I think the difference that spez failed to realize when he decided to turn the enshittification dial up to 11 is that, unlike facebook, whatsapp, instagram, etc, we were not on reddit because of people we know. There was no peer pressure or awkward conversations. We did not rely on reddit as a means of communication that was irreplaceable. When the whatsapp drama happened, we couldn’t really up and leave, because grandma doesn’t know how to download signal. because the local market down the road has whatsapp set up for orders and doesn’t really give a shit. the family group has important starred chats that we refer to, etc etc.
This is not at all the case with reddit. Reddit is where we went for content. But whether the content is on reddit, lemmy, or the back of a shampoo bottle in the bathroom, it made no difference whatsoever. In my jump from reddit I’ve had to explain to exactly zero people why I’m making this decision. You cannot do that with instagram or whatsapp; and it took me years to convince people that I will not use facebook (thankfully that’s now a little more acceptable of a concept, but i digress). they wanted to play like the big social media boys, but they forgot that, in their core, they are not a social media platform.
Yup, perfectly said.
I hate to be harsh but can we stop fooling ourselves here? Many large subreddits have already ended their blackout and are continuing as if nothing ever happened. The mods are continuing to slave away for free. The blackout itself barely made a dent in activity. I usually don’t care to comment but even Lemmy is getting infected with comments/posts of people patting themselves on the back for achieving virtually nothing.
I’m not saying Reddit isn’t reliant on users but these blackout and “mass” exodus movements are meaningless gestures. I literally only moved to Lemmy because RiF is closing.
What these guys don’t realize is the “value” of their website is their users content. They tend to feel like they’re the value, that they’ve done something great. You see this in both Musk and Zuck. They feel like they’re the heroes of the internet. Except what is Reddit exactly, what is it’s value? It is only the users. These guys parade around the knowledge of other people as if it’s their own value and want to become rich off it. I’m sick of this Silicon Valley bullshit, honestly. That whole mindset is toxic from start to finish. And we see the finish on all of them: screw over the people who create the content for the next round of VC cash, or IPO.
I hope Lemmy or whatever comes next can resist this culture of “burn it to the ground for the payday”.
Remember secret Santa?
I was talking to my tech kids (programmers for a very well known company) I told them how puzzled I was. The guy that created secret Santa was gung-ho to create a new one the second reddit announced they were closing it down. Then he disappeared.
The kids then explained non-compete and why it’s always included with contracts.
Reddit closed secret Santa down but wouldn’t let him bring a similar thing back.
Why? What is wrong with them?
PS this is conjecture only I haven’t spoken to him as he truly is MIA
Secret Santa was back when Reddit still had a semblance of community, which I realize now means trust. I’d never trust a Reddit secret Santa these days. Heck, I’ve done successful 4chan secret Santa’s and I’m still not brave enough to want a modern Reddit secret Santa.
Least with a 4chan secret santa I’d know there’s an 80% chance of my gift being poop and cum.
I actually ended up getting a really nice and thoughtful gift. (And cookies which I absolutely did not eat.)
(And cookies which I absolutely did not eat.)
Smart!
They think they are too big to fail and enough users will stick around up voting repost bots that it will be profitable.
They’ll be right. The quality of everything, not the least of which is internet scrolling, that the general public accepts is horrendous.
Somebody else put it best here that Reddit won’t die, it will still be around for all those people. Hopefully the rest of us move on and Reddit becomes “Oh huh? That place is still around?”
Reddit won’t die, it will still be around for all those people.
For anyone who doubts this, note that Digg still exists.
That, and also they’ll continue running their own bots to upvate the repost bots to make it look like there’s lots of engagement right up until the very instant that somebody else is holding the bag.
I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit’s own employees short the company once it goes public.
Sadly, I’m not sure they’re wrong.
