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This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the Internet, to the rear end of the internet. You killed your babies, man. Antagonising your most loyal users, for what? Bit of cash? Are you guys starving or what?? Man idk. I hope San Francisco is doing good. This is supposed to be the city of hippies and love, but lately not so much good news coming out of there. It really makes me sad to see Reddit explode like this.

Llamamoe 3y ago
All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned. One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads. That's just a wild guess on my part, though.
  - dx034 3y ago
    Can you really make that much money with behavior data? If that was the case, wouldn't we see more sites with few ads? I believe ads bring in the vast majority of money, behavior data helps ad targeting and can maybe sometimes bring in insignificant amounts as well.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      Can you really make that much money with behavior data? Good question. I don't know if companies sell behavior data directly or if it just helps them to target ads better and therefore theoretically improve conversion rates.
  - proto_lambda 3y ago
    > Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? Telegram does this, and I think they're successful with it.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Telegram? But there's no ads in the official app - are you saying they require them in third-party apps in order to make them a worse experience and push people back to the official one/make money from them if they don't? That'd be.. interesting, but I think I assume you meant something else, not Telegram?
      - proto_lambda 3y ago
        There are ads in the official apps - they appear similar to regular messages in large channels (telegram's few-to-many/broadcasting offering)
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads. Yeah, and this is them being unreasonable. The insistence on all the large platforms on doing that even when all of their users revolt is childish and killed a lot of platforms already.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  So easy to fake those conditions, though, and then you’re right back where you started only with a fun new game of whackamole to play.
- Lutzb 3y ago
  Fully agree: First exempt personal paid premium accounts from the api limitations & ads. Then the goal is to benefit from the already existing and thriving 3rd party app ecosystem. Make your API serve ads in non-premium API calls and profit share the ad revenue with 3rd party app developers. Optionally allow 3rd party apps to remove ads (paid API calls) and show their own ads, however make your ads more attractive & lucrative for 3rd party developers. In the future I would also like to see that subreddits can gain control of the ads shown in their subreddits (subreddits already understand their audience far better than reddit corporate ever will). Then eventually profit share with moderator teams and content submitter, basically copy youtubes model to incentivize content submitters & good moderation.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  This wouldn't solve the problem of their API being used to scrape Reddit to train LLMs.
  - hagbarth 3y ago
    Then have different terms for different purposes. Charge LLM trainers and request that 3rd party apps show ads.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      How would Reddit be able to tell the difference?
      - efreak 3y ago
        Users don't browse all of Reddit, and they don't browse from wildly varying IP addresses, from multiple ips simultaneously, or from datacenters.
- stcroixx 3y ago
  Why not instead charge 3rd party apps for the API and let the 3rd party apps show their own adds to help pay for the cost of the API?
- badwolf 3y ago
  Or just require a Reddit Gold sub to any user who wants to use another app.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    Indeed. The fact that they didn't do this and the extremely high cost of API access is good evidence that they wanted to kill 3rd part apps outright.
SoftTalker 3y ago
For me it's been a blessing in disguise. Reddit was a time suck for me, and spending a week without it has broken the habit. I don't need it, and a lot of it is honestly pretty toxic.
hughesjj 3y ago
its the death of reddit, just like digg before it. And google circles or whatever it was called its been so long. and myspace and friendster and orkut and aol and msn and Usenet and Dubsmash and vine and literally more sites than Wikipedia fits on one page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_networking_services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_netw...
- x3874 3y ago
  Funny i was part of not one of these. B/c every one of these were full of social media zombie sheeple along with gamers, dorks, geeks and techies. Decent, fun people you find IRL. Not arguing / chatting online.
- nshunter 3y ago
  I was thinking about the connection between the death of digg and now the death of reddit. It's similar that they destroyed engagement by not responding to feedback. Social communities can be forgiving for missteps with acknowledgement and accountability, but Reddit seems to have just shifted its focus from being a community space into a data product. Had an account for 14 years that I plan on 'deleting', whatever that means with the fast and loose intentions around customer data that reddit seems to have now.
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  This is more like the death of Twitter - highly exaggerated and no alternatives. Nothing changes.
  - MarcellusDrum 3y ago
    Lemmy is relatively thriving. I doubt this will be the "Great migration", but if Lemmy was able to hold enough users, the next time Reddit makes a big mistake, Lemmy will be a viable alternative by then.
    - bottlepalm 3y ago
      Just tried Lemmy.. are you serious?
Ygg2 3y ago
Killing geese that lay Golden Eggs is old and enduring Silicon valley tradition.
- brabel 3y ago
  Maybe, but in this case there was no golden eggs, Reddit had users but no way of making any money out of it other than by selling the data (which is exactly what they seem to be doing now).
