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Reddit Strike Has Started
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Nerd_hooligan 3y agoI thought the start is tomorrow?
- redundantly 3y agoCorrect. OP jumped the gun on this post.
- Timon3 3y agoGiven that there are currently 655/5279 already private, no, they didn't jump the gun. Edit: 1 minute later already 658. Edit: 2 minutes later 661. Edit: 2 3/4 hours later 840.
- Vervious 3y agoI'm clicking on some of them, and can still view the posts?
- dpistole 3y agolooks like its a website monitoring the subreddit statuses with a handful of them having already gone private
- redundantly 3y agoAh, my mistake. I wasn't aware some subreddits had already started, thought it was supposed to start tomorrow. The fun has begun ;)
- stndef 3y agoIt's also tomorrow in some countries already!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Choco31415 3y agoJust the title. The page itself acknowledges that the strike is scheduled to start tomorrow: “These subreddits are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after. ”
- IvyMike 3y agoI mean, it has begun: https://www.reddit.com/r/diy https://www.reddit.com/r/diy
- selykg 3y agoA bunch of subs started today
- louistsi 3y agoThe link shows which subreddits have turned private. Many have begun already as it is currently the 12th in many timezones.
- Ekaros 3y agoDefine tomorrow? It is past midnight for Beijing and Tokyo for example. UTC would be reasonable standard meaning 6 and half hours still to go.
- necovek 3y agoEven most of Europe would be already in the 12th by that metric, not to mention around 70% of the world's population.
- wedn3sday 3y agoFor many people in the world, it's the 12th already.
- Buttons840 3y agoIt's always tomorrow somewhere--or something like that. :) Remember, when you wake up on June 11th in the USA, June 11th is almost over for most of the world.
- bardfinn 3y agoI also keep coming back to the metaphor that Reddit is a great deal like Gormenghast: an ancient, stony fortification of cobbled-together structures, housing a gaggle of idiosyncratic personas whose lives are filled with the performances of abstruse rituals and obligations, the mandatory detritus of a former glory — insular and in a state of glacial decadence, and which nevertheless has a secondary community plastered on its boundary, with which it perfunctorily yet regularly interacts AND YET all of which exists within a much wider world that has largely diverged from it. I think about the Tower of Flints.
- Quequau 3y agolol, you're right but also with a good deal of 'minimum viable product' in the mix. I'm going to steal this to share with my friends (who mostly hate Reddit). Also, have a nice day.
- technothrasher 3y agoThat series literally depressed the heck out of me... as does Reddit at times.
- quenix 3y agoI suggest the title be updated to reflect the live tracking nature of this site "Watch the Reddit strike unfold live"?
- wpietri 3y agoGreat! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
- jcims 3y agoReddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoReddit is proof of Internet Rule No.51 "the better the content, the worse the User Interface"
- memefrog 3y agoIt's the other way round from a cause & effect perspective: the worse the user interface, the more off-putting it is to the casual users that create and promote low-quality content.
- oska 3y agoThe old reddit user interface was/is remarkably good. Threaded, collapsible discussions with markdown for comments in a non-distracting (i.e. sparse) layout.
- devnullbrain 3y agoOnce you found the comments it was but the comment link was/is marginalised in favour of the link itself, making it easy to miss that they're 'the point'. Even before new.reddit it was a common complaint that it's confusing to new users. Obviously this is relative, it's a huge site! And there may even be value to gatekeeping users who can't figure it out.
- 3y ago
- cute_boi 3y ago662/5279 = 0.12540253836 looks too tiny tbh.
- Timon3 3y agoThe subreddits didn't organize around a single point in time across all timezones. It's generally the 12th and 13th, but it's not yet the 12th everywhere. Give it a couple of hours. In the last 8 minutes alone 14 new subs went private.
- unstatusthequo 3y agoWhy didn’t they? UTC all the things.
- x86x87 3y agoIs it? It's not about the size (lookup how many subs are in total). It's about sending a message There's more than 5000 subs. There are millions of them. These are big subs
- ferngodfather 3y agoThat's 12% - nothing to laugh at
- cornedor 3y agoIt was 662 for me too when I opened the site, i've been scrolling a bit trough the site and it is 668 already, and the site showed notifications for those extra reddits. They seem to be closing fast.
- yareally 3y ago12.5%? That's roughly 1 in 8 subreddits
- klyrs 3y agohttps://backlinko.com/reddit-users https://backlinko.com/reddit-users As of now, six of the top ten subreddits have disabled posting. That doesn't seem tiny to me
- atleastoptimal 3y agoIs the inevitable fate of any social media site to be antagonistic to its most dedicated users?
- maccard 3y agoI don't know if it's inevitable, but it's clear at this point that people are unwilling to pay $ for access to the content in the forms we know now. I think until we find a better way of having people pay for content and curation, we're likely to see this happen again. That said, Reddit has (so far) lasted a decade on the throne, which is a third of the life of the www. It's not like there's anoter competitor sitting there ready to dethrone it so I suspect it's here for another while.
- Ekaros 3y agoWhen was a last time a big and popular social mediaish or like platform properly died? Media companies have not survived, but platforms seem to have been sticky or then I just haven't used them.
- philistine 3y agoI would be interest in seeing Pinterest’s usage numbers. That place has turned into a Wish.com ad farm faster than you can blink.
- MostlyStable 3y agoSo I think it's relatively clear that Reddit doesn't _want_ to reach some kind of deal with 3rd party apps, but honestly, I think that if they _had_ wanted that, most of these apps could have survived with a much smaller userbase of paying customers. I would have paid the $3-5/month it would have cost to keep my preferred app. And while yes, it definitely would have been fewer people, my guess is that it would have been enough to worth continuing. And if Reddit had been willing to figure out some kind of deal with ads, it might have been even more.
- fnimick 3y ago
- revskill 3y agoWhat is reddit replacement then ?
- nXqd 3y agoyes, we are waiting, the main thing would be their content and their communities. it's definitely not about the platform, but how it would be built and govern by the creator.
- guerrilla 3y agoLemmy, probably.
- jdlyga 3y agoTypically Discord, but Discord has its own issues. When the Digg meltdown happened, Reddit was already a Digg clone at the time (this was the days before subreddits).
- spicyjpeg 3y agoMost communities seem to be moving over to Discord, which is by no means a valid Reddit replacement (in my opinion at least) but it is the only option with decent popularity and moderation tools that are not completely unusable at scale. Lemmy is being thrown around as a "proper" Reddit alternative, but realistically it will probably meet the same fate as Mastodon: plenty of people will try it for a week or so, only to realize that the platform sucks and the content simply isn't there.
