8 ms·

at this point, there is only 1 way to save reddit, and it's so drastic that they wont do it because the ones who need to do it are too blind or too far away

• perryh2 3y ago
  you missed the big one: kill the IPO
• matsemann 3y ago
  Or they can continue their failed attempts at using chatgpt to astroturf a counter-movement, lol: https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg Edit, some context: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/comment/jnsfcfi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/commen... (spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming, hence it still being up)
  • nikau 3y ago
    How Do You Do Fellow Kids, that allegation is clearly false.
  • MortimerDukePhD 3y ago
    > spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming How is it possible that these companies are still run like an immature dorm room shitshow? Are there no separation of duties? The CEO should not have admin access to anything (the very least for security purposes).
    • alexruf 3y ago
      I guess you brought it right to the point: Reddit has never grown to a company it’s „dorm room shitshow“
      • madeofpalk 3y ago
        Isn't "reddit isn't a real company, it's a dorm room shitshow" supposed to be the appeal of reddit? A 'real company' wouldn't have a free-for-all API to allow third parties to leach their ad revenue.
        • sofixa 3y ago
          > A 'real company' wouldn't have a free-for-all API to allow third parties to leach their ad revenue. Or they might have realised that third parties are crucial to their success (they have the stats, they know what % of traffic, commenters, power users, etc. are using third-party apps) and instead added more constraints around the API, like also serving ads (like Telegram), lower rate limits for unauthenticated users, forcing oauth etc. Instead of going the nuclear path of making any third party downright unviable and thus forcing them to shutdown.
      • lt 3y ago
        Recently I read Reddit has over 2000 employees. I can’t begin to imagine what they possibly do.
    • tirpen 3y ago
      spez even infamously abused his admin access to edit another posters comment a while back. Calling it a dorm room shitshow is an insult to dorm rooms everywhere.
      • astrange 3y ago
        He was correct to do this, because it was funny. Any true longtime forum poster would recognize this. (Conversely, if it wasn't funny, he should've done it differently.) Although doing Lowtax things may lead to turning into Lowtax, which is probably bad. I can certainly tell you it's not a serious problem, because it'd be illegal if it was. All serious problems with websites are revenue issues or legal issues.
        • aerio 3y ago
          It wasn't funny, and he didn't make any jokes. He edited "fuck spez" comments to remove spez and substitute other mods. Fuck r/the_donald - but that's just blatant admin power misuse to deflect criticism. Very topical with all the "fuck u/spez" comments going around these days. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
          • astrange 3y ago
            Admin abuse is inherently funny. It's like slapstick. It was funny on SA when the users paid to sign up in the first place, and it can only be more so when they're not even paying customers. Should've made it a wordfilter though. Those are more participatory. (You won't take this advice, which is why I've run a large popular internet forum before and you haven't.)
            • Algent 3y ago
              I completely agree, when he did that is was pretty funny (but a little pathetic he didn't dare to ban these users or this sub, either for money or political reasons). Users reacted poorly and "shocked" site wide somehow that an admin could exerts admin right and edit database which as a sysadmin made me laugh a lot because I get occasional similar ones from our users when we do admin stuff.
  • nyberg 3y ago
    So does this means their astroturfing bot is open to prompt injection?
  • stavros 3y ago
    I don't know what happened with r/programming (I couldn't find the mod channel), but I just took it private, assuming the other mods just forgot about it. Then again, it's spez's subreddit, so maybe he wants it public (in which case he can just flip it back).
    • wsabihi 3y ago
      Could you please update the message to "This subreddit is temporarily private as part of a joint protest to Reddit's recent API changes, which breaks third-party apps and moderation tools, effectively forcing users to use the official Reddit app." to raise awareness for the reason you took it private? That would be really helpful!
      • stavros 3y ago
        Hm, I don't see where I can set that, sadly. I don't see a customizable message when I visit the subreddit incognito, either, just a "this is private". Given that nobody has reverted the change, I assume they'd just forgotten to do it in the first place.
    • lelanthran 3y ago
      Relatedly, I tried checking my comment history on reddit now, and most of its missing (out of a few hundreds (or maybe thousands of comments) there's like ... 15 left. So, my guess is that there's more blowing up with reddit right now than just the blackout.
