- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
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I have thoroughly enjoyed Lemmy and Beehaw over this weekend. I’m not expecting anything out of reddit.
Reddit was my home for 12 years and I really feel like it boiled down to three really uses of my time:
- cultivated communities
- niche knowledge
- scrolling through all
I have had a taste of being part of a community this weekend that reminds me of what reddit was like a decade ago. This really removed the sting of disconnecting all my apollo widgets and shortcuts. Lemmy, kbin, etc may lead to a new future for those of us looking for somewhere new.
Niche knowledge? I think that’s one thing that just will be on reddit for the foreseeable future but as communities move and shift away, it’ll disperse across the internet. I do see myself still searching through reddit results via google when searching for a personalized review or specific information. But it will become a get-in, get-out process.
Scrolling? Reddit leadership is so dumb. they’ve catered to this feature and this user base for all the marbles of their IPO. Scrolling is the least unique feature to reddit compared to other social media. And reddit’s scrolling was highly dependent on your feed and could sometimes not be that great. Scrolling can be replaced by anything from tiktok to instagram to other forums and new sites
Even this weekend on Beehaw, I’ve seen reviews of fountain pens, a storm over Scotland, trailers for new games on the horizon and little bits of people’s lives shared and connected. If I can continue to have an experience like this? I won’t even miss reddit.
It’s going to be an interesting new future
Reddit’s spiral down was the boiling frog analogy for me.
I’d forgotten what it was like for people have conversations with each other. The change was gradual.
100% agree with you there. It’s been a nice change on here this weekend :)
Welcome to the Fediverse! I’ve found that people tend to have a little more realness when they’re part of something they co-create vs merely participating in a company’s space. Even if the server this “sub” is on dies, Lemmy and the Fediverse will continue.
It will hurt, leaving so many meaningless internet points behind, but like you said, I’m hopeful this can be my new home.
Make it meaningful and sell your reddit account!
It’s laughable that the CEO of a 10 billion dollar (in valuation) company https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/technology/reddit-new-funding.html is saying that numerous solo and small group developers are more successful than he is.
This is an absurd statement. Small app developers making ends meet are in no way analogous with a P&L from a corporation and it is disingenuous for Huffman to position himself in this “woe is me” argument.
Laughable, maybe, but not surprising. Since the Web 2.0 boom started picking up, the game for tech startups has always been to attract users as fast as possible, profits be damned, and hope a FAANG buys you out for your userbase before your VC money runs out. Post-Great Recession, debt has been near as makes no difference free, so VCs have been willing to extend very long runways to the companies they invest in, but with interest rates going sharply up the music has stopped and it’s time for companies like Reddit to show they can become profitable or else.
Also, if Reddit is truly so unprofitable and terrible… maybe they should get a new CEO?
Somehow I feel like Spez himself has made a lot more money during this time than 3rd party developers. Despite Reddit itself not turning a net profit.
I’m missing reddit less and less with reach passing minute. At this point I don’t know if I’ll be going back after the blackout. This is already WAY more fun to use than the reddit app or mobile site, and I have no idea what I’m doing yet.
Kudos to the developers here for putting in the work.
Same here, I’m trying to wean myself off the firehouse of relevant content, in favour of a more community feel. Truth is, quality over quantity is exactly what I need.
And quality of interactions. So far, anyway, this place is missing the familiar hostility.
edit: for those on jerboa (like me) who can’t see the image, it’s Willy Wonka’s “Good DAY, Sir!” meme
Reddit is really doing everything it can to scare away the users who are looking to move away from the uninspiring trash mainstream internet. Looking forward to some new sites blossoming.
this article was from 2 days ago, hopefully there will be new light tomorrow. although, reddit’s history of corporatising at the expense of users, and their respect thereto, is still significant. let’s hope to see some awareness from the less technically & socially active reddit user-base tomorrow :p
I got off there as soon as I saw them slandering the creator of Apollo for ‘threats’, now I’m hoping he’ll just shift focus and make it into a badass Lemmy app instead.
Spez answered a total of 14 softballs, and 7 more questions were answered by other employees with ultimately no satisfactory outcomes or answers. You didn’t really miss much unless you like watching people pour gasoline on dumpster fires.
They were premade responses too. He accidentally full copy and pasted one.
that’s a plot twist i’d pay to see
It makes me sad that a site as big as Reddit is letting down so much of it’s userbase for a quick buck. At least it’s making people look for decentralized sites like this more, I suppose
From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.
I am also unsure what most of the 2000+ employees do, because by all accounts they are generally unresponsive to both users and mods alike when they reach out. This is as true now with the API stuff and small devs not getting traction to work with them, as it has been in the past and was a major reason there was backlash when Victoria was let go.
All your points are very true, unfortunately. It just saddens me seeing companies hurt the very community that even allowed them to rise to popularity
I am disappointed that this article, in its apparent attempt to appear objective and neutral, didn’t do a very good job of explaining why people are so angry. I was hoping for more signal amplification to inform more people who may not yet know.
The first part of the article makes it sound like the point of the backlash is that Reddit will charge for the API at all, not the punishingly high rates or the very small window of time devs had to respond after pricing was finally communicated. It does ultimately say how much Apollo would have to pay to operate under that pricing structure, but the article seemed to be burying the lede a bit to me. It also conflates the 3rd party apps with big AI training use cases, which I think misses the point.