  - sgarman 3y ago
    I've seen a lot of companies go far by "selling the dream" instead of actually booking rev. If this continues to go badly reddit won't have rev or a dream. At least with users making content other users want there is always a chance.
  - Panzer04 3y ago
    Reddit is a forum. It should not be hard to make money selling ads on the most popular forum on the internet. Hosting costs should be jack shit, developing costs should be pretty low, etc. Reddit must be funking up in a pretty fundamental way to not be making money.
    - brabel 3y ago
      Easy to say from the outside, isn't it? You think they just never thought of that...
      - Panzer04 3y ago
        It is easy to say from the outside.. but everyone else seems to make it work. What makes reddit so special it shouldn't be able to afford to pay for itself? It doesn't make sense. Every social media company with this kind of massive userbase appears to be able to make good money, why not reddit? Sure, maybe they cant make Facebook levels of cash - but 10th most visited website, with what should be low hosting costs (mostly text), should be more than sufficient. If they can't make it work, they'd need good reason to explain what makes them different, IMO.
redmerchant2 3y ago
They don’t care about the old guard of mostly geeks and techies. With Covid and moments of Twitter/tumblr exodus, Reddit has picked up a ton of users that just want generic social media. It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.
- tayo42 3y ago
  Maybe I'm imagining things but i feel like the content on reddit is very regular, average and safe lately. Like you can't be werid in the comments.
  - bithaze 3y ago
    It's going to be even more regular, average, and safe when they block NSFW subreddits in the API.
    - ryanwaggoner 3y ago
      Will it? Who will be using the API at all going forward?
- icoder 3y ago
  My home page turned into this at some point in the past, after which I unsubscribed from a bunch of dopamine based subs and subscribed to more substantial subs of my interest. That really helped, but over time the rot set in again as a few subs grew in size and turned into a meaningless dopamine fest (probably fuelled by karma hungry bots / farms). Based on this experience I won't be surprised at all if your prediction became true. It is as if that's the natural end state and it requires constant effort (org, mods, community) to steer away from it.
  - mehdix 3y ago
    This was exactly my experience too. Their app is also optimized toward that end, ad-riddled, laggy, and privacy-invasive (the green online dot, bombarded my pi-hole with requests). Their web is the same, just pushing for the app and slow. I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.
matsemann 3y ago
It's not even about not just "liking" them, like if it's only about resistance to changes. My way of browsing reddit on desktop is to scroll and open lots of stuff I find interesting in tabs. With new reddit this is "holding it wrong" I guess, because that amount of tabs absolutely destroy the performance of my browser. Scroll is janky etc. And multiple subreddits have features and stuff that never got ported to new reddit, making new reddit a subpar experience as well. As for the app, I just can't figure out what to press. I want a list of posts, and pressing them to take me to the comments. It keeps injecting other stuff everywhere, though. Avatars, coins, huge ads, lots of posts from other communities I don't want to see in my list, defeats the purpose of following a subreddit. I have to use the app once in a while to post content as other apps aren't allowed to upload videoes etc, and it's a confusing experience every time.
Sparkyte 3y ago
Reddit is trying to flip loss to profit. They have a wealth of data for AI models and AI is going to be big. They are trying to cash in on it. What they should have done was make a free model for general API use like most companies to develop against. And after that tier the model accordingly. Data is expensive, even though it is getting cheaper per byte we are producing more of it per volume.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  I don’t get the AI angle. The data already exists in dumps. How does restricting access to the API stop that? Sure, you don’t get access to new data but I doubt anybody cares about that given that there’s 15 years of existing data already. Especially if they kill all the interesting subs and turn Reddit into cat picture central.
  - Sparkyte 3y ago
    True, but old data is not what companies want since it is readily available and probably already in models. Reddit produces more data than any other social media website in the text and picture format. I think Tiktok is relatively close but with videos.
    - ryanbrunner 3y ago
      Reddit is still also open to indexing, so the data is still currently available with no authentication required to anyone interested in crawling it. The training data for AI theory doesn't hold water.
      - Sparkyte 3y ago
        The other thing to also consider is that Reddit funding is partially attached to investments. Investments for Reddit and many other investment based companies dried up over the government pulling back interest rates to deal with inflation.
- dyno12345 3y ago
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
All this suffering so some jackass can get his third comma. Reddit would be better for everyone as an open source nonprofit.
- abhiminator 3y ago
  Reminds me of Russ Hanneman's obsession with the three commas and the 'Tres Comas' tequila from HBO'S Silicon Valley. I'm hindsight, it's crazy how accurate that show was in portraying a lot of the VC and Silicon Valley folks in general.
mise_en_place 3y ago
It was the same with Digg and Slashdot.
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  Unless there's an realistic alternative to Reddit that users are actually moving to - then no it's not.
  - aydyn 3y ago
    There are loads of reddit alternatives. The only thing reddit has going for it is network effect.
    - bottlepalm 3y ago
      Post a few, maybe I'll switch.