- applesan 3y agoI've seen some move to tildes.
- CostcoFanboy 3y agoSo far the best alternative that I've seen was Squabbles.io A lot of communities seem to be moving towards Discord. It has announcements, posts, chat, etc.
- macintux 3y ago
- bstar77 3y agoFlashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
- hinkley 3y agoWhat’s the new Reddit though?
- lobstrosity420 3y agoI don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.
- afavour 3y agoIf that were the case people would have left long ago, Reddit has plenty of downsides. Personally I know of no other place where I can get discussions on such a wide range of topics (AskHistorians, biking, my local neighbourhood) presented to me in a simple format. I hope there will be but I’m not holding my breath.
- ketzo 3y agoWhy would the vast majority of users stop using Reddit because of, to the average person, a totally meaningless policy change?
- chx 3y agoBecause who wants to engage with an inane nazi cesspit? We know what happens to unmoderated spaces.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
- khalladay 3y agoDoes subreddits going dark for 2 days matter? Seems like an insignificant ampunt of disruption to make much of a difference, or am I wrong?
- macintux 3y agoI don't know how widespread the sentiment is, but some mods have decided after the disastrous AMA that they're going dark indefinitely, until Reddit walks back the changes.
- mcjiggerlog 3y agoMany are now committing to either going dark indefinitely, or to reassess after the 14th, maybe with a poll to their members on how to proceed. This will definitely be going on for more than 2 days.
- jeffrallen 3y agoIf my Reddit communities are making polls, I won't even know to vote "keep it dark". I don't cross picket lines.
- afavour 3y agoDon’t you remember the Reddit net neutrality blackout? That did… uh… raise… awareness… kinda?
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoThey put an impressive amount of work into that site. There are notifications and an autoupdating counter, and even a livestream. https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247 https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
- valine 3y agoIt’s honestly better for subreddit discovery than anything reddit has made in the last 5 years. Off topic, but giant lists of things are seriously underrated. I’d speculate that a large majority of the sites with a “Recommended for you” section would be much better served by a giant list.
- mvdtnz 3y agoThe site is frequently breaking for me.
- capableweb 3y agoThere is a IRC channel for the same effect (useful as it uses less cpu, ram and bandwidth), #reddark at irc.hackint.org:6697, hanging out with the people from Archive Team too, who are achieving reddit at the moment (in #shreddit, same server) https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/reddark https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/reddark for a webclient
- EdwardDiego 3y agoDoesn't show the sub I mod though, and the search box isn't working for me.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWhat's the endgame here? Why even turn the subs back on? The admins have made their intentions clear enough, I think.
- guerrilla 3y agoIt's a demonstration of power; a sampler. This is a common strategy. You want to show them that you have the power so that serious negotiations can begin anew without disrupting the service you want to provide.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWhat power? Reddit can just takeover the subs and turn them back on.
- guerrilla 3y agoThe power of an organize and commit to a strike obviously. Reddit is nothing without mods. Going private is, as I said, just a sampler. The endgame would be for the mods to just leave if Reddit doesn't change course. This signals that that is a definite possibility since they've shown a. their unanimity of objection b. their ability to organize and c. their commitment to action.
- ben_w 3y agoAnd do they want to put in the same effort to curating those communities as the moderators there've just overruled? Communities can thrive or fail depending on who is in charge. (What happened with regard to the mod banning an artist because they thought their art looked like it came from an AI? Last I heard the artist was able to show their workflow but the mod was unwilling to back down…)
- 0xr0kk3r 3y agoThey'll just put the same effort in that Twitter does. Problem solved. No one has left twitter, despite Elon's tantrums. Do you really think CEOs care when their site has so much momentum and mods can be replaced in a snap?
- honksillet 3y agoLet’s hope Reddit consumes itself in this peer struggle.
- cm2012 3y agoUsually I am anti-internet stunts like this. The vast majority of boycotts are dumb wastes of time. That said, Reddit should have built better mod tools before making their api change. I think people complaining about not having 3rd party apps to browse reddit is "meh". But moderators need to be able to do their jobs.
- rany_ 3y agoBesides this boycott is at best useless, most are only going offline for 48 hours; it should be permanent until they reverse the decision if they were being sincere.
- BrotherBisquick 3y agoReddit mods are addicted to power. If they don't ban anyone for 48 hours, they get the shakes.
- joobus 3y agoThe third-party apps shutting down on July 1st will be the real test. If Reddit notices a significant drop in traffic on that day, they will probably start walking back the change. I agree that this boycott, while the intention is good, won't do much.
- MostlyStable 3y agoUnless a large number of people who don't use 3rd party apps also leave in solidarity, it won't be a "significant drop". 3rd party apps make up quite a small amount of total traffic. And that's also assuming that TPA users _leave_ and don't just switch.
- michaelmrose 3y agoIf you have 10,000 users you have 1000 commenters, 100 people posting, and 10 moderators. If you keep 97% of your users but you lost half your mods, 25% of your posters and 7% of your commenters its going to lead to an eventual decline bigger than 3% and it can create a self re-enforcing trend because the people contributing to other networks can drag their connections along with them.
- john-radio 3y agoTo self-reinforce my participation in the strike, I logged out of reddit and disabled Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Old.reddit Redirect add-ons, and looking at the front page without those improvements (which I'm sure a minority of users use) it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is for the uninitiated. For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.
- TX81Z 3y agoThe thing I think this conversation should be about is how horrible their site is. I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with disabilities and allow people who wouldn’t deal with their trash UX to still generate content for those who do. The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.
- nomel 3y ago> I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money What is this based on? All of the third party clients that I've used don't show reddit ads, so as long as I'm using the client, it's a cost sink for reddit. I don't contribute content.
- matteoraso 3y ago>For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone. The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money ruining their UI.
- barbazoo 3y agoI don't get it. If I log out and go to reddit.com I see it he "Popular" view with a pretty good looking UI, 4.5 "cards" per screen height, I don't think that's what someone could mean by > it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use. Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI? Am I looking at the wrong thing?
- rany_ 3y agoOh no, gone for 48-hours... That will show 'em! (meanwhile the Reddit IPO is in a few months..) It should be permanent if these boycotters want an effective outcome, but a 48-hours boycott sends the wrong message and just communicates that it is OK to do these sorts of shenanigans and all they will get a slap on the wrist.
