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.
I predict that as the blackout goes into full swing, Reddit is going to start taking over major subreddits from their mods to keep the site going. Things are going to become ugly very fast.
Iirc one of the mods said that the blackout was designed to prevent that. If it’s 2 days, they likely won’t bother taking them over. But an indefinite lock down they probably will. Even then though, that disruption in content will likely be too large to handle for most users
If it’s only temporary then I as an admin would just wait it out, then go about my comically evil business. Reddit staff can’t realistically moderate the entire site, so the best way to get the message across is to stop moderating and let things burn until the bean counters can’t take the heat. Just my opinion, not that I want that to happen.
I just say screw it and leave. But that’s coming from more of a lurker on Reddit.
Oh I have, I only put off deleting my account so I could tell spez to 🖕himself at the AMA.
I’ve been wondering the same thing.
100% too gross for me
I kinda feel the same way. I’ve used the official Reddit app before, and I might’ve considered using a modded version of the official client, but I just feel gross even having a Reddit account after what they’ve done. Despite the fact that I use old.reddit as well, once Apollo is gone I reckon I’ll delete my account.
A lot of mucky feeling about it has been partitioned by Apollo for me. I specifically didn’t want to interact with online politics so I set up tons of keyword filters and blocked honestly a few thousand subreddits. I turned off awards and things. I could actually browse r/all and see cool and unique content. It felt really close to classic Reddit and it insulated me from a lot of the passing drama.
Drama around the thing I used to make that space for myself was inescapable. The entire saga, from the evasiveness on details in the initial post, to the insane pricing, to the blackmail accusations make it impossible not to see how rotten the leadership is at the very top. Even if all the API stuff gets reset (it won’t) I can’t feel good about Reddit anymore.
At least the Internet Historian video about this will be absolutely lit.
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.
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.
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.
I’m versed in ActivityPub to the extent the Twitter imbroglio landed Mastodon on Ars and Techdirt, so … not very well. But wouldn’t someone who really wants control over which instances they see be able to spin up one of their own and then just not let people join?
I guess. I’m kind of new to whole idea of federation myself, never jumped on Mastodon, for example. But we will see as Lemmy and its federated instances scale up.
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
No more low interest rates…
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.
Remember to check that it stayed deleted. My account rolled back my deletions. Possibly due to “stability”
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 also responded to another comment made my Spez
Yeah this AMA was eye opening for sure
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’ve been tangentially involved in this. I think if any of the bigger instance operators were to contact derivator to see what can be done to host a gateway, that would really help.
Since it’s a proxy you’d want a reliable entity to host it, who you trust with your credentials. And the only entities who currently make sense would be the lemmy instance owners themselves. Eg. if I’m already connecting to beehaw.org or lemmy.world, I would be okay to point apollo or baconreader to redditapi.beehaw.org.
See here for a list of how people can help: https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy
That is awesome :) Thank you for chipping in. I wasn’t aware it was this far along already!
I’ve been enjoying using RedReader so far, and I’d love to see it switch to Lemmy instances
Me too. The app has a classic feel to it that isn’t replicated by other apps.
A lot more customizable too. I love the ability to hide scores, upvote/downvote buttons, reply button, etc.
Exactly! My favourite is swipe to vote up/down!
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!
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.
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?
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
I’m glad at least one site is taking off the kid gloves with the title.
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.
They really want to cram those hegetsus ads down people’s throats. I hope everyone migrates away to different options. Leave them holding turds.
all of these changes reek of desperation. i’m deeply curious as to what’s going on behind the scenes at reddit HQ
They’re all trying on monocles and top hats
oh for fuck’s sake.
I keep sitting here waiting for Reddit to backtrack. But it keeps not happening.
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.
Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You’d think spez was new to reddit with the way he’s commenting.
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.
I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of “We’re very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we’re all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time.”
Instead it’s all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they’re done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.
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.
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.
It’s all corpspeak. It means nothing except to lie and gaslight users into staying so he can cash out.
classic bully behavior
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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%.
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.
I love how the AMA has 0 points. You down vote it and it comes back to 0. No manipulation there reddit. Just that alone shows what a disgrace that company is.
I don’t think posts on reddit ever actually show less than 0 points no matter how many downvotes they get. Comments do, but posts always bottom out at 0 as far as I know.
Ahhh. What about that ea post? Didn’t it have some crazy negative number? Or was that just the comment? Probably the comment
That was a specific comment
On Reddit, comments can show negative scores, but posts will never show a score lower than zero. It used to be possible to determine how negative a post score really was, but that hasn’t been possible for some time now.
Edit: I guess that doesn’t really answer your question. I read too fast, whoops.
When the individual up and downvote counts on comments and threads went away, that was a bad sign. Back in the old days you might see a comment with a -100 total score, but you could also see it had 400 upvotes and 500 downvotes, which made it a lot more clear it was a controversial but perhaps not wholly worthless comment. Modern reddit design just shows the final number, which I think capitalizes on internet hivemind behavior.
One or more of the Reddit interfaces displays a dagger on comments that are “controversial”, notably missing from the official phone app I think. I do miss the individual counts, though.
I have (or should say “had”) the dagger on Apollo, but it’s a downgrade from being able to see the straight numbers. And of course my point being that reddit has continued to obfuscate info, so even though it is on 3rd party they have no problem hiding it from the primary userbase. Just I don’t know. Talking about all this kind of wears me out, ya know? I think everybody here is just tired of reddit the machine.
Oh, it’s been such a long time since I’ve used the official Reddit app that I forgot about this, because you can see the downvotes in other apps.
That’s been a thing for a long time. Threads can not go into negatives. You can only see the upvote percentage.
You aren’t the first person I’ve seen confused about that, which I think indicates a big problem with reddit’s modern design. Back in the old days on every thread and comment you could see both how many up and down votes it got, not just the total number. It was cleaner and more transparent. Over time, reddit has increasingly obfuscated how all the magic numbers work.
Before they changed what numbers they showed, there were karma farmers that specifically posted dumb stuff to rack up the most negative karma score they could. Over time Reddit has done a fair bit of tweaking of what numbers are shown and setting caps or floors in some places.
This isn’t special behavior, all posts have a floor of 0. Only comments can have negative scores.
It doesn’t even show up on spez’s profile lmfao. Last post says 1 year ago. Definitely no manipulation there.
The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) 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.
[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]
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 Evik 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 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.
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 😀