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    Given the number of blacked out subs that link to a Discord, it seems like an alternative is already there. For sure it's not exactly the same, but it seems to serve a similar purpose for a lot of users.
    - bottlepalm 3y ago
      Yea Discord is not an alterative.
      - ryanbrunner 3y ago
        In practice it's serving as one though. For sure it's not a 1-1 replacement, but alternatives often aren't. Reddit doesn't work exacctly the same as Digg, and neither work like a PHPBB forum.
goykasi 3y ago
Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. So people dont mind it and probably never experienced the old layout. Additionally, the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2]). That also tells me that a huge amount of users are perfectly fine with the reddit app. So, knowing those basic facts, is it at all surprising that reddit is reacting this way? They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy. The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care. disclaimer: old.reddit user of 13 years and only recently switched to apollo from alien blue. just calling it like i see it. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828 [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  I use the reddit app very occasionally. Mostly when I'm away from my laptop and someone DMs or replies to me. For actually USING reddit, browsing threads etc it is woefully shitty experience.
- atraac 3y ago
  > They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy. But there's a very simple way to do that... sit down with people, figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like. There's multitudes of ways this whole thing could've been solved, they clearly don't wont to solve it. Paid API is NOT going to make reddit profitable, especially at this price. It's funny to me that anyone actually even believes that. Hosting costs are not the problem, they have 2000 employees. For a site that can't get any feature fully functioning, has one of the worst ads in the business that noone wants to buy and is almost fully maintained by community for free, it's quite a lot of employees.
paradite 3y ago
I like the new Reddit UI for mobile web compared to old.reddit.
- kccoder 3y ago
  Both are inferior to reddit.com/r/.../.compact, which they nixed a few months ago, on mobile.
thrownaway561 3y ago
what are you talking about... i've used the official app since the beginning and honestly have no issues. I don't get this whole 3rd party app uproar.
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  Same, would love to know what is 'bad' about the official app.
  - sterlind 3y ago
    - Pressing notifications brings up the wrong pages. - Back navigation is very messed up and unreliable. - Images, videos and posts often take a long time to load, and often just don't. - No ability to copy/paste text from posts. - Collapsing threads is unreliable. - Barrages of spam notifications that are difficult to turn off. just offhand.
    - bottlepalm 3y ago
      Man I've been using the app daily for over a year and have never experienced any of these issues..
marcosdumay 3y ago
> Are you guys starving or what?? The CEO himself have said a few times that they are are not and were never profitable. They can't keep raising money, so yeah, from their POV, it's do something now and bad consequences don't really matter. The thing where he disagree with any thinking human is on what that "something" may be (and about not acting earlier). But the desperation is reasonable.
- LanceH 3y ago
  Some of that disagreement is that Reddit should get paid. The current blackout fiasco seems to be centered around avoiding all forms of payment to Reddit -- both api charges and ads.
- TheCapn 3y ago
  There's something else odd going on. I think the easiest answer is the company is just poorly run but considering everything we've seen from both sides of the issue: - Reddit believes costs to maintain their API are on the level of charging 3rd party apps upwards of $20MM each. A small handful of 3rd party apps between iOS/Android would be netting them $100MM annually? Does it really cost them that much to run the API? There's a lot of questions regarding those figures by themselves - Reluctance to come up with alternative offerings. If this is about 3rd party apps not serving ads, why is the most obvious solution not just "3rd party app usage must be through premium accounts"? - An absolute refusal to recognize how their site operates and the value of the free labour given to them through moderation and content generation. This one is where I'm most in the dark. They must've run the metrics to see that even if losing a sizable portion of the 3rd party users they won't be in a bad place. I'm assuming they're prepared to rework their moderation structure in its entirety? But at the same time, they seem unable to devlop/publish meaningful features that have been requested by those who know the site best My gut reaction is the IPO is coming. They want short term numbers bump to justify these actions and damn the long term. A mindset of solve the immediate problem, ignore the rest and figure it out later. Most people see this as a bad strategy, they seem to believe in it...but have they had a good track record to date showing they're capable of making these measured decisions? I think not. It's interesting to watch & experience at least.
drngdds 3y ago
What's a social media zombie sherson (is that the singular of sheeple?) and how are they worse than a hardcore redditor?
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
What are the reasons these so-called "tech" companies do what they do. For example, why does Reddit choose to ban free API access and encourage the use of a closed source app. Is it for the benefit of users. Really. Improved "user experience" or whatever. Maybe there other reasons that the companies are reluctant to share.. For instance, I asked someone I trust this question of why. His answer: "It's greed." If someone asked me the question, I might answer, "Because they can." Interesting to see Reddit moderators defend the company when faced with issue of Section 230 libility^1 now opposing the company when faced with issue of increasing company profits. 1. See Gonzalez v Google amicus brief.