- SCUSKU 3y agoGreat! For any other compulsive Reddit addicts out there with uBlock Origin installed, you can block Reddit as follows: Click uBlock Origin extension -> click gears -> click "My Filters" tab -> paste this line ||reddit.com^$all
- Marcan 3y agoThanks for the filter, very useful! I'm keeping this on until Reddit backtracks.
- true_blue 3y agoIt seems like you can just add "reddit.com" to "My Filters", and it still works.
- albert_e 3y agois there a way to achieve this on Android Chrome? that's my prime gateway i found myself unconsciously opening reddit.com and starting to scroll and consume content mindlessly ... only to realize after a few seconds that it happened... and then closing the browser I suspected i had a habit ...but only realizing now the autopilot effect of it
- Riffz 3y agoOh god me too. Doom scrolling habit for sure. I had to remove the Apollo icon from my Home Screen to force myself to take part in the protest.
- king_magic 3y agoMy prediction is that the “strike” will be utterly useless. It will usher in the era of full-spectrum AI moderation faster. The world will keep turning, and most Reddit users simply won’t care that much. Cynical take? Certainly. I think this was always doomed to failure through eventual apathy. Do I want it to fail? Of course not, but it feels as poorly thought out as Occupy Wall Street did.
- king_magic 3y agoAs I predicted, nothing has happened or changed. Entirely useless “protest”.
- baby 3y agoThis is so sad. I hope Reddit doesn’t die, because there’s nothing to replace it, but I also hope that it stops all the horrible decisions it’s been taking in the last like 5 years? I miss the old reddit.
- drumhead 3y agoThe cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app. Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour, creativity, stories, humour, talent, wisdom, advice, skills of their users to try and make themselves billionaires whilst delivering a hopeless piece of tech in return, thats only been made useable by others people writing software to make the site bearable, Reddit Enhancement suite, Apollo, RIF. And yet here they are ready to make it rubbish again to get their filthy lucre. The more I think about it the more infuriated I get.
- WXLCKNO 3y agoI found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees. I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible
- drexlspivey 3y agoThey raised $250m 2 years ago and have tripled their workforce since. Now they're losing money of course but why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money recently?
- civilitty 3y agoEveryone wants to cash out before the ship sinks.
- rossriley 3y ago2000 employees at an average cost of 200k / year is a $400m a year burn rate. If they're not breaking even with revenue then that money starts to run out quite quickly.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago> why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money Venture capital funds are for a limited time - e.g. five years. At the end of the time, the fund is liquidated - the companies are either sold, or closed down. They can sell to another round of VC funding, sell to a competitor (who wants to "acquihire" the team), or by IPO.
- balozi 3y agoReddit has been purging subs and users with reckless abandon for some time now as they cleaned up the place in the name of "community safety" (aka advertisers). I guess the monetized government kids that stayed believ(ed) they were the good ones, the worthy ones. If y'all think it will end at the API changes, you'll be sorely be disappointed.
- yanderekko 3y ago>I guess the monetized government kids that stayed believ(ed) they were the good ones, the worthy ones. Yep, this is the great irony. When capitalist logic was being used to justify Reddit going after hate speech, powerusers loved it. When it's being used to justify closing API access, they hate it and the rhetoric shifts entirely. We'll see the same thing when Reddit starts tightening the screws further on NSFW content as well.
- Eisenstein 3y ago> When capitalist logic was being used to justify Reddit going after hate speech, powerusers loved it. So, being anti-hate-speech is a bad thing, to you?
- yanderekko 3y agoHypocrisy is a bad thing to me. "No bad tactics, only bad targets" is a bad thing to me.
- Eisenstein 3y agoIf your principles were used as a lever to undermine your principles would you still adhere to them? You seem to be very principled but from what you have written so far you don't seem to acknowledge or understand that some people operate in bad faith. This comes across particularly when you state that people should operate within reddit's rules but neglect to take into account that reddit is not adhering to the rules themselves and that this is a breach of any ability to have a civil relationship. This is also frequently the case with the loud 'free speech' cries by 'bad targets'. Many of them have no intention of ever giving anyone who disagrees with them the same offer. How do you deal with people like that except to disregard them entirely?
- neilv 3y agoMaybe Reddit can turn a this-could-be-a-Digg-moment to their advantage, in increased appeal to users, and maybe investors... Given lots of revolutionary-lite public sentiment in recent years... when some other platforms are in the news for abusing and neglecting users, and the users being impotent property... Reddit ownership could renew its aura of empowered community of people with agency. While Reddit still owns it, yet looks like corporate is aligned with "the people", and not a doormat for backing down. I don't know the exact messaging to nail this optimally, nor how to reconcile that with revenue and investor optics goals (but a bunch of mainstream news newly muttering about supplanting Twitter, and a burst of adoption, can't hurt). My gut feel is that it could work, and I'm guessing that Reddit, of all companies, probably still has the institutional DNA to swing it better than most. (Disclaimer: Am computers expert, not people expert.)
- CostcoFanboy 3y agoI fund Squabbles.io to be EXTREMELY promising. I have no stake in it. I just really dig the simplicity, format, layout, etc.
- paulpauper 3y agoThis is why strikes are not that effective unless everyone does it. A handful of subs striking for a few days out of hundreds of big subs is not going to change anything. But sub-level Reddit censorship has gotten so bad over the past 5 years I find it hard to muster much sympathy, tbh . I try to share links or make posts and half to 3/4 of them are removed even when trying to follow the guidelines perfectly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LanceH 3y agoThe strike is less meaningful when imposed by moderators enforcing it. It's not simply a boycott of those using the app, which would be proportional. Moderators are dragging a lot of other people along with them that may not share the same opinions. I'm scratching my head that the general attitude seems to be that Reddit just shouldn't get paid.
- edgarvaldes 3y agoThe subs I follow made a poll, I'm fine with that, even knowing not everyone voted.
- skilled 3y agoAre you implying the new Reddit design is cheaper to maintain than the old one?
- _b 3y agoI think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make that data junk for awhile to make a statement?
- ec109685 3y agoThat anomalous behavior would be easy to filter out, especially given they have protections against brigading.
- wvenable 3y agoIf nobody upvotes anything you can't protect against that.
- orev 3y agoI suspect Reddit already has protections in place against this type of coordinated attack, as it would look exactly like when a whole sub (or 4chan) decides to brigade another sub for some other reason. There’s probably a hidden limit somewhere that when you downvote too many things at once, those vote become shadow-votes that don’t really count anymore.