I think the thing that blows my mind about the pricing model is- AI using reddit for training data doesn’t need to up vote, downvote, subscribe, comment, or constantly ingest new data. They could ingest everything on Reddit once and be done, or come back every 6 to 12 months for an update. 3rd Party App developers need to download the same posts from the front page for every user, multiple times a day, constantly. They actually interact with a website. A $1 billion LLM ai might pay $1 million to download all the reddit data they need. Meanwhile Apollo might be worth less than $1 million as a business and is being hit with $20 million per year as operating expenses. The pricing model is set up in such a way that LLM’s are in a much better position to either pay a pretty insignificant fee to get all the data, or just build a scraper since they don’t need to support multiple users or website interaction. Meanwhile the price to app developers is impossibly high.
Correct. Spez is either a pathological liar, or incomprehensibly stupid. But probably both.
I’d go with pathological liar given how he alleged that the Apollo developer threatened Reddit - allegations which the Apollo developer proved false by releasing the audio of the phone call - and then Spez doubled down on the allegations while saying the developer shouldn’t have released the audio. Basically, “I’m going to defame you and you providing proof of me lying about you isn’t allowed.”
They are just lying. Blaming LLMs is just a convenient, topical target. If that was really a problem, why did they not react anytime in the last few years when thimgs like ChatGPT were actually gathering their initial data? It’s not like this tech popped up or of nowhere, it’s been around for awhile but just recently became a mainstream story due to the increased access.
Having mainstream news sources reporting on this – especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes – is actually a pretty good sign. Even though I am enjoying Lemmy more now that I have tried it anyway.
Having mainstream news sources reporting on this – especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes – is actually a pretty good sign.
I thought so too. Been searching news sites since yesterday waiting to see when investors were going to chime in.
Betcha spez is in a well-deserved crisis mode rn.
Still ain’t gonna back down.
Humans are paradoxically really good at adaptation, and also not admitting mistakes. Dude is singularly responsible for the biggest PR fumble in Reddit history and seemingly has zero self awareness despite being at the center of it.
How do you mean good sign? I don’t think they can put the genie back in the bottle at this point.
I assume this is “good” as in the protest is having the effect we want.
I’m really dying to find out if this blackout continues past the first 48 hours and if it has any impact on their decision.
It sort of doesn’t matter to me since the Apollo dev already said he wasn’t going to keep his app up due to how spez handled the whole situation.
I think he said June 30 it’s done, barring spez changing his mandate ofc.
Apollo, Sync, RIF and others have all announced that they are closing permanently. Some of the big subs have done the same.
I fully expect others to join. There were more subs that went dark by the end of yesterday than began the day!
I hate to be a pessimist, but it’s not gonna work.
Most big subs will reopen, and those that don’t will get their moderators replaced. The bulk of the user base is gonna switch to the official app and meme about how bad it is right on Reddit and get Reddit Gold for it.
I’m still gonna stick to either Lemmy or Kbin. I like the smaller community here; it reminds me of Reddit’s olden days when everyone wasn’t a cynical asshole.
I agree that it probably won’t work but I’m trying to be hopeful that people will see that there are other places to post content and interact with each other that don’t view us as cattle.
I can’t stand the stock Reddit app and more importantly I think it’s disgusting the way Reddit has treated the Apollo dev so I won’t be going back regardless of what happens. If people go to lemmy or kbin or whatever other alternatives I’ll join but if not I guess I just won’t participate and this kind of content anymore.
Several large subs are not private anymore according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ 80 not private anymore out of 372 ones that went private (of the top 500 by number of subscribers).
The stupid part is nobody really cares how much they want to charge to organizations wanting to train AI models. Literally all they have to do is offer a reasonable price for third party app developers. It’s not that hard to have different price tiers for different use cases.
I deleted every comment, every upvote and every post I ever made on Reddit. Fuck /u/spez, fuck Reddit.
Well if Reddit thinks that the people contributing to Reddit’s content are wasting resources, I agree.
as if we would back down - or even need to
all glory to the Fediverse!
So the article states that spez has made this decision in order to prevent/capture ai from taking data from his business for free. So to monetize reditor work to train AI models, and provide data. I am sure that there is an EULA out there that says reddit owns your contributions on the plate form. But ultimately that will be for the content creators to decide on if they want to participate in that, especially considering that they threw the baby out with the bath water if they didn’t intend to target this party apps.
But lets be honest here, he wants people to use the reddit app for the same reason he wants AI capture.