      • matsemann 3y ago
        I thiiink your comments from subreddits having gone private are hidden from your profile as well.
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > (spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming, hence it still being up) The whole subreddit is down at the moment. I guess the other moderators disagree with the CEO?
  • ttctciyf 3y ago
    > it still being up Must have gone dark in the last two hours, I guess. Clicking on your "context" link gets me: > The moderators of r/programming have set this community to private. Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions. The GPT astroturf fail seems like a worthy story in itself, if it could be stood up - amazing!
    • Physkal 3y ago
      All major subreddits are protesting Reddit on jun 12 by going private.
      • djbusby 3y ago
        Not all. Last I looked it was >50% of the top 200 (and like 3000 total)
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • HWR_14 3y ago
          Those numbers are usually computed by subreddits going private. More have left old content up but have blocked new posts/comments. Those have not been reflected in your numbers.
• Ekaros 3y ago
  Maybe instead of this banning 3rd part Apps. They could charge all users 9.99 or 19.99 a month. Thus generate revenue for the IPO.
  • user_named 3y ago
    You'd probably get at most 5% signing up for the paid plan so the price would have to be more than 20x what they get from a free user seeing ads. Could work if they cut down the size of the organ but that has literally never happened
    • qwytw 3y ago
      Also would force the platform into a death spiral. 95% of users leaving -> massive reduction in content -> more users leave -> no more content -> reddit is gone.
  • onion2k 3y ago
    The problem with this approach (not just for Reddit, but for all internet content sites) is that $9.99 is a significant investment when there are other sites providing content for free. The choice the user has to make isn't "Is Reddit worth $9.99?" but more like "Is Reddit better value at $9.99 than some other website at $0.00?", and Reddit is probably never going to win in that process for the majority of people. It's the same reason why so few people sign up to pay for YouTube or Twitter. Video content is available elsewhere. Whatever the hell Twitter content is can be found just by talking to people. On the other side so many do pay for Spotify and Netflix because that content is locked down pretty well. You can pirate some things, but it's a pain. Paying is easier. Reddit seems to think it has a product that has value. Like so many web content hosts before it, it's probably wrong. It probably can't work as a business unless it's showing people adverts. And the problem with that model is that people hate adverts. Honestly, until users realise that they can't have a content host unless they pay, no sites like Reddit will survive long term.
    • visarga 3y ago
      Already survived a long time.
• yanderekko 3y ago
  >It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle) What makes the activists here think that they can speak for this 1%?
  • ant6n 3y ago
    They don’t speak for, they give an estimation of their opinion.
  • bandrami 3y ago
    I mean, personally I've been paying for a Premium membership for years now because I know good web communities need user financial support to be sustainable. So I have at least some moral right to a preference in the direction the site goes. I honestly wish they'd just done a bigger Premium beg-a-thon and see if they could meet their revenue needs that way; it's ultimately a much better model.
• notimetorelax 3y ago
  Followed some of the links shared here, I fully agree now that the CEO should go. Earlier, he compromised the integrity of people’s speech by editing their posts: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/reddit-edit-post https://www.wired.co.uk/article/reddit-edit-post
  • prmoustache 3y ago
    Those that should go are the users really.
  • smcl 3y ago
    I can see why they might want someone with the ability to edit posts (removing extreme TOS stuff - racism, hate speech etc). But that's probably not for the CEO and certainly shouldn't be used simply to "troll the trolls" Also it's baffling to me that the CEO of reddit is a regular user and somehow isn't up in arms about how irritating it is to use the site.
    • kybernetikos 3y ago
      I'm not sure that's right. If your website is saying I said something I didn't say then that's an issue. Sure, have the ability to remove or annotate posts that break the rules in some way but to leave a post up saying something other than what the poster wrote seems bad (and possibly even libellous) to me.
      • smcl 3y ago
        Yeah there's definitely better ways to go, but regardless the main thing is the CEO has no business being anywhere near this kind of functionality.
