I think it was too much to hope there would actually be good-faith engagement at this point. It was just more corporate messaging.
I just don’t get how a site based on freely produced content thst employs volunteer mods can actually monetise.
That part just gets me. The site has nothing without the users and the users have nothing without the mods.
They’re taking us all for granted. They are going to embarrass themselves if they go public
Let ‘em, we’ll share content here.
Hopefully my old popcorn machine still works. I’m going to need it.
The thing is, they have operating costs. I’m sure it’s a boatload of money as well, given the size and scope of Reddit. Almost all startups run at a loss. And then continue to do so long past when they’re a “startup”. The money they “make” is from rounds of investors who believe they will find a way to make money in the future. Eventually investors get restless and demand that they find a way to monetize so they can recoup. Without those investors money, the site will come crashing as soon as they miss some critical payments for stuff that keep the site up. I’m absolutely sure that’s what we’re seeing. I think either way, its time has come.
Pinch the users to try to keep it alive for a little bit more. Don’t pinch the users and it dies in a grinding halt when they miss some key payments.
There used to be a daily progress bar on the front page of Reddit to show if the sales of Reddit Gold that day were enough to pay for that day’s worth of server usage. I recall it usually hitting over 100%.
So realistically, what would a sustainable business model be for something like Reddit?
Something like lemmy or a fediverse platform is going to rely on donations and community support. In the case of mastodon, for example, it’s been shown to work well enough for sustainable operations. For those willing to work on something worthwhile for lower salary, it is potentially a great gig. In a commercial context though, it’s basically a subscription based business model.
If we’re to recover from this ad driven data tracking economy, subscriptions seem like a healthy thing for businesses to adopt.
Reddit may have already signed their deals with the devil. But generally, the point of the fediverse is to escape this corporate manipulation of our basic communications in the internet, and it’s still interesting to ask what profitable but sustainable operations can look like.
I think that federation will help Lemmy a ton–there will be a lot of small, cheap servers rather than a single extremely expensive one!
Possibly. I’m not sure how true it is that the fediverse necessarily leads to more efficient computing needs per user. I’d bet it’s the opposite.
But, as you perhaps allude to, there are other factors. For those who only want niche smaller communities, they can enjoy a more stripped down experience without needing speedy and beefy servers. Similarly, the platforms here are probably slimmer and not bloated with features that are trying to engage and monetise.
The major factor, IMO, is ownership. Admins literally own their servers. And should have a much closer and codependent relationship with the users in their servers, except in the case of large instances which become different beasts. Additionally, users have much more choice and mobility on the fediverse. All of which means admins/moderators and users have more at stake in their relationship. More ownership over their platform/instance. And therefore actually have a reason to donate and contribute and help out.
The interesting thing for me is that the federated system allows for a potentially huge variety of business models, and we’ll get to see what works and doesn’t. Whereas reddit has to stick with just one
We don’t know if that’s the case, though…
You’re right, we don’t know for sure. But it’s a good bet. I’ve been in tech a while.
Still, if they’d only communicate this and then use it as a reason for some other strategies for making money (without killing all user choice i.e. 3rd party apps), that would be a much more sympathetic way of approaching the issue.
100% agree with you.
They can always work together with platform developers to make profits. Yet they’re killing the very platform that bring traffics to the site. I can only see greediness here.
It’s because of the contract every user has with Reddit. It’s that legal document nobody ever reads.
That legal document isn’t worth the pixels it’s drawn on. As soon as the moderators leave Reddit en masse, spammers move in, Reddit goes belly up, and the contract won’t change that in the slightest.
The contract’s entire validity with moderators is questionable, by the way, seeing as how there isn’t any meaningful consideration. Subreddit moderators contribute to Reddit and receive essentially nothing in exchange. For ordinary users, one could argue that you agree to do the things in the contract in exchange for access to and participation in all the content and community on Reddit, but that argument doesn’t work for moderators.
Lol. This sounds like a dig at spez.
I’m not sure if there’s a SelfAwarewolves community somewhere in the Fediverse, but if there is, that belongs there.
There is! !selfawarewolves@lemmy.ml
If Yishan is on twitter I hope he responds too
The active mod team of r/videos has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/
In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:
I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I’m fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.
No way Reddit is going to be able to replace so many mods on so many subs that deal with so many millions of users. They can try, but that doesn’t mean it will work.
Apparently they’ll be laying off about 90 workers (5%) whilst also lowering the amount of people they will hire. So, less staff to begin with. Less mods. It’s going to be a shitshow. The admins don’t even deal with moderation, really. Reporting is outsourced to their “Anti Evil Operations” team. So wtf are they going to do? I can’t wait to see the downfall.
At this point, after that poor excuse of an AMA, their reputation is tanked.
They’ll appoint new mods. New mods that don’t have any experience or any professionalism. New mods that may not even be the age of majority yet. It’s a dumpster fire waiting to happen.
It’s a damn shame.
Yes I was totally blown away when I saw how large that sub is. It’s incredible to see Reddit losing people with that much experience of managing and growing massive communities, but the board’s focus right is only on selling existing content to AI bros so they probably don’t care that much at the moment.
That’s why it’s important for normal users who leave the site to delete their comments and submission too.
Or for the paranoid, edit then delete 😀
They rely on the free labor of the community mods. They can’t handle that workload. They’d have to replace those mods with other free mods without the years of experience, or mods with experience that will suck up to Reddit to keep their unpaid job.
Either way, I predict it will end in fireworks.
Also they don’t have the language skills, I’d be serously impressed if they managed to scrunge up employees with the language and culture skills for many subs.
Well, the AMA was a shining success…
The way that guy gaslit the Appolo dev, and doubles down that the Appolo dev is the bad guy. Even though the recording is clear that the reddit ceo is straight up lying. Imaging working with, or having to interact with someone who so easily lies like that. Shameless
It’s hilarious really. Christian has the fucking receipts. Spez can say what he wants, but it’s meaningless drivel.
Also, I just looked into the AMA and…he only gave 14 answers 🙄
To their credit, there were other admins too!
Collectively, they
answeredresponded to a whopping additional 5 comments!I may miss the community, but I definitely won’t miss reddit.
The answers were all copy & paste canned ones. No wonder
Oblig. fuck u/spez
Seconded fuck /u/spez
It is hilarious to see this happening. Option A, he could have just shut up, released a press statement and waited till this blew over, he didn’t do that. Option B would have been to do an AMA, engage with people and say nice but meaningless things to placate people and do whatever he wants in private, he didn’t do that either.
Instead he choses to host an AMA, copy pastes canned responses, edits his comment when someone caught it, ditches the canned response when a question is asked about the Apollo thing and doubles down, and finally leaves after answering 14 questions.
You really can’t make this shit up 🤣
Did they ever publish the starting time, or did it just start? It seemed to have happened while I was asleep. Not that I’d have stayed up for it ha.
