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Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

402 points by UpToTheSky 3y ago

s1k3s 3y ago
I know I'm not contributing to the conversation, but this is really funny.
UpToTheSky 3y ago
What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content? Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies? Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today. Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.
- femboy 3y ago
  The Network Effect.
  - sowbug 3y ago
    This is the point critics are missing when they argue about Bitcoin's intrinsic value. Bitcoin has no value other than its network effects. Facebook, Reddit, Bitcoin, etc. are valuable because of their usage. Which makes them hard to replace even if they're not perfect.
- blendergeek 3y ago
  The hardest part is going to be the community itself. Reddit (the board and shareholders) are betting that the community is too large to migrate to a better alternative.
  - UpToTheSky 3y ago
    Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site? To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments. If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      The issue is also that the right people need to come. Generally speaking, the issue with new startup competitors for social networks is that the first people they attract a critical mass of are people who got banned from the other sites for spam or excessive toxicity, and once they’re there they spook potential new people. It’s the online version of the “Nazi bar” problem.
      - UpToTheSky 3y ago
        That's why I suggested piggybacking on HN's karma points.
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      Do you visit niche or speculate topics? They have far better communities than any of the default communities. My observation is comment quality scales with complexity of the topic. It’s extremely hard to rebuild most of these high quality communities elsewhere. Often, it seems only the troublemakers/outliers are willing to move to another platform. They simply become a stain on the alternative platform.
      - SecretDracula 3y ago
        Yeah. A new platform needs to offer something fun or interesting in its own right to attract users. Otherwise it's going to be an island prison for the worse members of the old community.
- lrem 3y ago
  Bootstrapping an alternative. Growing it from nothingness, being easily welcoming but not overrun by spam and malicious content. Getting to a critical mass before losing the goodwill with users and runway with whoever pays for this. This is a very significant moat, one that makes Reddit's leadership believe they can turn the screw without worrying about competition for now.
- pgwhalen 3y ago
  There are many reddit clones. The value is completely in the communities and not in the technology. r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.
  - UpToTheSky 3y ago
    What are some of those Reddit clones? Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?
    - dumpsterlid 3y ago
      There are reddit-likes on the fediverse (which means they are using the ActivityPub protocol). The fact that a software like kbin works on ActivityPub means that users on other fediverse software like Mastodon (twitter-like) can interact with posts on kbin. Discussion, interaction and discoverability are thus not limited to just the small community on kbin. https://kbin.social/ https://kbin.social/ Here is a discussion by @feditips@mstdn.social on reddit alternatives on the fediverse. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884
    - rzzzt 3y ago
      I think Aether comes close: https://aether.app/features/general/ https://aether.app/features/general/
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    >but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere. bogleheads?
- tiedieconderoga 3y ago
  Three big issues off the top of my head: * Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity. * Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam. * Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium. Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.
  - UpToTheSky 3y ago
    Hosting costs: Let's start with text only. Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it? Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?
  - marcod 3y ago
    If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....
    - tantalor 3y ago
      Or if you have EU users
      - viraptor 3y ago
        That doesn't apply by default. While the US is enabling people to be more litigious, EU will mostly slap you with fines for doing bad things. You have the option to... not do bad things. (Yes, I'm sure there's some odd counterexample somewhere, but this holds in general)
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- jrnichols 3y ago
  > What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? One already exists in Lemmy. I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.
  - brvsft 3y ago
    Are "all of the laws and regulations" against "child abuse material" specific to the US?
- rvz 3y ago
  > What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit. > Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI. Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI. It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative. But anyway... ...AI really is going just great. /s
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    The irony that the technology we once used to combat spam is being used to create spam has not been lost on me
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  > Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content? Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    That's not quite the whole story.
- seydor 3y ago
  creating momentum is hard, even with a better product. Even before the internet, the slightly technologies did not necessarily get enough traction to unseat the incumbents
- super256 3y ago