    • constantcrying 3y ago
      > (removing extreme TOS stuff - racism, hate speech etc) Why would you edit these? Deletion seems far superior, do you want people to go around editing out the racism of peoples posts? Seems absurd.
• darreninthenet 3y ago
  Reddit won't die for the same reason Facebook won't... there's no real viable alternative for the majority of the users. It might become a bit shitter, it might lose a few users who are a bit more tech savvy or from the "old days of the internet" who'll find themselves fedi or forum based alternatives but the majority will keep getting what they want out of it without a reason to move - most users probably use the official app which is rubbish compared to Apollo etc but is sufficient for them. I'd love to see this protest actually work but the cynic in me says it won't, or if it does it'll be a slow death as the 1% leave and the content dries up which then pushes away the majority, and it'll be too slow to save it... only then might we see a viable alternative pop up, but I'm sure it won't be any of the Fedi solutions as they just fragment the communities too much even with the instances opening to each other, but we're already seeing Lemmy instances "defederate" from each other
  • nebrie 3y ago
    There are alternatives. Lemmy has seen incredible growth over the past two weeks.
    • darreninthenet 3y ago
      How do you fix the problem for the average user of why the (eg) recipe group on their Lemmy instance is empty, and when/if they do learn that other instances recipe groups are different groups, how they properly follow them all, and why it is their favourite one suddenly disappeared because their instance defed'd from that instance because the other instance also carried trumpsfavouriterecipes? I get and like the principles of the Fediverse but for the average user it's too fragmented, needs too much effort around discoverability, is confusing and promotes echo chambers in some ways worse than Reddit (in that your instance can simply cut off another instance it doesn't agree with - at least in Reddit you can find another sub all on the same instance that meets your echo chambers. Yes you can change instances but supposing that other instance doesn't carry a group you use heavily?) IMO Lemmy's growth will halt once the more intrepid average user decides it's too complex, tells all their friends about it and goes back to Reddit.
• ricardo81 3y ago
  Is there any good reads wrt the blowback on cost of the API? I've only read that it costs $0.25 per 1000 calls which seems relatively cheap, but I haven't looked into how it affects use cases.
  • sofixa 3y ago
    1000 calls isn't much when basic actions such as an upvote/downvote are an individual API call, and comments are heavily paginated.
  • sushibowl 3y ago
    Here's a write-up from the Apollo app developer: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... Some key takeaways: > Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month. > I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls. > For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.
  • pizzapill 3y ago
    There is more to it than the amount Reddit demands now. One huge issue is that it's a very sudden move. 30 days is not enough time to change apps business models (with existing paying customers in the mix). Additionally it seems reddit made promises in the beginning of this year that they wont monetize API access. Reddit does not want to find common ground with 3rd party apps and make money with them, it wants them out of the market ASAP. The issue even extends to non-mobile users that are afraid now that old reddit will be chopped for better monetization etc.
• kristopolous 3y ago
  Delusional people with big egos fancy themselves as visionaries
• flatline 3y ago
  Much as Elon Musk has not managed to kill Twitter, despite nationwide, breathless, reporting to that effect, I don’t think that the Reddit situation is anywhere nearly as drastic as people striking would like to believe. Yes, twitter users have fled and given Mastodon a day in the sun, and the site’s constituency has undoubtedly shifted, but its dominance still seems fairly secure. Reddit is playing with fire, this could all go horribly wrong for them. I just don’t find it likely. Reddit is really, really big. Those 1% add a lot of value to the site but without it the site is still quite valuable. 1% of users can eventually be replaced and it won’t catch fire in the meantime. The reddit user base is largely unaware of any of this and will forever remain passive users. I’m confident spez took one look at third party app user counts and said, “worth it.” If Reddit does IPO I expect it to become only more popular. Time will tell.
• alex3305 3y ago
  > [...] who need to do it are too blind [...] You mean, those who cannot use the official Reddit app because of lack of accessibility?
• jcfrei 3y ago
  As much as I wish that to be true I doubt it. A large portion of users will simply scroll through reddit and look at the latest cat videos or social media stunts. You can scrape this content without any contributors at all. All the separate communities that reddit hosts probably contribute very little to their ad revenue.