- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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It’s really amazing to see the incompetence of Huffman. As the CEO, it’s his responsibility continue to drive his company while being committed to its values. They’ve lost touch with what made reddit special in favor for the lowest common denominator user base.
Reddit has three real function, first as a cultivated collection of subreddits, second as a warehouse of incredibly niche and specific information, and lastly as a place to scroll.
They’ve catered to this third audience which I see as the most shallow of user. This part of their function can be easily replaced by plenty of other services. With such tone-deaf and dishonest actions of spez, it’s obvious there was no foresight on trying to set up a smooth transition.
There absolutely could have been a solution here to generate income for Reddit without coming to this painful nuclear ending. It’s been writing on the wall for a while with the stretch toward IPO that their motives and value had become entirely based on money.
See that’s not how companies work though. They may need to be profitable to exist but they exist to provide a service or product. By sacrificing and disenfranchising a loyal core of your user base out of lack of foresight and problem solving, this is just another nail in the coffin of their inevitable demise.
Huffman is a loser and a sell out. Get fucked Spez.
Steve has never been committed to any values that the company has ever tried to say they adhere to. He’s a kid who doesn’t have a clue how to handle people. And never has.
Now now, he did brag about how he thinks reddit could “definitely influence elections” and then immediately tried to smother it when people started to comment on r/The_Donald’s role in the 2016 election. It takes truly bold leadership skills to brazenly lie about your own conduct, especially when it’s on public record.
Thing is, I’m kind of settled with the idea that Reddit will still win out monetarily with this. 99% of users are going to take the path of least resistance, which is kinda expected.
So my goal is more around just having a good conversational community, and I kinda like the change in pace now that I’m using alternatives. I don’t really focus on “Reddit losing”. I just like having a good place to chat. It might be funny to see if they end up reversing course, but I’m not losing sleep on that turnout.
That is my feeling. I want Lemmy to be good, so I hope a lot of quality users jump ship from Reddit, but if Reddit retains the millions of passive users, then I’m happy for Reddit to keep them. One part of Reddit’s issue was the diluted quality of posts and comments, so let it continue to exist to filter people who want that experience. ___
Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.
If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.
Reddit won’t come out on top. They’ll survive, but it’s going to hurt them. They seem to have pissed off most communities on the site. It’s the largest protest they’ve ever had.
Reddit doesn’t run a profit yet, so all they need to achieve is enough to get into the black. Like Twitter, Reddit I don’t think will crash and burn but the quality will drop dramatically. Reddit doesn’t care about quality long as there’s enough users on the site to make the paid ads have value. In the short term I think they’ll succeed in that but it’s going to turn into a cesspool.
But if those up for actual conversation and vaguely respectful debate come over here & leave the trolls and the karma farmers with Spez then that’s a great result!
Should be noted, Twitter is actively crashing and burning and may file for bankruptcy this year.
…And Mastodon seems to be a much nicer place to be than Twitter, even if it is a smaller “community”
But if those up for actual conversation and vaguely respectful debate come over here & leave the trolls and the karma farmers with Spez then that’s a great result!
Excellent point. Those of us who actually value conversation will make the effort to find, sign up for, and learn another platform. For the trolls and karma farmers, that’s just too much trouble. There will still be enough targets on Reddit to satisfy trolls, plus we’ve got the sunk cost fallacy working for us: karma farmers would lose their precious karma by leaving. Reddit is much more bot-friendly, too.
Thanks for being a greedy jerk, spez! Reddit is serving the Lemmy community as a bullshit filter!
It’s just a question of if it sticks or not. Will people complain and mods relent or admins intervene and oust mod teams for a new batch of dummies? I feel the answer is yes.
I’m ok with the smarter people forming communities elsewhere like Lemmy. Reddit brain drain will definitely be a thing. It’s going to be the new Facebook when this is all over.
out of curiosity, what alternatives are you using? im only on lemmy rn but i wanna try other stuff out
I also signed up to kbin. Can’t give opinions yet, because I just started using both of these.
I’ll check it out, ty
True, to hell with them. I’ll do me.
Depends on the quality of the first-party mod tools and if enough mods stick around. Reddit doesn’t work without free labor. It’ll be overrun by spam and trolls.
Here’s what I think will happen.
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Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit’s side, out of fear that they’ll lose their foothold on the site.
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Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.
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Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
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Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.