  The automoderator feature of reddit seems to be very complex. You can configure a lot.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Moderation of large scale social media is a god-damned nightmare.
samtho 3y ago
I understand the purpose of this and that if they raise a sufficient enough stink, it will likely get them to cave for the time being. However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduction but overall, the writing is on the wall: Reddits corporate priorities are no longer aligned with the community’s.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I'm not sure how a "one-day anything" is supposed to get anyone to cave. This seems like those performative one-day big-tech "walkouts" where it's just people waving signs over an extended lunch break and then getting right back to work as usual. How does that practically have any effect? "Go dark indefinitely until change happens" might get someone's attention. This is barely a blip on the radar, and even if there's a minor revenue impact, Reddit knows it'll be over in a day so they can obviously weather it.
  - eric-hu 3y ago
    > The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action.
- croes 3y ago
  Investors hate a shrinking user base, so this move can massively backfire.
  - nicce 3y ago
    It does not matter much if the value of the remaining users also increase
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  If Reddit caves, it just gives mods more power and they'll use that for any future change or nonechange. What will it be next week? Force Reddit to shut down all subs that these power mods dislike?
Ekaros 3y ago
They will be back. I don't think they will stick to their guns. They should step up their game if they really want to voice it. Delete all the posts and the accounts. Then if decision is reversed come back with new account.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale. Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance. I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing their future for short term gain. It's the only path to being eventually rid of them. And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.
- Levitz 3y ago
  >And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general. I, too, want to be hopeful, but how do you think this can possibly happen? Metcalfe's law is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vecto... TLDR: The more people share a method of communication, the more value that method of communication has. Social networks organically evolve towards monopolies.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    I said this in a sibling comment but it felt responsive to yours, so you summarize, I think what we're finding out is a.) When the marginal cost of joining another network is 0, people will join "lower value" networks and b.) When you have enough people on the platform, the marginal value to the user of adding an additional user becomes negative - when you get to a certain scale, the new people joining are less likely to bring you additional conversation then additional trolling and harassment. Anecdotally, HN is at a sweet spot for me. It's large enough that I'm just a person in the crowd (which I value), but it's small enough and the interaction is limited enough that I don't feel I'm likely to receive persistent, ongoing harassment. (I catch plenty of trolling, but it never feels personal really, I don't think they'll recognize me in the next thread we bump into each other.)
  - 3y ago
throw-4e451c8 3y ago
I agree. Please let Reddit die already. Just before I stopped using, some stranger messaged me (in the same language) and offered to sell me video sex with a young person. Reddit has become a prostitution platform.
- stjohnswarts 3y ago
  n=1 is a bad sample size. I've been on there 10 years and nothing of the sort has happened to me. If you don't like reddit then you should leave and find a better platform for you. I highly doubt reddit is going anywhere for a while because there is no easy alternative like there was when Digg died.
dt3ft 3y ago
I started to build an alternative: https://flingup.com https://flingup.com It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  I love this idea, but the content I'm seeing on the front page right now is turning me off from using it. A lot of fringe political content (pandemic trutherism, Bud Lite culture war shit, etc.), which is not my idea of interesting since I can find plenty of that anywhere else.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth. notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server<->server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing. notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is: distributed: peers backup/serve content anonymous: but don't trust it to be psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavy
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      That makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.
Levitz 3y ago
Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right? You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.
- dingledork69 3y ago
  Addiction and the fear that reddit staff will just appoint new mods, like they've done before.
  - koheripbal 3y ago
    Also, the mods don't do it for free at all. They get paid to promote content. All the primary mods on the big subs also have online social media marketing consultancies.
    - worldofmatthew 3y ago
      Most do it for free. Powermods often are getting paid to promote stuff.
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  Reddit can replace the mods at any time, if necessary with their own staff until they get volunteers.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    That only works for the top few dozen subreddits, the ones that were once 'default' subreddits, they can't afford to pay people to sit and moderate the other hundred thousand subreddits all day long.
    - somsak2 3y ago