- _b 3y agoThat is a good point. Are there modifications to the voting strike idea that would make it effective? For instance, what do you think about an "inverted-voting" strike instead? Everyone on strike does things roughly as normal, but swapping most of their down votes for up votes, and visa-versa? That way, people on strike will continue to vote about the same amount as before, and in the same subeditors as before, so it would be harder to identify them. The hope would be that although Reddit could do work to clean up the voting data, it would be annoying & take time, and presumably still end up as significantly lower quality data than they had before.
- mcintyre1994 3y ago
- jimmytucson 3y agoFor the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1]. For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/jmmptma https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/... [2] https://www.reddit.com/premium https://www.reddit.com/premium
- princevegeta89 3y agoI don't see why the fuck anyone would buy reddit Premium. Enough with these subscriptions;
- dybber 3y agoIf it gave you the possibility to use other apps than the official? I think people would want to do that.
- justinhj 3y agoThe business model being, we make a client so bad that you will willingly give us money to not use it.
- thepasswordis 3y agoMaybe if I could then bypass the ridiculous rules some mods put on their subreddits I would. Imagine paying for Spotify, and then some ego tripping power nanny decides you aren’t allowed to listen to some of the music. It’s absurd. The lex Friedman subreddit especially is like this. The number of people banned from that sub for simply disagreeing with Lex is ridiculous. Why on earth would I pay for something like that?
- microtonal 3y agoYeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API requests their users are going to make and if they underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also, it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly, especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX. If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium? Reddit gets more premium subscribers and clients don't have to deal with all the complexities of how to handle API request prices. It reeks of just wanting to destroy third-party clients in favor of their own (terrible) client.
- causality0 3y agoHas anybody done a writeup on the old vs new API costs compared to what it actually costs Reddit to provide the service? How is Reddit still not profitable?
- DarkmSparks 3y agoHaving watched literally hundreds of sites rise and fall over the last 3 decades. All I can say is this mess is not the exciting show it seems to be. Quite frankly I'm most surprised reddit made it this far.
- endisneigh 3y agoDoubt anything will come of this, but Reddit will probably not miss these folks. I’ll see them on the new site
- mikerg87 3y agoI just can’t imagine this is the Reddit that Aaron Swartz would have wanted
- fhsm 3y agoWhen this happened my thoughts also turned to Aaron. I had not thought about him in some time. It made me sad note that, to think of where we and of all we have done without and why that is so. Context for those who missed it: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/02/20/carmen-ortiz-investigation https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/02/20/carmen-ortiz-investigat... I think of Sci-hub and Alexandra are the continuation of Aarons fatal push: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan Ongoing attention on the circumstances: https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz-carmen-ortiz/ https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...
- justinhj 3y agoForgive me if I'm making a simplistic reading of this, but it seems the CEO has said that whilst apps and bots are making some good money, Reddit is losing money. Assuming Reddit has already taken cost saving measures (with 2000 staff maybe not), then how can they continue as a business losing money? I wonder if a model would work where all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself, and they do a 30% revenue share with the apps?
- anonred 3y ago> all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself How does this work with IAP and ads? Or do you mean that only Reddit Premium users should have access to third party apps? Because that would be much more expensive than the $2.50/mo that people are riled up about with the new API pricing.
- justinhj 3y agoI would say that making money from sites content by putting it somewhere else with your own ads is simply not allowed. What I would allow is you to charge a subscription to use the api which goes to Reddit and you get some cut like 30%.
- Monotoko 3y agoApps were always willing to pay money for their usage, but not the insane pricing Reddit put in front of them ($12k for 50 million calls)
- 3y ago
- graiz 3y agoRemember IRC? /alt/? We just needed IRC clients but instead we got Digg and Reddit.
- darkstar999 3y agoApples to oranges. I’m not interested in live chat.
- aendruk 3y agoScreenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbjkWVyHEhwkwCZ6yfTEkz9fM1Sjab5FN674LvgDfeZx6 https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmbjkWVyHEhwkwCZ6yfTEkz9fM1... The live site has been difficult to reach. (https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/issues/49 https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/issues/49)
- xwdv 3y agoWhat is the point of making a subreddit private for 48 hours? If approved members of a subreddit can still read and post, why not just leave the subreddits private indefinitely? Is public access really that important for some reason? This feels toothless. It feels like making your Instagram profile private as a form of protest.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoThe website [0] appears to be down right now for me. Overload, or legal troubles? [0]: https://reddark.untone.uk/ https://reddark.untone.uk/
- GaggiX 3y agoKnowing the dev behind the site, he got 11k connections, the RAM finished and the server went down. It must be a pretty stressful coding session now.
- low_tech_punk 3y agoI’d consider it a brand damage to Cloudflare too. Their CDN clearly couldn’t offload the sever traffic. Ideally they should just serve stale content while server recovers.
- aendruk 3y agos/couldn’t/wasn’t configured to/. It’s not magic.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nabakin 3y agoIf anyone is interested in how many of the top 250 subreddits are participating, I created a website for it here https://save3rdpartyapps.com/ https://save3rdpartyapps.com/
- low_tech_punk 3y agoThinking on how to forward from here. Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem? Instead of raising API price, what if Reddit injects ADs as real content for non premium API calls, so those API free riders/crawlers would get ADs indistinguishable from content. Well intended apps like Apollo could allow users to provide their premium identity and get AD free content. If this works, Reddit could even lower the price of premium account thanks to increase in AD revenue. Also, I believe Reddit should share ADs revenue with subreddits moderators. This would truly align the incentive of all parties.
- TX81Z 3y agoThe age of adtech as the dominant technology revenue model is drawing to a close and Reddit missed out on the golden age. Trying to make ads work now, when it’s clear the future is subscriptions and the like, is just dumb.
- rchaud 3y agoOnly Google and FB figured out ads, and they were planet-scale companies. Twitter pulled in ad revenue but couldn't make a profit. Reddit's audience is extremely hostile to ads, and they've never managed to attract big advertisers anyway.
- TX81Z 3y agoAnd they haven’t figured out a way to do it *legally*. Both are getting fined more by the day in the EU and fending off more class lawsuits than you can believe in the USA. Once you take away the “grossly illegal activity” dividend neither is nearly as rosy as it seems.
- belinder 3y agoAmazon?
- jachee 3y agoAside for my own curiosity: Why do you capitalize the word `ad` like that? It’s not an acronym, it’s an abbreviation; short for `advertisement`.