Llamamoe 3y ago

All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.

JohnBooty 3y ago
All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned. One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads. That's just a wild guess on my part, though.
- dx034 3y ago
  Can you really make that much money with behavior data? If that was the case, wouldn't we see more sites with few ads? I believe ads bring in the vast majority of money, behavior data helps ad targeting and can maybe sometimes bring in insignificant amounts as well.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    Can you really make that much money with behavior data? Good question. I don't know if companies sell behavior data directly or if it just helps them to target ads better and therefore theoretically improve conversion rates.
- proto_lambda 3y ago
  > Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? Telegram does this, and I think they're successful with it.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Telegram? But there's no ads in the official app - are you saying they require them in third-party apps in order to make them a worse experience and push people back to the official one/make money from them if they don't? That'd be.. interesting, but I think I assume you meant something else, not Telegram?
    - proto_lambda 3y ago
      There are ads in the official apps - they appear similar to regular messages in large channels (telegram's few-to-many/broadcasting offering)
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads. Yeah, and this is them being unreasonable. The insistence on all the large platforms on doing that even when all of their users revolt is childish and killed a lot of platforms already.
dclowd9901 3y ago
So easy to fake those conditions, though, and then you’re right back where you started only with a fun new game of whackamole to play.
Lutzb 3y ago
Fully agree: First exempt personal paid premium accounts from the api limitations & ads. Then the goal is to benefit from the already existing and thriving 3rd party app ecosystem. Make your API serve ads in non-premium API calls and profit share the ad revenue with 3rd party app developers. Optionally allow 3rd party apps to remove ads (paid API calls) and show their own ads, however make your ads more attractive & lucrative for 3rd party developers. In the future I would also like to see that subreddits can gain control of the ads shown in their subreddits (subreddits already understand their audience far better than reddit corporate ever will). Then eventually profit share with moderator teams and content submitter, basically copy youtubes model to incentivize content submitters & good moderation.
pmoriarty 3y ago
This wouldn't solve the problem of their API being used to scrape Reddit to train LLMs.
- hagbarth 3y ago
  Then have different terms for different purposes. Charge LLM trainers and request that 3rd party apps show ads.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    How would Reddit be able to tell the difference?
    - efreak 3y ago
      Users don't browse all of Reddit, and they don't browse from wildly varying IP addresses, from multiple ips simultaneously, or from datacenters.
stcroixx 3y ago
Why not instead charge 3rd party apps for the API and let the 3rd party apps show their own adds to help pay for the cost of the API?
badwolf 3y ago
Or just require a Reddit Gold sub to any user who wants to use another app.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Indeed. The fact that they didn't do this and the extremely high cost of API access is good evidence that they wanted to kill 3rd part apps outright.