      They probably don't care about that long tail. While valuable to individual users, I'm sure their business is an 80-20 like any other. For monetization, they just need to make sure the default subreddits stay moderated. Which they can with hired guns if required. This is how every other social network works after all.
rilindo 3y ago
I wish Usenet becomes popular again.
awesome_dude 3y ago
The API arguments are interesting from another point of view - who really owns the content generated on a site like Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker News. Once I send this post out, do I own it? Can I claim some sort of compensation for my comment being used in an AI training set? Does HN (or whichever site I post the comment on) own the comment, and therefore should be compensated for the comment's use in said training set? Do we both own the comment, and both have rights to its use?
- Macha 3y ago
  Legally it's governed by the terms of use which for most sites say something along the effect of you retain copyright ownership but transfer a non-revocable unlimited license to the platform. Sometimes other legislation, like EU right to to be forgotten, GDPR, etc. overrides that and they have to take it down, but otherwise they could pretty much do whatever.
  - suddenclarity 3y ago
    GDPR doesn't force a forum to take down content unless it contains private information. It's enough to just change the username to a random string and then it's no longer tied to you. Authorities in my country published guidelines about it because plenty of people saw it as an opportunity to get rid of shit they wrote when they were younger.
- 58x14 3y ago
  Depending on the Terms of Service flavor your platform of choice serves you, it’s generally that you own the content you post, but grant an infinite, irrevocable license to use that content for just about any reason, including as an entry in a dataset sold to a separate entity for use training a large language model. I think this is a really important question worth answering by future UGC-based platform incumbents.
seydor 3y ago
I see this as a grand opportunity to start new subreddits. It's been decades that the biggest subreddits are being ran by the same aging small group of moderators. The new ones may not be better over time, but it's worth giving it a try. There's nothing wrong with reddit finally being a bit more serious about their content which is awesome compared to a lot of what is today's internet. Maybe if they focus on making money they 'll stop their childish grandstanding and culture war
tomatotomato37 3y ago
I'm curious how the logistics of this strike are going to happen. With the old reddit themes you could just put a black everything over with squares in CSS but the new themes are so uncustomizable (especially in the app) that your average mass consumer may not even notice. In addition, anti-spam/anti-bandwagoning measures may be leveraged by reddit to censor protestors in the subreddits, along with banning of "malicious" moderators who attempt to enforce the strike on the most popular of the subreddits. While that would obviously degrade the moderation of those subreddits the sheer inertia of the communities will result in the consuming masses thinking everything is working as usual
- bezier-curve 3y ago
  Mods can set the subreddit to private.
  - hfkwer 3y ago
    And reddit staff can reverse that immediately. I'd be amazed if they didn't prevent huge subreddits from going private altogether without someone from the staff giving the go ahead.
    - 14zadz 3y ago
      That’d piss off a lot of mods who moderate huge subreddits in their free time for Reddit…imagine if those mods got mad and decided to let inappropriate things through that drew negative media attention? Doubt Reddit wants that press when they want to IPO soon
      - seydor 3y ago
        they are scared that reddit might remove them. mods seem to be a special category with pathological attachment to free labour that they see as their own instrument of power.
    - Macha 3y ago
      And then the mods can program auto moderator just remove every new post or comment. And then reddit can remove the mods, but then who will run the community events, common threads, and do the actual moderation that many of the subreddits use heavily?
ninth_ant 3y ago
Can someone explain why this is such a big deal to some people? I legitimately don’t understand why this matters. Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software. I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users. To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.
- xigoi 3y ago
  For years, third-party apps were the only apps and some of them were really great. Then Reddit introduced the official app, which is inferior in every way, and now it wants to forbid the other ones.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  A lot of power users use third party software that offers extra features (or just a UI they are familiar with). Mods of popular subreddits are power users and friends with other power users. So mods or people they associate with use third party apps far more than average users. If the numbers are small, they are concentrated among people who have a lot of reach on the platform. It's similar to how Twitter shut down several tools only used by power-users to force a small number of people into using their first party app. Obviously, Twitter/Reddit wants the revenue associated with supplying the app. But it's not clear if it will be worth pissing off their user base.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  - Moderators use the poweruser tools in the third party clients - I'm not sure how niche third party clients really are. Reddit started as a community of tech-savvy users who would not put up with the crap the official site/app is doing. There's probably a reason why reddit kept old.reddit.com online for so long.
- Macha 3y ago