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Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.
- Someone will discover an old episode of The Simpsons where somehow, all of this already happened.
There are about 13k moderators participating in the blackout IIRC - I don’t think reddit will have the resources or the community goodwill to take over all of the major subs
Isn’t moderation an unpaid volunteer gig? I agree. He’s gonna have a hard time finding a bunch of people who can /will jump at the opportunity
Looks like #2 is starting to get realized: https://beehaw.org/post/487504
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Doubling down on throwing accusations at Christian Selig (dev of Apollo) in the AMA was really a low point. Spez has been a fan of a certain orange politician for years, and seems to be taking his tactic of spewing shit at people whether it is true or not. Sad.
Christian called him out on it and asked for proof. No response.
I’m so excited to see Huffman burn his company to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted someone to fail as much as him.
I just hope there is any fallout from this. I really hope start mass migrating off reddit, and people don’t begrudgingly return a couple days after all of this dies down
I am personally leaving, friends/family also leaving. And Im blocking it on my network, and we got a “lets do it” to block it on our corporate network (1900+ employees). But everyone said “likely leaving”. Kbin maybe about to get the hug of death! May launch a selfhosters one! Lets do this
Wow blocking on work network not to stop wasting time but because of frustration over api is rly funny
Honestly, after coming to Lemmy, I haven’t looked back.
fuck reddit man My account was created the same time as Apollo, and now we’re leaving it together
Rexxit seems to be picking up speed.
Seeing a lot more posts about deleting comment history.
I very much doubt there will be.
They have crunched the numbers, they know they can weather this storm.At the end of the day there will still be natural growth of reddit via people hearing about it and just grabbing the official apps from stores. A lot of techy types will leave, but they haven’t been the driving force behind reddit for a long time.
Reddit will just start heading more towards influencer style content and less of the content that originally built the platform.
My guess is that influencer style content is more profitable and less hazardous for them to host anyway.
I created my account here because of this. Was on Reddit for over ten years. Won’t be using Reddit after June 30th. Trying to figure out what to do with the (smaller, but over 150k subs) subs I moderate now then I’m out.
A ‘small’ portion of the Reddit community used Apollo & RIF (and other third party apps), but those were the power users and mods.
There will for sure be some fallout.
I’d say if you can private them and leave reddit and spez don’t deserve the content
The AMA was just an obligation. It was never going to change his or anyone elses mind.
He knows the reality. This change won’t kill reddit. It will make it more controllable though, at the sake of some of their more techy users. The truth is that its big enough that they don’t need those users anymore though. The people who do leave will be replaced by the natural growth of the site of people who simply download the official app from the various stores over the next few months.
The result will be a more TikTok/Tumblr/Twitter like experience. Less niche, more mainstream serving.
I’m honestly surprised how quickly this is all falling apart. I don’t understand Reddit’s ass-backwards approach to all of these decisions.
Yep, I just deleted my reddit account. The sheer disrespect gosh. I’m glad to be here now lol.
Ah yes, the AMA has a score of precisely zero. Nice vote manipulation there Reddit.
Also you can upload images directly? Awesome!
Posts never go into negative scores. If a post has negative karma, it shows 0 points, always been like this.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Still a pretty dumb feature.
This got me to check out Reddit alternatives… Landed on kbin… so here we go?
Same. It got me to oficially jump over to Lemmy. Reddits been veering downhill and always wanted an alternative. Kind of glad all this got more people to Lemmy etc.
I landed on lemmy first, then I found out about kbin over there. I’m glad for the Fediverse because I don’t have to lose the ability to continue to participate in the community and not be tied to one website. Now, if they could figure a way to import the subscribed list from my old account, that would be icing on the cake.
Same here! Just so I understand, it doesn’t matter if you choose kbin or Lemmy, the content is the same? What about Mastadon? Is that also combined into this same network?
They all implement ActivityPub which is just the protocol used to move everyone’s posts and such around to any other server that’s supposed to receive it. So yeah, you can use Mastodon to follow Lemmy or kbin magazines. You can also do the opposite where you follow Mastodon users from Lemmy/kbin. As long as the blog uses ActivityPub federation, you can ingest that content in to whatever other compatible service you want.
I will say things get a little weird if you follow on a service that presents that information in a drastically different way, but it is doable.