- hker999 3y agoIronically, /antiwork is not on strike
- surgical_fire 3y agoDoing a strike is perhaps too much work. ... I'll see myself out.
- ChocMontePy 3y agoI have to hand it to those app devs. The way they managed to dupe millions of Redditors into protesting was masterful. They didn't produce any good evidence that the new API price is excessive (some cherry-picking here, a deceptive comparison there) but they still managed to convince 99% of Reddit that it was true anyway. Bravo! It was a beautiful exercise in propaganda and the delusion of crowds.
- poisonborz 3y agoIt has nothing to do with the amount of the price, the scheme (charge per request, not /user/month) makes third party apps impossible on purpose. Not to say that this abrupt and unannounced dumping of beloved community apps is just the latest misstep of a long string of anti-user moves from Reddit. They had it coming, but their estimation is that a large majority will keep silent. Let's see - Twitter had also not truly crashed yet on their grand way to profitability...
- ChocMontePy 3y agoIf it made 3rd party apps impossible, then all or most of them would have announced they were shutting down by now. In fact, only three have done so. The rest are still trying to work out the economics. I expect that quite a few will survive, despite people saying it is "impossible."
- skilled 3y agoDo let us know about the math, once you are done with it.
- coufu 3y agoEven if the API price was reasonable, Reddit only gave 3rd party apps 30 days to prepare. You can’t come up with a decent pricing model, billing infrastructure, and incorporate the logic in your app in that amount of time. It’s just overall very hostile and unreasonable from Reddit leadership. The biggest apps are forced to shut down because if they stay up, the millions of dollars in bills are going to start flooding in.
- dubeye 3y agoI've never used a reddit 3rd party app or mod. Do they make up a large percentage of users? What leverage do users have here, any?
- unclekev 3y ago> Do they make up a large percentage of users? About 3% > What leverage do users have here None
- fho 3y agoHonestly ... If it would not be for the campaign and media coverage ... I would not have noticed that anything has changed.
- paulddraper 3y agoHug of death
- OldManRyan 3y agoThere's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong. Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a power user. If you moderate a subreddit, you're probably a power user. If those power users go away then you lose a large swath of content and moderation which negatively affects the regular users at other parts of the curve. It is not going to be immediate but this is reddit slowly bleeding itself to death.
- themagician 3y agoMost of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it because—surprise—they ban those people. Honestly, the mod structure on reddit needs to change. This protest will almost 100% backfire. If it actually impacts revenue the admins will just ban a few dozen mods and the protest will, effectively, be over. Users will probably be better off for it too. The oppressive moderation that happens on reddit is not necessary. The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people post what they want and vote on it.
- altonas 3y agoI'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll have you blacklisted from modding other subs". That same exact mod on multiple occasions has deleted my posts from subs he mods, just to reupload them for karma himself. I don't even care about the karma, I just wish mods wouldn't delete my posts that don't break any rules in any way, shape, or form, especially when it's for blatant karma farming. If you look around Google you can even find several posts of subreddits getting "liberated" of this particular multi sub mod... Something needs to change so this stops happening
- golemotron 3y agoWouldn't boycott be a better word than strike?
- coufu 3y agoI think boycott is more passive. Like I’m not gonna use or support their product. This strike includes moderators actively locking down subreddits (whether making them private or read only) thus making Reddit less usable during the strike.
- DantesKite 3y agoThis would work better if there was a viable competitor to Reddit. As it stands, there doesn't seem to be anywhere for these people to go, so they'll likely come back after a few days. Habits are hard to break. Habits are a moat too.
- eksapsy 3y agoStrike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life". Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do you know what message that sends? What would you think if your customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm coming for the rest of the year" ? Would you give a damn? Reddit is a commodity. Admittedly a great one. Used to be at least. We'll create another one or they'll fix themselves, but they won't unless they know you're not going to use them unless they fix themselves. No strike is successful unless you actually make them understand that they can't live without you or that ••AT LEAST* that you're doing your part. Like, is reddit scared of me deleting my account? I think it doesn't give a damn. Is reddit gonna give a damn if another 100k accounts start getting deleted along with mine? At least they're gonna start noticing. And at least I can say that I've done my part. Ive deleted my reddit account and I'm done with Reddit. Until they fix themselves and realize that acting that greedy and immaturely with lies about conversations that never happened between the Apollo programmer and /u/spez are not gonna pass. At least not from me, i'm fairly disgusted by the Reddit leadership.
- jachee 3y agoFWIW, Many of the participating subs are going dark indefinitely. And the real APIcalypse will happen in a couple of weeks, when people actually using third party apps literally can’t anymore.
- arthens 3y agoIndefinitely until reddit picks new moderators and reopen them. No way they'll allow major subs closing down.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoYes but there are too many big subs closing. My guess is they couldn't support more than a couple dozen on their own.
- 3y ago
- nunez 3y agohell yeah. burn baby burn. i fucking love reddit but i'd rather it die by implosion than see it live long enough to become slashdot
- sva_ 3y agoIt seems that the site broke down and now redirects to a Twitch stream > Can I watch the website myself! > Afraid not, our site recently broke down due to the amount of requests, and for the time being we've resorted to livestreaming it. When traffic dies down we'll put it back up.
- unclekev 3y ago> It seems that the site broke down and now redirects to a Twitch stream Probably had to shut the database instance down once they exceeded the AWS free tier limits and realised that internet infrastructure actually costs real money and doesn't run on magical free fairy dust like the protesters seem to think.
- dahwolf 3y agoThis could be Spez's Stalin moment. Ban these conspiring power mods and take over their subreddits with willing volunteers. Let the free-loading Apollo app expire and persist with the new API pricing. I bet this seemingly cruel series of actions would actually improve Reddit. Reddit has a whiny upper class of power mods that take a little too much joy in watching something burn. Show them who's boss. Call the bluff.
- jcpsimmons 3y agoWho cares? Redditors are really too much. Hoping that everything has a good resolution only because I don’t want Redditors fleeing to other sites that are (blissfully) free of their “culture”. Already have seen an unfortunate influx of them on this site.
- sourcecodeplz 3y agoMy website, my rules, my API prices. Don't like go somewhere else. Ez pez.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoAs I’ve continued to repeat, a change in user preference (mostly from one ideology) is to blame for this. Reddit went from pretty much complete free speech to one of the most censored websites in existence. Huge portions of America now prefer censorship so Reddit has in essence created a moat for themselves. If Americans were more accepting of all speech like before, Reddit clones would be easy to switch to. Now, you’re not only battling new censorship standards, but good luck getting on the IOS and Android store as a free speech forum. On top of that, there are political benefits to this censorship. So that adds even more defense to the moat.