  The first party clients are undergoing the enshittification process https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys They would rather direct users to content that Reddit wants them to see. High engagement content like quick meme pics, short videos or polarised political content that generates time on site and activity that looks good to investors. Profitable content like the awards programs. Not externally hosted content where the ad revenue might be going to YouTube or journalists rather than Reddit. Not comments discussions where a user might spend time reading rather than generating new page views. This might be fine with you if you see Reddit as "that site for the memes", but for a lot of users, especially veteran users, it replaced forums and other sites for discussing hobbies or other content, and that content is both harder to enjoy as the official apps push you towards what Reddit would rather you see, and drowned out by the more casual content. In addition, for many people, they would like an efficient experience where they can select what they want to dig deeper into and then get off the site, while Reddit would rather you doomscrolled for longer to improve their metrics at the expense of the user's time. So it's been very clear for a while that Reddit's first party UX design does not gel with the aims of these groups, which, being veteran users and therefore having more time to get used to the site, are over represented amongst those creating content or in roles like moderation. And this has been mostly fine with these groups as long as they can just go to the refuges of third party apps, old.reddit and compact reddit and ignore Reddit's trend chasing. But compact is gone, third party apps are going, and it's hard not to extrapolate that to old.reddit.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
What is a one day strike going to accomplish? You want to strike? You strike until there is a real financial harm to the company and shit gets changed. Otherwise, keep your useless opinions to yourselves.
appleaday1 3y ago
The mobile reddit site is so bad, it is basically unusable and they tell you to get the app. I personally don't even prefer Reddit mobile, I use Apollo if I have to moderate on the go, and it's really good for moderation I haven't used the Reddits mobile app for moderation but I remember when I did that it was terrible.
dom96 3y ago
I've been following this since it erupted and am currently developing something that I hope will either enable the Reddit community to transition to a new home or force Reddit to abandon its paid API plans. The first step in my plan is to implement a read-only API proxy which does not use Reddit.com's API but instead scrapes the necessary data. This should cover 80% of the API traffic, if it works then third-party apps will be able to transition their apps to this new API. So if Reddit does put their API behind a paywall there will be a way for developers to avoid at least some of the ludicrous costs. I already have next steps in mind, but they really depend on what Reddit does. I sincerely hope they reassess what they are doing with their API.
- rekoil 3y ago
  Why not just impersonate the official mobile app and use its API?
  - dom96 3y ago
    That's another option. Scraping the webpages isn't actually that difficult (though admittedly it is likely to be less reliable).
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  Doesn't reddit's website use an API? It's new.reddit.com seems like some single page app bullshit, right? The real problem you will run into though is that Reddit will restrict what you can access without login. They already tried to flip the switch once on requiring login to access NSFW content, and had to backtrack at least temporarily. I'm not exactly sure why they had to, but supposedly they have now added some missing feature to their web version that allows upload of NSFW content on desktop, so maybe they're ready to unpause. And the official API will block NSFW so I think that's returning. And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.
  - dom96 3y ago
    It's actually interesting how they do it. The new and old Reddit seems surprisingly similar in how they handle at least the initial page loads. > And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans. Argh, that would suck. Not as bad as losing my Twitter but still. That said, they explicitly say in their API docs "We're happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions". So at one point in time they were happy to allow scrapers.
GenericDev 3y ago
I wish they would just let Reddit die. I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems. We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control. Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms. God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process. Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Decentralized platforms with no shitty middlemen fiduciarially responsible to shareholders to exploit you even harder next quarter? Where's the $$$$$ in that?!
  - techdragon 3y ago
    Hosting and building them…. The “rent” and “shovels” of the digital era.
- urda 3y ago
  Today's reddit mods are the same as Digg's power user's back in the day. It's an open secret that a few dozen or so individuals control the top 100 or so subreddits, and calling that fact out is often met with site wide bans. Reddit died a long time ago, and it's time we let it go.
  - ulfw 3y ago
    I don't even know why I got 'banned for life'. No recourse, no explanation. Good riddance frankly.
- stjohnswarts 3y ago
  reddit isn't going to die for a long time, even with 3rd party apps dying. Neither is HN.
- 3y ago
abhayhegde 3y ago
I'm perplexed as to what to support here. For someone like me who brazenly hates Instagram, FB, Snapchat kinds of social media, Reddit is a gold mine of wisdom, advice, and content, if used appropriately. And the best way to use it was through third-party apps like Relay, Apollo etc. The eventual loss of better user experience is saddening, but I'm not sure I fall into the category of not using it at all, because it's where I learn about a lot of useful stuff on life, personal finance, frugalism, unfiltered review of a product I haven't used yet etc. I hope this decision doesn't break the site.