I feel old and out of touch. 15 years of being Reddit only, and now I have no idea what half of those words mean or how these services work. Hah, time to do some learning again
I’m still trying to figure that one out lol
Also, what’s boost?
I’m here for the same. Let’s hope this place has what we’re looking for, eh?
Yeah but if we don’t see a community/magazine we want (that exists on reddit), do we take it upon ourselves to start it or do we wait for the mods of the reddit sub to create it?
So far I’m in the wait and see camp, especially until the apps actually shut down on the 30th. In an optimistic view where this site takes off (I don’t even know what that means in a federated situation. Aren’t the instances fracturing communities? Posts transfer but it doesn’t seem comments do…), moderation of huge magazines would be incredibly time consuming and difficult, I imagine.
Admittedly the system is a bit confusing as far as UX goes. I’m a fairly nerdy gal and am familiar with servers and software packages and “instances”, and I’m still having issues wrapping my head around the UX.
For example. I’m on Kbin, federated with Lemmy instances. Which is working obviously. But how do I go about discovery of networks and instances and communities within those instances from Kbin? That seems possible but to an uninitiated user, not exactly the simplest thing. None of this is a dealbreaker for me, but what about others? Am I the only one not quite understanding how it all slots together interface wise?
No, you are definitely not the only one. I explored this style of social media for the first time several months ago because of what was going on with Twitter.
I got confused pretty quickly and ultimately decided it would be easier to just quit Twitter and use Reddit only, even though I would be giving up things I liked about Twitter.
But now we’re here, so I’m trying again. Still confused tho
At least we have a reason to push through that confusion and try to make the best of what we figure out now.
I wish you luck!
Yeah that’s a really good point. Hopefully we (or someone) can get this figured out with a good solution
Also +1 for that marathon pic
There’s no guarantee they’re going to come over, so I’d say make it yourself. You can always add them in the future if they do make the switch and still want to be a mod.
I for one had modded for r/beards and r/moustache and decided to make a moustache community over on lemmy.ml. Anyone is welcome to join!! Moustache community on Lemmy.
Do you really want a ton of super mods here too?
Dear Apollo dev, if you updated your backend to support federated services like Lemmy I for one would love you forever.
It would definitely be great, but I was unaware until this thread that the premium version of Apollo is a paid subscription, which is a no-go for me. I’ll pay money for an app like that once, never a subscription.
I get that this largely an unpopular opinion, and ultimately, you have to do you, but whether or not an app is first party, third party, or a cobbled together black market party, software development for any service will have to be ongoing until the heat death of the universe or until the service stops functioning.
There’s no getting around that. Anything that realistically touches the web/internet will need to be maintained. It’s the reality of software and security. It may not always require a $10/mo plan, but things are not free. Where seeing the death of the web as a lot of us knew it because funding is finally drying up and companies have to show value, or all of it goes away.
To be clear - I think what Reddit is doing is catastrophically bad; there are ways they could monetize third party apps, they just don’t want to. But to a lot of people who don’t necessarily follow development, it’s difficult to understand how it quickly can consume all of your time. And you’re either paying for it, you are the product, or you’re paying for it with your time (volunteering on open source software).
I understand what you’re saying. Like I said, I have no problem paying for software, but the subscription model for EVERYTHING is getting ridiculous. I can’t keep track of the subscriptions I have now, let alone add more. I buy apps regularly. If I have to start paying a subscription to for all of my apps I’ll go back to a flip phone.
The problem is really the internet part of it. It’s one thing when you’re talking like “a calculator” app - it’s different when you’re talking about an app that makes api calls to a server. Both ends of that aren’t static.
I get subscription overload is a thing - but the biggest problem too is that the platform owners don’t even give you the capability as an app owner to “sell” an upgrade like in the olden days.
I think a solid question to ask, all of this said, is why every subscription has to be $10-20. They don’t, and certainly some part of that is definitely greed.
Well as you mention the app platforms are not setting themselves up in a flexible way. They should have all matter of payment models available. The problem is monopolies.
Something i have wanted for a long time is that services/apps with overlapping user bases could have some sort of group deals where you get an overall discount by paying for a package. When i de googled i was looking around at all the paid replacement services and if i did a total replacement it would have been like $150/m due to high cost of individual services. These companies should collab because they all have overlapping user base. I ended up paying for only a couple of the most important because I am a casual user for other stuff. I would have been willing to spend more in total if i could have had low-use access to a diversity of services. Then who knows maybe i could have been upsold on something after a while.