SoftTalker 3y ago

For me it's been a blessing in disguise. Reddit was a time suck for me, and spending a week without it has broken the habit. I don't need it, and a lot of it is honestly pretty toxic.

hughesjj 3y ago

its the death of reddit, just like digg before it. And google circles or whatever it was called its been so long. and myspace and friendster and orkut and aol and msn and Usenet and Dubsmash and vine and literally more sites than Wikipedia fits on one page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_networking_services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_netw...

x3874 3y ago
Funny i was part of not one of these. B/c every one of these were full of social media zombie sheeple along with gamers, dorks, geeks and techies. Decent, fun people you find IRL. Not arguing / chatting online.
nshunter 3y ago
I was thinking about the connection between the death of digg and now the death of reddit. It's similar that they destroyed engagement by not responding to feedback. Social communities can be forgiving for missteps with acknowledgement and accountability, but Reddit seems to have just shifted its focus from being a community space into a data product. Had an account for 14 years that I plan on 'deleting', whatever that means with the fast and loose intentions around customer data that reddit seems to have now.
bottlepalm 3y ago
This is more like the death of Twitter - highly exaggerated and no alternatives. Nothing changes.
- MarcellusDrum 3y ago
  Lemmy is relatively thriving. I doubt this will be the "Great migration", but if Lemmy was able to hold enough users, the next time Reddit makes a big mistake, Lemmy will be a viable alternative by then.
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    Just tried Lemmy.. are you serious?

Ygg2 3y ago

Killing geese that lay Golden Eggs is old and enduring Silicon valley tradition.

brabel 3y ago
Maybe, but in this case there was no golden eggs, Reddit had users but no way of making any money out of it other than by selling the data (which is exactly what they seem to be doing now).
- sgarman 3y ago
  I've seen a lot of companies go far by "selling the dream" instead of actually booking rev. If this continues to go badly reddit won't have rev or a dream. At least with users making content other users want there is always a chance.
- Panzer04 3y ago
  Reddit is a forum. It should not be hard to make money selling ads on the most popular forum on the internet. Hosting costs should be jack shit, developing costs should be pretty low, etc. Reddit must be funking up in a pretty fundamental way to not be making money.
  - brabel 3y ago
    Easy to say from the outside, isn't it? You think they just never thought of that...
    - Panzer04 3y ago
      It is easy to say from the outside.. but everyone else seems to make it work. What makes reddit so special it shouldn't be able to afford to pay for itself? It doesn't make sense. Every social media company with this kind of massive userbase appears to be able to make good money, why not reddit? Sure, maybe they cant make Facebook levels of cash - but 10th most visited website, with what should be low hosting costs (mostly text), should be more than sufficient. If they can't make it work, they'd need good reason to explain what makes them different, IMO.

redmerchant2 3y ago

They don’t care about the old guard of mostly geeks and techies. With Covid and moments of Twitter/tumblr exodus, Reddit has picked up a ton of users that just want generic social media. It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.