402 points by UpToTheSky 3y ago

I know I'm not contributing to the conversation, but this is really funny.

What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content? Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies? Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today. Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

femboy 3y ago
The Network Effect.
- sowbug 3y ago
  This is the point critics are missing when they argue about Bitcoin's intrinsic value. Bitcoin has no value other than its network effects. Facebook, Reddit, Bitcoin, etc. are valuable because of their usage. Which makes them hard to replace even if they're not perfect.
blendergeek 3y ago
The hardest part is going to be the community itself. Reddit (the board and shareholders) are betting that the community is too large to migrate to a better alternative.
- UpToTheSky 3y ago
  Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site? To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments. If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    The issue is also that the right people need to come. Generally speaking, the issue with new startup competitors for social networks is that the first people they attract a critical mass of are people who got banned from the other sites for spam or excessive toxicity, and once they’re there they spook potential new people. It’s the online version of the “Nazi bar” problem.
    - UpToTheSky 3y ago
      That's why I suggested piggybacking on HN's karma points.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    Do you visit niche or speculate topics? They have far better communities than any of the default communities. My observation is comment quality scales with complexity of the topic. It’s extremely hard to rebuild most of these high quality communities elsewhere. Often, it seems only the troublemakers/outliers are willing to move to another platform. They simply become a stain on the alternative platform.
    - SecretDracula 3y ago
      Yeah. A new platform needs to offer something fun or interesting in its own right to attract users. Otherwise it's going to be an island prison for the worse members of the old community.
lrem 3y ago
Bootstrapping an alternative. Growing it from nothingness, being easily welcoming but not overrun by spam and malicious content. Getting to a critical mass before losing the goodwill with users and runway with whoever pays for this. This is a very significant moat, one that makes Reddit's leadership believe they can turn the screw without worrying about competition for now.
pgwhalen 3y ago
There are many reddit clones. The value is completely in the communities and not in the technology. r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.
- UpToTheSky 3y ago
  What are some of those Reddit clones? Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?
  - dumpsterlid 3y ago
    There are reddit-likes on the fediverse (which means they are using the ActivityPub protocol). The fact that a software like kbin works on ActivityPub means that users on other fediverse software like Mastodon (twitter-like) can interact with posts on kbin. Discussion, interaction and discoverability are thus not limited to just the small community on kbin. https://kbin.social/ https://kbin.social/ Here is a discussion by @feditips@mstdn.social on reddit alternatives on the fediverse. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884
  - rzzzt 3y ago
    I think Aether comes close: https://aether.app/features/general/ https://aether.app/features/general/
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  >but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere. bogleheads?
tiedieconderoga 3y ago
Three big issues off the top of my head: * Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity. * Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam. * Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium. Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.
- UpToTheSky 3y ago
  Hosting costs: Let's start with text only. Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it? Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?
- marcod 3y ago
  If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....
  - tantalor 3y ago
    Or if you have EU users
    - viraptor 3y ago
      That doesn't apply by default. While the US is enabling people to be more litigious, EU will mostly slap you with fines for doing bad things. You have the option to... not do bad things. (Yes, I'm sure there's some odd counterexample somewhere, but this holds in general)
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jrnichols 3y ago
> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? One already exists in Lemmy. I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.
- brvsft 3y ago
  Are "all of the laws and regulations" against "child abuse material" specific to the US?
rvz 3y ago
> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit. > Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI. Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI. It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative. But anyway... ...AI really is going just great. /s
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  The irony that the technology we once used to combat spam is being used to create spam has not been lost on me
heavyset_go 3y ago
> Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content? Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  That's not quite the whole story.
seydor 3y ago
creating momentum is hard, even with a better product. Even before the internet, the slightly technologies did not necessarily get enough traction to unseat the incumbents
super256 3y ago
The automoderator feature of reddit seems to be very complex. You can configure a lot.
flangola7 3y ago
Moderation of large scale social media is a god-damned nightmare.

samtho 3y ago

I understand the purpose of this and that if they raise a sufficient enough stink, it will likely get them to cave for the time being. However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduction but overall, the writing is on the wall: Reddits corporate priorities are no longer aligned with the community’s.