The article also really downplayed how unprofessional Steve has been, especially during the AMA, and how powerful the recording Christian released was in terms of causing the monumental backlash that is now happening. It didn’t really describe the magnitude of the backlash itself very well, either. It was mostly trusting readers to go look at the embedded links to understand what was actually going on, and the summary snips in the article don’t do much to encourage anyone to do so.
You can tell Reddit PR folks got their word in on this article.
It’s truly sad to see a website that I’ve been on for 8+ years turn to an absolute dumpster fire. I suppose I’m not surprised by Steve Huffman’s (u/spez) behavior, he has been deplorable to say the least over the countless years and this just does it for me and so many other users.
The sub I mod on (r/Moustache) has gone private and will continue to indefinitely. I’ve deleted all of my posts aside from subreddit announcements and all of my comments on the site (all 4,500) of them.
If anyone wants to delete their user data on Reddit you can do so by using this tool PowerDeleteSuite. It took a while for the suite to delete all my comments (make sure you overwrite your existing comments with whatever you like first to prevent future AI scraping and Reddit making even more money off of you) but it was worth it.
Make sure to use a fork of PowerDeleteSuite that respects the edit rate limit if you plan to edit your comments. Otherwise it will only actually get like 1/3 of them.
If Reddit has not learned how to make a profit in 17 years, that is not the devs fault.
This is a good article, but is says nothing about his position on subreddits going dark.
11 years on reddit and seeing its long slow decline its just sad. A return to the basics was very necessary. Removing subs from r/all, messing with the voting, “new” reddit, a clamp down on content…it just kept getting worse and worse. As long as I could use RIF and old.reddit it was fine, but the writing is on the wall at this point.
While most of their users are used to the newer layout from other social media, my goal was always to see the most number of posts I could on a single page and have a clean ad-free experience. Lemmy seems to get this
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
If true, that actually speaks volumes. Like what kind of guy removes a dead man, at some point revered, from the list of co-founders. What do you lose by not doing it? What did you win by doing it? I mean, the odds are you lost more than anything. Besides, he should have been your partner. Even if you did for the cash, what about all the moments you had with him? Was Aaron such a piece that you’d rather have him erased?
I seriously can’t get it.
Ego. Tremendously inflated ego, perhaps stoked by watching Musk and thinking “great idea, I can do that too!”…?
Aaron Swartz will always be the real spiritual founder of what Reddit was at its best for me. Huffman will be the fool that didn’t understand the ethos of it and drove it into the ground in his greed.
Whoa. I missed this tidbit of information. Aaron Swartz’s memory defiled by their actions just reaffirms my decision to leave.
It’s like Reddit forgot the Digg flood back in the day and is making the same poor choices Digg made that drew so many people to reddit a decade ago.
There was never serious competition to threaten Reddit before. Voat was the closest, but when legitimate redditfugees got there it was already full of a critical mass of Nazis (actual Nazis, not “everyone I don’t like is a Nazi”) and people who thought spamming slurs was peak free speech. Not exactly a solid foundation for popular new site.
Those who forget history are doomed to get downvoted to oblivion.
I’ve officially removed all traces of reddit this morning and going with lemmy strictly. I will go back to reddit on the 14th to assess the situation. I probably will use both but lemmy is growing on me a lot
At this point even if Reddit keeps going on, there’s enough people on Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin that we can thrive as a new site with our own culture. Hacker News wasn’t made obsolete by Reddit or Digg’s existence for example.
Yep. I just don’t care anymore. I have all the community I possibly need right here. I can miss some niche communities but this is all I need for the time being.
As someone who’s been looking for a reddit alternative for a while and occasionally read Hacker News, I must say I really like it here on Lemmy. Similar simplicity of Hacker News, but with more diverse communities.
It’s not surprising, but IMO the shutdown is still worthwhile. It’s shaking people loose to start looking for alternatives, and giving those alternatives opportunity to shake themselves down too. We’re not quite ready for a Digg-style implosion yet. It may come more gradually this time.
To be honest, if this doesn’t case an implosion I don’t know what will.🤷🏻♂️
The blackout won’t, but surely the lack of porn on mobile after June 30th is going to cause a major shake-up. Reddit’s mobile app is really unpopular, even among casual users. You can’t view it in browser reddit (popover tells you to either use the app, or back out the page). Literally the only way to view it on mobile is in their shitty app, which is horribly optimised and chews data like nobody’s business.
Humans are creatures of habit, they’ll struggle to change or move on without sufficient deterrent. The announcement was deterrent for the principled, the blackout is deterrent for the casual consumer without their content; the lose of 3P apps will be the deterrent for the visually-impaired…
…but the June 30th NSFW changes will be the deterrent for the horny, and Reddit is nothing if not unrelentingly horny.
Nobody asked Reddit to start hosting images and videos. If you want to turn a profit, maybe stop doing that? I think Spez comes out as very despicable in this whole situation.
Doubly so considering it was a redditor That started imgur specifically to handle this. It was a completely self-inflicted wound.
And imgur charges Apollo’s dev $166 for the same amount of load reddit asked $20m for
They want to own it all without 3rd parties
I paid $5 once for a lifetime of ad free Reddit. I probably have a negative net value to them. I imagine they have only a few outcomes for a user like me:
- the app I use stays with Reddit, and I generate some income via their new pricing model
- I switch to Reddit official app, maybe even pay for ad free
- I leave altogether, and become a 0 instead of a negative
I did the “change all my past posts to ‘Fuck Spez and Reddit’” then delete my account thing today. I’m done with reddit. Maybe this here will work out for me, if not, whatever. I’m not going back to reddit.