tayo42 3y ago
Maybe I'm imagining things but i feel like the content on reddit is very regular, average and safe lately. Like you can't be werid in the comments.
- bithaze 3y ago
  It's going to be even more regular, average, and safe when they block NSFW subreddits in the API.
  - ryanwaggoner 3y ago
    Will it? Who will be using the API at all going forward?
icoder 3y ago
My home page turned into this at some point in the past, after which I unsubscribed from a bunch of dopamine based subs and subscribed to more substantial subs of my interest. That really helped, but over time the rot set in again as a few subs grew in size and turned into a meaningless dopamine fest (probably fuelled by karma hungry bots / farms). Based on this experience I won't be surprised at all if your prediction became true. It is as if that's the natural end state and it requires constant effort (org, mods, community) to steer away from it.
- mehdix 3y ago
  This was exactly my experience too. Their app is also optimized toward that end, ad-riddled, laggy, and privacy-invasive (the green online dot, bombarded my pi-hole with requests). Their web is the same, just pushing for the app and slow. I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.

matsemann 3y ago

It's not even about not just "liking" them, like if it's only about resistance to changes. My way of browsing reddit on desktop is to scroll and open lots of stuff I find interesting in tabs. With new reddit this is "holding it wrong" I guess, because that amount of tabs absolutely destroy the performance of my browser. Scroll is janky etc. And multiple subreddits have features and stuff that never got ported to new reddit, making new reddit a subpar experience as well. As for the app, I just can't figure out what to press. I want a list of posts, and pressing them to take me to the comments. It keeps injecting other stuff everywhere, though. Avatars, coins, huge ads, lots of posts from other communities I don't want to see in my list, defeats the purpose of following a subreddit. I have to use the app once in a while to post content as other apps aren't allowed to upload videoes etc, and it's a confusing experience every time.

Sparkyte 3y ago

Reddit is trying to flip loss to profit. They have a wealth of data for AI models and AI is going to be big. They are trying to cash in on it. What they should have done was make a free model for general API use like most companies to develop against. And after that tier the model accordingly. Data is expensive, even though it is getting cheaper per byte we are producing more of it per volume.

zarzavat 3y ago
I don’t get the AI angle. The data already exists in dumps. How does restricting access to the API stop that? Sure, you don’t get access to new data but I doubt anybody cares about that given that there’s 15 years of existing data already. Especially if they kill all the interesting subs and turn Reddit into cat picture central.
- Sparkyte 3y ago
  True, but old data is not what companies want since it is readily available and probably already in models. Reddit produces more data than any other social media website in the text and picture format. I think Tiktok is relatively close but with videos.
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    Reddit is still also open to indexing, so the data is still currently available with no authentication required to anyone interested in crawling it. The training data for AI theory doesn't hold water.
    - Sparkyte 3y ago
      The other thing to also consider is that Reddit funding is partially attached to investments. Investments for Reddit and many other investment based companies dried up over the government pulling back interest rates to deal with inflation.
dyno12345 3y ago

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

All this suffering so some jackass can get his third comma. Reddit would be better for everyone as an open source nonprofit.

abhiminator 3y ago
Reminds me of Russ Hanneman's obsession with the three commas and the 'Tres Comas' tequila from HBO'S Silicon Valley. I'm hindsight, it's crazy how accurate that show was in portraying a lot of the VC and Silicon Valley folks in general.

mise_en_place 3y ago

It was the same with Digg and Slashdot.

bottlepalm 3y ago
Unless there's an realistic alternative to Reddit that users are actually moving to - then no it's not.
- aydyn 3y ago
  There are loads of reddit alternatives. The only thing reddit has going for it is network effect.
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    Post a few, maybe I'll switch.
- ryanbrunner 3y ago
  Given the number of blacked out subs that link to a Discord, it seems like an alternative is already there. For sure it's not exactly the same, but it seems to serve a similar purpose for a lot of users.
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    Yea Discord is not an alterative.
    - ryanbrunner 3y ago
      In practice it's serving as one though. For sure it's not a 1-1 replacement, but alternatives often aren't. Reddit doesn't work exacctly the same as Digg, and neither work like a PHPBB forum.