- miniBill 3y agoNo? This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or censorship. What are you on about? [nitpicky note: it's iOS, not IOS - the latter being Cisco's one]
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoIf the original Reddit popped up today it would be rejected by most users for allowing certain content, and rejected by all marketplace stores for the same thing. This in turn gives Reddit much more control and a very powerful moat.
- discardedrefuse 3y agoReddit didn't censor itself because Americans are not accepting of free speech. Reddit started censoring itself to appease corporate overlords. And the only reason those corpos embrace censorship is to stay out of the political crosshairs. How long did /r/jailbait exist before getting shutdown in 2011...and only because it was featured on Anderson Cooper?
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoMy point was even given an alternative, most users agree with and support the censorship. This in effect discredits almost any alternative by the user base itself, thus giving Reddit control.
- seydor 3y agoMy subs are up though
- constantly 3y agoSmall subreddits are largely not participating. Large subreddits I just browse from the All or Popular. I’m thinking if the large subreddits don’t inject things into the All subreddit than largely identical content will be injected and this will be a blip as small as the last protest that only saw the main subreddit names change and nothing more.
- DowsingSpoon 3y agoThis whole fiasco leaves me shocked and surprised. I never considered that Reddit would sink themselves this way. It’s incredible. Until the AMA, I really had hope they’d back off and implement a sane API pricing model. That apps like Apollo would survive, diminished, and things would mostly continue on business-as-usual. But now, well, that’s it I guess. It’s been a long, slow decline, but I guess this is the end of the road.
- seydor 3y agoHonestly good riddance to most of the mainstream subreddits with powertripping mods. The same people have been moderating for free (because they are power-addicted) for more than decade and this is a good opportunity to start new subreddits. Could it be that reddit actually wants the 'strike' to shake up the stagnant subreddit/moderation situation which hasnt changed for so long? If any of you is starting new subs, please post them here. It's more likely they will be better than the tired old ones This is one of the dumbest reddit protests and that s a high bar to cross
- darkstar999 3y ago> Could it be that reddit actually wants the 'strike' to shake up the stagnant subreddit/moderation situation Not likely. Reddit already controls the r/popular feed which is the default experience and highly influences traffic.
- andruby 3y agoHave the makers of the 3rd party clients considered creating a reddit clone? Technically that’s not too hard. Moreover, these clients have a large user base. Some even have revenue. I guess the most tricky part is content moderation. Has this been discussed or proposed anywhere?
- raverbashing 3y agoOne "easier" middle ground is that if they would work on aggressive caching of requests and then maybe building a "shadow reddit" in the background You could make your Api usage go really down this way
- gigglesupstairs 3y agoAs an example, Apollo has around 50k paying members currently. Even if we say 10% are really hardcore ones and will jump ship (and not just use Reddit’s default app which is decent if not feature rich), how many of those 10% will still retain Reddit as a parallel app, and how many of those will get frustrated very fast because growth is very hard in this space owing to federated nature of upcoming social networks and growing personal server costs and the time it will take for that social network to become mature like reddit. Will the remaining ones who stuck with the new ship and probably brought new members as well as part of scaling, be enough to generate enough revenue for those apps to continue investing in the new social network? Also, what I have understood with these Reddit 3rd party app developers - seeing multiple ones over the years from Alien Blue to Readit to Apollo - is that these guys are pretty good at understanding complexity and solving it via their good designs but a social network is not just all this as we have seen with Reddit itself and now twitter. It’s about moderation, nurturing communities, formulating effective user friendly policies across communities and much more. Which none of these app developers have experience with.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davemp 3y agoI’m planning to build up an RSS feed or two to stay up to date with the niches I go to reddit for and supplementing with discord when I want to read general comments. I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits has tanked over time.
- htag 3y ago> I’m actually somewhat excited because the quality of most subreddits have tanked over time. People have been complaining about decreasing quality of content on reddit since the beginning of reddit.
- Cannabat 3y agoIt’s true, though - over the past few years especially. Substantial rise in spam, paid accounts trying to sell you on some product or service, direct message solicitation, bots with political motivations… it really has gone downhill recently.
- CodeWriter23 3y ago[shrugs] the mods will be deleted and replaced with a Mechanical Turk style outsourcing system.
- dehrmann 3y agoOne of the magic things about reddit was it was acquired by Condé Nast very early in its life. They didn't know what to do with it, so it was a bit neglected. That meant most of the time was spent on high-priority scaling issues, and there wasn't time to squeeze it for money. This helped with organic growth because the users were real and engaged. The downside was they didn't have resources to develop good first-party apps, and ended up depending on third-party developers for that.
- Eisenstein 3y agoThey bought a good third-party app, turned it first-party, and destroyed it. Seems that they had resources enough to do that.
- dehrmann 3y agoIt takes resources to ruin tech products. There's a happy median between neglect and manufacturing growth and ruining something in the process.
- elsewhere7868 3y ago[dead]
- saos 3y agoJust deleted the app. Not returning until Reddit undo this stupid decision.
- cprecioso 3y agoI saw r/kpop in the list. You better not anger the most powerful collective in the internet.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- moomoo11 3y agoHopefully this starts a "battery" approach to dealing with APIs, 3rd party apps, keys and a way for end users to quickly and seamlessly sign up to use services via 3rd party apps. Why not.. 1. User installs 3rd party app 2. You accept reddit TOS, an API key is attached to your account. It could even be integrated into apple/android keys or user subscription models. You pay either directly to reddit or via your payments to the 3rd party app service fees This could work for so many use cases. Why should developers need to do think about all this nonsense like key rotation, constantly changing pricing models, using round robin API key rotation because you're hitting limits with one key, etc. Devs should just set up the experience so users can bring their own battery and plug in to start playing. Just provide the backend. Let devs build cool 3rd party apps around it. Each user can just get their own API key that's tied to them, either simple case like the reddit account, or its part of the apple id subscriptions + keychain. Everyone makes money. Everyone gets to learn programming or whatever the fuck makes them make 3rd party experiences. Everyone can just be happy.
- corrigible 3y agoThis still needs a network effect to get started
- moomoo11 3y agoYeah true, that's why Reddit doing it would be kinda interesting (they won't).