I guess it isnt worth the transaction costs to take less than $10. But that is where platforms have the capacity to be useful.
Agreed. I just honestly don’t know what the solution is.
Been asking myself the same question.
Even here, servers cost money or moderation takes time, something we’re all limited on.
It’s really rather depressing, cuz I fear the days of the “fun-ternet” is over.
There’s a one time premium payment as well. That’s what I did.
There were three ways to use it:
Free - limitations (things like a single account and can only comment, not post).
Pro - one off payment for the standard functionality.
Ultra - annual or monthly subscription for the enhanced functionally that did cost the dev money to operate.
Apparently you could pay a one off amount for a lifetime sub to the Ultra subscription but I didn’t see that option available to me (I’ma recent iPhone user)
Fuck spaz
I’m seriously considering using https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite to edit all my posts to say “fuck you u/spez” and then delete my account.
Just used redact.dev and save yourself the time. it’ll scramble all your comments and delete them, ruining their data haarvesting sales potential or AI scrapability.
Wasn’t aware of this one, thanks!
I’ve been on Reddit for 9 years. I just deleted all my posts and comments and then deleted my account. Good riddance, I say!
So in the article it seems that reddit is banking on getting money from the help in training AI models, but what if everyone started using scripts to change their posts and then ultimately ruining the model for AI. Wouldn’t those companies then not want to use those API for reddit and then ultimately losing everything too?
Yup, my entire post history (such as it is) will be "Lorem Ipsum"ed before I delete the account.
Am I the only one who doesn’t get all the outrage? They are a private company with a CEO and investors and that’s their data. There was never any promise to be a community effort. Why should they let Apollo etc make money out of their data.
And before people say “it’s NOT their data! Users cre it” - yeah it’s user generated data, which users then donate to Reddit in exchange for reach and publishing tools.
It would be different if it was on the fediverse, which has totally different premises. But Reddit is a private company and eventually they would have to turn a profit. That was always on the cards.
I don’t think anyone who understands the issue is complaining about them monetising. People know it costs a ton to maintain the infrastructure. That’s not the point.
- people don’t mind TPAs are billed, but the pricing is a thinly veiled attempt at pretending that they don’t want to completely eliminate TPAs. People would have been fine if the pricing is reasonable. They don’t like it when you try to pull a fast one over them.
- their own application is bad. There’s no way around it. From accessibility to mod tools.
- they have promised to focus on the above points for years now, and there’s still almost no improvement. People don’t trust them anymore.
- spez’s recent comments against the Apollo dev are blatant lies and it only fuelled the outrage. Unfortunately for him, the Apollo dev legally recorded the conversation.
- they do own the data, but it’s still the users who create them. If you treat the people who create content for you like trash, expect backlash. This happens on many private companies, not only reddit.
There’s more, but I’m out right now so I can’t focus much. Basically, if your content is from the users, you should take care of the users and people running your site.
I agree that them pushing out third party apps when their own is rubbish is an idiotic move - and it will hurt them badly. They rely on people being too addicted to leave (it kind of worked when Musk did it with Twitter) but if the app is unusable it’s simply not going to happen. As someone who uses as few apps as possible (why do people trust the Apollo dev to be any better at privacy than spez? anyhow…) I didn’t quite grasp that for many people Reddit is an app first and foremost. No viable app = no reddit
Maybe I can elaborate.
As somebody who uses the official Reddit app (Android), it’s complete dog shit and ridden with bugs. Tapping links will often direct you to a completely different thread, videos often don’t play or if they do, audio is disabled, sometimes comment threads don’t load at all, etc. I would 100% recommend using a third-party app for browsing Reddit and the only reason I ditched BaconReader was because I had some compatibility issues a few years ago.
If the official app wasn’t a vastly inferior alternative to browsing the site and like a worse version of New Reddit, a lot of people would be less pissed off at Spez over this.
Oh don’t take me wrong, I am not saying they are handling this well. Specifically on the app, it’s idiotic to force people off unofficial apps without the official app being if not better at least comparable in quality. That’s why I use the web version - that and the fact I don’t want apps collecting location and sensor data as I go about my day. I am not sure why people assume the Apollo devs are trustworthy and are not selling your data like everyone else does.