ryandrake 3y ago
I'm not sure how a "one-day anything" is supposed to get anyone to cave. This seems like those performative one-day big-tech "walkouts" where it's just people waving signs over an extended lunch break and then getting right back to work as usual. How does that practically have any effect? "Go dark indefinitely until change happens" might get someone's attention. This is barely a blip on the radar, and even if there's a minor revenue impact, Reddit knows it'll be over in a day so they can obviously weather it.
- eric-hu 3y ago
  > The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action.
croes 3y ago
Investors hate a shrinking user base, so this move can massively backfire.
- nicce 3y ago
  It does not matter much if the value of the remaining users also increase
suddenclarity 3y ago
If Reddit caves, it just gives mods more power and they'll use that for any future change or nonechange. What will it be next week? Force Reddit to shut down all subs that these power mods dislike?

Ekaros 3y ago

They will be back. I don't think they will stick to their guns. They should step up their game if they really want to voice it. Delete all the posts and the accounts. Then if decision is reversed come back with new account.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale. Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance. I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing their future for short term gain. It's the only path to being eventually rid of them. And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.

Levitz 3y ago
>And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general. I, too, want to be hopeful, but how do you think this can possibly happen? Metcalfe's law is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vecto... TLDR: The more people share a method of communication, the more value that method of communication has. Social networks organically evolve towards monopolies.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I said this in a sibling comment but it felt responsive to yours, so you summarize, I think what we're finding out is a.) When the marginal cost of joining another network is 0, people will join "lower value" networks and b.) When you have enough people on the platform, the marginal value to the user of adding an additional user becomes negative - when you get to a certain scale, the new people joining are less likely to bring you additional conversation then additional trolling and harassment. Anecdotally, HN is at a sweet spot for me. It's large enough that I'm just a person in the crowd (which I value), but it's small enough and the interaction is limited enough that I don't feel I'm likely to receive persistent, ongoing harassment. (I catch plenty of trolling, but it never feels personal really, I don't think they'll recognize me in the next thread we bump into each other.)
- 3y ago

throw-4e451c8 3y ago

I agree. Please let Reddit die already. Just before I stopped using, some stranger messaged me (in the same language) and offered to sell me video sex with a young person. Reddit has become a prostitution platform.

stjohnswarts 3y ago
n=1 is a bad sample size. I've been on there 10 years and nothing of the sort has happened to me. If you don't like reddit then you should leave and find a better platform for you. I highly doubt reddit is going anywhere for a while because there is no easy alternative like there was when Digg died.

dt3ft 3y ago

I started to build an alternative: https://flingup.com https://flingup.com It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
I love this idea, but the content I'm seeing on the front page right now is turning me off from using it. A lot of fringe political content (pandemic trutherism, Bud Lite culture war shit, etc.), which is not my idea of interesting since I can find plenty of that anywhere else.
- superkuh 3y ago
  That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth. notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server<->server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing. notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is: distributed: peers backup/serve content anonymous: but don't trust it to be psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavy
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.

Levitz 3y ago

Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right? You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.

dingledork69 3y ago
Addiction and the fear that reddit staff will just appoint new mods, like they've done before.
- koheripbal 3y ago
  Also, the mods don't do it for free at all. They get paid to promote content. All the primary mods on the big subs also have online social media marketing consultancies.
  - worldofmatthew 3y ago
    Most do it for free. Powermods often are getting paid to promote stuff.
optimalsolver 3y ago
Reddit can replace the mods at any time, if necessary with their own staff until they get volunteers.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  That only works for the top few dozen subreddits, the ones that were once 'default' subreddits, they can't afford to pay people to sit and moderate the other hundred thousand subreddits all day long.
  - somsak2 3y ago
    They probably don't care about that long tail. While valuable to individual users, I'm sure their business is an 80-20 like any other. For monetization, they just need to make sure the default subreddits stay moderated. Which they can with hired guns if required. This is how every other social network works after all.

rilindo 3y ago

I wish Usenet becomes popular again.

awesome_dude 3y ago

The API arguments are interesting from another point of view - who really owns the content generated on a site like Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker News. Once I send this post out, do I own it? Can I claim some sort of compensation for my comment being used in an AI training set? Does HN (or whichever site I post the comment on) own the comment, and therefore should be compensated for the comment's use in said training set? Do we both own the comment, and both have rights to its use?