- _dan 3y agoThat doesn’t sound very far away from how Apollo/etc work today - you authenticate the app with Reddit via oauth and it accesses the api as you. Reddit already implements some features only when you’ve paid (eg you get access to the lounge when you have gold active), so I don’t imagine it would be a massive stretch to just prevent all access to the api to users without gold. Though it does prompt the question of why they took the path they have, instead of trying to charge users. I guess their goal is really to get rid of 3rd party clients.
- ayakang31415 3y agoI feel like one day blackout is going to have an opposite impact as it might give Reddit a false idea that no matter what they do people will eventually come. Instead of one day, if people were doing it for a few months, it will be effective. But we know that is not going to happen.
- AlbertCory 3y agoWe know about reddark, but is there a list of the subs that are consciously not participating?
- internetter 3y agoconsciously? no, but here are the largest subreddits still public: https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/ https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/
- MrPatan 3y agoReddit has been doing a great job for my use case. Since I decided to quit it a few years ago they've made so many absurd changes that every time I land on it by chance I can't make head or tails of it, can't find the post, the comments, nothing. It works great!
- dom96 3y agoI honestly didn't expect this from Reddit. It seems like investors are really tightening their grip and they are banning subreddits and long-time users who oppose these changes left and right. I built a free API emulating the Reddit API[1]. It was returning the same data as the existing publicly accessible .json endpoints on reddit.com (for example https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps.json https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps.json). They not only blocked my requests, but also banned the subreddit I created and my 13 years old personal Reddit account (permanently!). 1 - https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com
- thefourthchime 3y agoWow, that’s a low blow. These guys seem to hate their fan base.
- bink 3y agoI don't know of any site that will allow someone to set up a "secondary" API where they proxy all user requests, especially if they're using a variation of a trademark.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThat wasn’t the low blow they were referring to. Sending a C&D is standard. Banning a 13 year account isn’t.
- aprilnya 3y agoyeah but deleting the creator’s account is uncool
- MicropenisMike 3y ago[flagged]
- Double_a_92 3y agoI like the message is You have been banned "for breaking reddit." Not the reddit terms and conditions, just reddit itself :D
- temporallobe 3y agoYet another heavy-handed action taken by out-of-touch leadership who doesn’t seem to grasp their very reason for existing - their customers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phoe-krk 3y agoIf the website does not load for you because of HTTP 502 or other timeouts, there is a Twitch stream at https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247 https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247 showing the protest live.
- natebc 3y agoI've dropped (\.|^)reddit\.com$ into my pihole block list to avoid any accidental visits during the strike. I'll really miss a couple of the good communities I've found there if this adventure ends up being fatal.
- ZachSaucier 3y agoIt'd be nice if there was a count of the total # of subscribers across all of the subreddits that have gone dark
- stOneskull 3y agoif the site loads for you, the number is there. last i looked it was over 2 billion.
- Hary06 3y ago[flagged]
- cactusplant7374 3y agoReddit has gone downhill. My notifications are filled with only fans spam accounts that are now following me. Is reddit even safe for younger folks or folks at the office?
- nikkihahaha 3y ago[flagged]
- barelysapient 3y agoIf these protestors wanted to really impact Reddit, they’d also boycott all Reddit advertisers after a certain date.
- predictabl3 3y agoI was on reddit 17 years. Needless to say, I have emotions. Reddark, the Twitch stream, the Discord, the Lemmings instances popping up, the way people are talking about this situation. I'm so sad, and so FREAKING PROUD.
- gamesbrainiac 3y agoWhat is a good alternative to reddit?
- ryukoposting 3y agoThis is an atrocious experience on mobile, but a fantastic website regardless.
- internetguy 3y agoWe're making HISTORY here. Massive kudos to all the redditors that are participating.
- MrMan 3y ago[dead]
- liberty-DNBWM 3y agoThis is ridiculous. I couldn't speak for all subreddits. But for some of the subreddits I loved, it just shows how ignorant, arrogant and dictatorial they are. Those moderators didn't contribute to the value of the subreddits. They don't provide any valuable content at all. How can they move subreddits to private without approval from creators? This is fucking ridiculous.
- john-radio 3y agoThat's exactly the question that all of the rest of us have about the reddit admins demanding millions of dollars from the app developers with a month's worth of notice. Why on earth are you criticizing the moderators? Have you never heard of the concept of a strike?
- jimbob45 3y agoA strike hurts the company's owners primarily - much less so the company's consumers. This primarily hurts the company's users and does virtually nothing to the owners. Even worse, it highlights the dictatorial power reddit mods wield to be able to unilaterally decide to shut down their boards. Don't hurt the people you want on your side.
- unclekev 3y ago> Why on earth are you criticizing the moderators? Because 99 days out of 100 the majority of people including Redditors hate Reddit mods for being power tripping egomaniacs who actively censor any discussion that they don't agree with. It's a literal meme at this point how bad Reddit mods are - but today they are the 'heroes' because it suits the narrative. It's amazing how many people have bought into the mods agenda regarding this whole 'strike'
- 2devnull 3y agoI just hope they don’t come here and Reddit the place up.
- jshen 3y agoThe strikers need to turn to the fediverse, open protocol systems, otherwise what’s the end game?
- stevenwliao 3y agoIs the fediverse ready for 9 digit MAU?
- jshen 3y agoI have two different answers to this, one technical and the other about power and leverage. 1. Technical. I don't think it's apples to apples. You don't need a single You don't need a single fediverse instance to handle 9 digit MAUs, and if you think of each subreddit as a different instance of a fedi-server then I think it would hold up, and I'm sure it could with some work. 2. Social: I don't think the strike/black out will succeed in any significant way unless the mods have more leverage. Threatening to go fedi, and starting to do it for some of the subreddits, will dramatically change the power dynamics. As a thought experiment, game out the current situation. Reddit needs to make money, and if they want to IPO (i am anti IPO but that's not my choice) then they will also be expected to grow exponentially. They can't do that with third party apps that don't show ads so they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The community very much wants to have these communities, and everyone knows that. If they can stick to the strike it's mutual self-destruction but from reddits perspecgive given in is also self destruction. The CEO is right, the community likely won't be able to maintain it for all kinds of reasons. The main one being reddit can just make the subs public again if they want to. So what leverage do they have? None if reddit believes their only option is reddit.
- stevenwliao 3y agoIf we imagine, say, /r/funny as a Fediserver, it'll need to be ready for 8 figure MAU, if not 9. You make a good point about leverage.