goykasi 3y ago

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. So people dont mind it and probably never experienced the old layout. Additionally, the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2]). That also tells me that a huge amount of users are perfectly fine with the reddit app. So, knowing those basic facts, is it at all surprising that reddit is reacting this way? They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy. The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care. disclaimer: old.reddit user of 13 years and only recently switched to apollo from alien blue. just calling it like i see it. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828 [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

sleepybrett 3y ago
I use the reddit app very occasionally. Mostly when I'm away from my laptop and someone DMs or replies to me. For actually USING reddit, browsing threads etc it is woefully shitty experience.
atraac 3y ago
> They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy. But there's a very simple way to do that... sit down with people, figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like. There's multitudes of ways this whole thing could've been solved, they clearly don't wont to solve it. Paid API is NOT going to make reddit profitable, especially at this price. It's funny to me that anyone actually even believes that. Hosting costs are not the problem, they have 2000 employees. For a site that can't get any feature fully functioning, has one of the worst ads in the business that noone wants to buy and is almost fully maintained by community for free, it's quite a lot of employees.

paradite 3y ago

I like the new Reddit UI for mobile web compared to old.reddit.

kccoder 3y ago
Both are inferior to reddit.com/r/.../.compact, which they nixed a few months ago, on mobile.

thrownaway561 3y ago

what are you talking about... i've used the official app since the beginning and honestly have no issues. I don't get this whole 3rd party app uproar.

bottlepalm 3y ago
Same, would love to know what is 'bad' about the official app.
- sterlind 3y ago
  - Pressing notifications brings up the wrong pages. - Back navigation is very messed up and unreliable. - Images, videos and posts often take a long time to load, and often just don't. - No ability to copy/paste text from posts. - Collapsing threads is unreliable. - Barrages of spam notifications that are difficult to turn off. just offhand.
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    Man I've been using the app daily for over a year and have never experienced any of these issues..

marcosdumay 3y ago

> Are you guys starving or what?? The CEO himself have said a few times that they are are not and were never profitable. They can't keep raising money, so yeah, from their POV, it's do something now and bad consequences don't really matter. The thing where he disagree with any thinking human is on what that "something" may be (and about not acting earlier). But the desperation is reasonable.

LanceH 3y ago
Some of that disagreement is that Reddit should get paid. The current blackout fiasco seems to be centered around avoiding all forms of payment to Reddit -- both api charges and ads.
TheCapn 3y ago
There's something else odd going on. I think the easiest answer is the company is just poorly run but considering everything we've seen from both sides of the issue: - Reddit believes costs to maintain their API are on the level of charging 3rd party apps upwards of $20MM each. A small handful of 3rd party apps between iOS/Android would be netting them $100MM annually? Does it really cost them that much to run the API? There's a lot of questions regarding those figures by themselves - Reluctance to come up with alternative offerings. If this is about 3rd party apps not serving ads, why is the most obvious solution not just "3rd party app usage must be through premium accounts"? - An absolute refusal to recognize how their site operates and the value of the free labour given to them through moderation and content generation. This one is where I'm most in the dark. They must've run the metrics to see that even if losing a sizable portion of the 3rd party users they won't be in a bad place. I'm assuming they're prepared to rework their moderation structure in its entirety? But at the same time, they seem unable to devlop/publish meaningful features that have been requested by those who know the site best My gut reaction is the IPO is coming. They want short term numbers bump to justify these actions and damn the long term. A mindset of solve the immediate problem, ignore the rest and figure it out later. Most people see this as a bad strategy, they seem to believe in it...but have they had a good track record to date showing they're capable of making these measured decisions? I think not. It's interesting to watch & experience at least.

drngdds 3y ago

What's a social media zombie sherson (is that the singular of sheeple?) and how are they worse than a hardcore redditor?

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

What are the reasons these so-called "tech" companies do what they do. For example, why does Reddit choose to ban free API access and encourage the use of a closed source app. Is it for the benefit of users. Really. Improved "user experience" or whatever. Maybe there other reasons that the companies are reluctant to share.. For instance, I asked someone I trust this question of why. His answer: "It's greed." If someone asked me the question, I might answer, "Because they can." Interesting to see Reddit moderators defend the company when faced with issue of Section 230 libility^1 now opposing the company when faced with issue of increasing company profits. 1. See Gonzalez v Google amicus brief.