Macha 3y ago
Legally it's governed by the terms of use which for most sites say something along the effect of you retain copyright ownership but transfer a non-revocable unlimited license to the platform. Sometimes other legislation, like EU right to to be forgotten, GDPR, etc. overrides that and they have to take it down, but otherwise they could pretty much do whatever.
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  GDPR doesn't force a forum to take down content unless it contains private information. It's enough to just change the username to a random string and then it's no longer tied to you. Authorities in my country published guidelines about it because plenty of people saw it as an opportunity to get rid of shit they wrote when they were younger.
58x14 3y ago
Depending on the Terms of Service flavor your platform of choice serves you, it’s generally that you own the content you post, but grant an infinite, irrevocable license to use that content for just about any reason, including as an entry in a dataset sold to a separate entity for use training a large language model. I think this is a really important question worth answering by future UGC-based platform incumbents.

seydor 3y ago

I see this as a grand opportunity to start new subreddits. It's been decades that the biggest subreddits are being ran by the same aging small group of moderators. The new ones may not be better over time, but it's worth giving it a try. There's nothing wrong with reddit finally being a bit more serious about their content which is awesome compared to a lot of what is today's internet. Maybe if they focus on making money they 'll stop their childish grandstanding and culture war

tomatotomato37 3y ago

I'm curious how the logistics of this strike are going to happen. With the old reddit themes you could just put a black everything over with squares in CSS but the new themes are so uncustomizable (especially in the app) that your average mass consumer may not even notice. In addition, anti-spam/anti-bandwagoning measures may be leveraged by reddit to censor protestors in the subreddits, along with banning of "malicious" moderators who attempt to enforce the strike on the most popular of the subreddits. While that would obviously degrade the moderation of those subreddits the sheer inertia of the communities will result in the consuming masses thinking everything is working as usual

bezier-curve 3y ago
Mods can set the subreddit to private.
- hfkwer 3y ago
  And reddit staff can reverse that immediately. I'd be amazed if they didn't prevent huge subreddits from going private altogether without someone from the staff giving the go ahead.
  - 14zadz 3y ago
    That’d piss off a lot of mods who moderate huge subreddits in their free time for Reddit…imagine if those mods got mad and decided to let inappropriate things through that drew negative media attention? Doubt Reddit wants that press when they want to IPO soon
    - seydor 3y ago
      they are scared that reddit might remove them. mods seem to be a special category with pathological attachment to free labour that they see as their own instrument of power.
  - Macha 3y ago
    And then the mods can program auto moderator just remove every new post or comment. And then reddit can remove the mods, but then who will run the community events, common threads, and do the actual moderation that many of the subreddits use heavily?

ninth_ant 3y ago

Can someone explain why this is such a big deal to some people? I legitimately don’t understand why this matters. Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software. I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users. To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.

xigoi 3y ago
For years, third-party apps were the only apps and some of them were really great. Then Reddit introduced the official app, which is inferior in every way, and now it wants to forbid the other ones.
HWR_14 3y ago
A lot of power users use third party software that offers extra features (or just a UI they are familiar with). Mods of popular subreddits are power users and friends with other power users. So mods or people they associate with use third party apps far more than average users. If the numbers are small, they are concentrated among people who have a lot of reach on the platform. It's similar to how Twitter shut down several tools only used by power-users to force a small number of people into using their first party app. Obviously, Twitter/Reddit wants the revenue associated with supplying the app. But it's not clear if it will be worth pissing off their user base.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
- Moderators use the poweruser tools in the third party clients - I'm not sure how niche third party clients really are. Reddit started as a community of tech-savvy users who would not put up with the crap the official site/app is doing. There's probably a reason why reddit kept old.reddit.com online for so long.
Macha 3y ago
The first party clients are undergoing the enshittification process https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys They would rather direct users to content that Reddit wants them to see. High engagement content like quick meme pics, short videos or polarised political content that generates time on site and activity that looks good to investors. Profitable content like the awards programs. Not externally hosted content where the ad revenue might be going to YouTube or journalists rather than Reddit. Not comments discussions where a user might spend time reading rather than generating new page views. This might be fine with you if you see Reddit as "that site for the memes", but for a lot of users, especially veteran users, it replaced forums and other sites for discussing hobbies or other content, and that content is both harder to enjoy as the official apps push you towards what Reddit would rather you see, and drowned out by the more casual content. In addition, for many people, they would like an efficient experience where they can select what they want to dig deeper into and then get off the site, while Reddit would rather you doomscrolled for longer to improve their metrics at the expense of the user's time. So it's been very clear for a while that Reddit's first party UX design does not gel with the aims of these groups, which, being veteran users and therefore having more time to get used to the site, are over represented amongst those creating content or in roles like moderation. And this has been mostly fine with these groups as long as they can just go to the refuges of third party apps, old.reddit and compact reddit and ignore Reddit's trend chasing. But compact is gone, third party apps are going, and it's hard not to extrapolate that to old.reddit.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