- jshen 3y ago
- ForOldHack 3y agoLogged on, down voted everything I could find, left quickly. Lets see what it looks like next Monday.
- sacnoradhq 3y agoReddit was 99% awful and this won't make it any better. If you want change, vote with your eyes and go elsewhere out of reach of absurdity.
- pkju62dqmx 3y agoI scrubbed and deleted my account. I’m done. They will have to make major changes in their trajectory for me to consider making a new account. It’s even less about the API changes than the way that they treated Christian Selig, a CEO throwing an indie dev in the mud like he did is disgusting and doesn’t give me hope for the site improving for anyone other than investors and advertisers.
- zouhair 3y agoThis actually makes me sad. Over the year Reddit became a treasure trove of great and diverse information and thinking it could just disappear like that makes me so sad.
- jackdh 3y agoA large amount of it (I think they were going for all) has been saved by /r/datahoarder. So I wouldn't worry about it disappearing. It'll likely end up on archive.org at some point.
- hiepph 3y agoYeah, sites like Reddit (or Youtube) makes me believe there is still hope in (knowledgeable) social media. But the situation right now in Reddit is purely chaotic.
- newqer 3y agoIs there a good way to scrub automatically? My account is almost 10 years and it seems like a good time to end. I did it with MySpace, Tumbler and Facebook before and I never looked back.
- pkju62dqmx 3y agoI used [shreddit](https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit) in an endless bash loop until it had overwritten and removed everything.
- acyou 3y agoIf we think we don't care about Reddit because we don't use the site, we should probably care. The future of Reddit may have a wide-ranging impact on the future of the Internet as a whole. Will content be created and consumed in walled gardens, or easily linked? Will AI-generated content flood forums and stifle meaningful discussion? Will moderation become an AI task instead of a human task? The Reddit protest does not stand alone and is not caused by u/spez or Reddit management or whatever. There is a vastly broader context here. What will be the lasting effects of a migration away from Reddit, or of a management change, or of a structural change in how this and other websites are administered? I couldn't care less about Reddit because I don't use it and don't like the posts and discussion on there. At the same time, I do care, because I know many of the Reddit users and moderators are also probably going to end up here, and for the above reasons.
- fritobugger 3y agoI am here for the first time because of the reddit strike.
- acyou 3y agoI would also like to add that the dark side of this protest seems to be the "walled garden"-ization of Reddit. It's entirely possible that post-protest, the website or particular sections of the site and users will continue on in a Private mode where accounts, authentication, credentials, verification are required for creating and consuming content to a larger extent than before, and content is not visible or linkable to or from this and other sites. That will probably have a knock-on effect across the entire Internet. If users start to accept, for instance, account creation as the cost for entry for consuming content, the Internet will become a very different place. Reddit is one of the only big sites where you don't need an account to consume content, and there are tons of links in and out of the website. Is that about to change?
- inamberclad 3y agoOf course, this is why decentralized alternatives like Mastodon have an advantage. There's no equivalent group of managers to make such a horrible decision.
- fayazara 3y agoI wonder how Aaron woupd have reacted to this descision.
- pwpw 3y agoWith users deleting their comments, Reddit reducing API access, and other trends such as moving discussions behind Discord, this certainly feels like a Library of Alexandria moment: a gradual decline of loss of knowledge. Hopefully we can find a way to better store the wealth of knowledge that has been shared over the internet.
- motoxpro 3y agoScrolling and seeing all of the green here makes me so happy that so many people can come together to do something they believe in. Brings me back to early internet. Very very very cool.
- jimbob45 3y agoThis probably seemed like a good idea to everyone but I absolutely hate everyone partaking in this now. I was previously on the "fuck reddit" side but this has eroded all of my goodwill. Frustrating the people you want to support you rarely works.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoNothing will come out of this, in the same way that nothing came out of the “walkouts” on Facebook’s wall redesign and Instagram’s feed redesign from chronological to algorithmically-curated. And as a matter of fact user engagement increased with those changes.
- btnews 3y ago[dead]
- btnews 3y ago[dead]
- gareve 3y agoGreat Visualization! My perception was that only 10% of the subs were going to go private. At the time of this comment, 87% of reddits are private
- cjs_ac 3y agoThat's only 87% of subreddits that announced participation in the strike. The remaining 13% have gone read-only.
- unclekev 3y ago> My perception was that only 10% of the subs were going to go private There's 3.5 million subs. Less than 8000 are participating in the 'blackout' That's 87% of ~8000, not the whole of Reddit.
- JaceLightning 3y agoReddit died a long time ago. It's just a cesspool of one-sided arguments.
- bella001 3y ago[dupe]
- jrochkind1 3y ago> others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, Without a very clear statement of demands -- what it would take to end the action -- that everyone (or at least majority) of those participating understand and agree too -- it makes this even less effective as a form of pressure. Those planning on going away "unless the issue is adequately addressed", what does that mean? Completely ending and reverting all plans to charge for API? That's not what they say, they say "adequately addressed", so that probably isnt' consensus (and probably isn't winnable? Or reasonable?). Making the charges some kind of reasonable... so every mod just decides on their own if any change announced is "adequate" or not? What makes a boycott most likely to be effective as a pressure tactic is if the target knows exactly what they have to do to end the boycott, and has some confidence that if they do it the boycott will indeed end. Now, whether this is actually winnable here (and via this tactic) is another question, but you might as well do your best if you're trying it. I feel like at least some of the people participating in this boycott are just sick of reddit (and the internet, and society) and would be just as happy to see it burn though. There's very little discussion of strategy and tactics in this thread -- how we can actually win, when organizing collectively for collective demands. If we want to be able to win, it's a good thing to think and talk about, not just react instinctively.
- alsargent 3y agoMaybe this is a dumb question... but why doesn't Reddit lower its API prices to a point that Apollo and other app developers can afford? Plenty of other companies have figured out how to price APIs in a way that works for developers: AWS, Twilio, Stripe, Okta, MongoDB, and Plaid, to name a few. It's not like these companies aren't making money with their API pricing; they've all generated enough in revenues and profits to drive their valuations into multiple billions of dollars. It's as if Reddit didn't do the basic work of rolling out API pricing: talk to customers, find price points they can live with, offer prioritized customer support in exchange for API charges, etc. Literally hundreds of software companies have followed this playbook, and have rolled out API prices without drama. Am I missing something here?
- sylens 3y agoThey likely don't want third party apps at all, but this is the method they thought would be more palatable than just coming out and saying that. They want to control the experience end-to-end, like Twitter and Discord.