What is a one day strike going to accomplish? You want to strike? You strike until there is a real financial harm to the company and shit gets changed. Otherwise, keep your useless opinions to yourselves.

appleaday1 3y ago

The mobile reddit site is so bad, it is basically unusable and they tell you to get the app. I personally don't even prefer Reddit mobile, I use Apollo if I have to moderate on the go, and it's really good for moderation I haven't used the Reddits mobile app for moderation but I remember when I did that it was terrible.

dom96 3y ago

I've been following this since it erupted and am currently developing something that I hope will either enable the Reddit community to transition to a new home or force Reddit to abandon its paid API plans. The first step in my plan is to implement a read-only API proxy which does not use Reddit.com's API but instead scrapes the necessary data. This should cover 80% of the API traffic, if it works then third-party apps will be able to transition their apps to this new API. So if Reddit does put their API behind a paywall there will be a way for developers to avoid at least some of the ludicrous costs. I already have next steps in mind, but they really depend on what Reddit does. I sincerely hope they reassess what they are doing with their API.

rekoil 3y ago
Why not just impersonate the official mobile app and use its API?
- dom96 3y ago
  That's another option. Scraping the webpages isn't actually that difficult (though admittedly it is likely to be less reliable).
fluidcruft 3y ago
Doesn't reddit's website use an API? It's new.reddit.com seems like some single page app bullshit, right? The real problem you will run into though is that Reddit will restrict what you can access without login. They already tried to flip the switch once on requiring login to access NSFW content, and had to backtrack at least temporarily. I'm not exactly sure why they had to, but supposedly they have now added some missing feature to their web version that allows upload of NSFW content on desktop, so maybe they're ready to unpause. And the official API will block NSFW so I think that's returning. And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.
- dom96 3y ago
  It's actually interesting how they do it. The new and old Reddit seems surprisingly similar in how they handle at least the initial page loads. > And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans. Argh, that would suck. Not as bad as losing my Twitter but still. That said, they explicitly say in their API docs "We're happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions". So at one point in time they were happy to allow scrapers.

GenericDev 3y ago

I wish they would just let Reddit die. I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems. We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control. Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms. God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process. Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Decentralized platforms with no shitty middlemen fiduciarially responsible to shareholders to exploit you even harder next quarter? Where's the $$$$$ in that?!
- techdragon 3y ago
  Hosting and building them…. The “rent” and “shovels” of the digital era.
urda 3y ago
Today's reddit mods are the same as Digg's power user's back in the day. It's an open secret that a few dozen or so individuals control the top 100 or so subreddits, and calling that fact out is often met with site wide bans. Reddit died a long time ago, and it's time we let it go.
- ulfw 3y ago
  I don't even know why I got 'banned for life'. No recourse, no explanation. Good riddance frankly.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
reddit isn't going to die for a long time, even with 3rd party apps dying. Neither is HN.
3y ago

abhayhegde 3y ago

I'm perplexed as to what to support here. For someone like me who brazenly hates Instagram, FB, Snapchat kinds of social media, Reddit is a gold mine of wisdom, advice, and content, if used appropriately. And the best way to use it was through third-party apps like Relay, Apollo etc. The eventual loss of better user experience is saddening, but I'm not sure I fall into the category of not using it at all, because it's where I learn about a lot of useful stuff on life, personal finance, frugalism, unfiltered review of a product I haven't used yet etc. I hope this decision doesn't break the site.