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This whole thing has been about: [1] Reddit not building the needed tools for its free labor and relying on third parties to do it for them, then taking those

This whole thing has been about: [1] Reddit not building the needed tools for its free labor and relying on third parties to do it for them, then taking those tools away without providing another option [2] Disrespecting moderators and powerusers by insulting them ("landed gentry"), creating incentives for them to scab on each other, and being threatening and doublehanded at every turn, if not outright lying. [3] A decade of broken promises on feature development, trust n safety failures, half baked features that no one asked for that end up shut down. [4] Breaking the illusion that users ever owned their data (posts, comments) and communities. Not all these reasons apply to everyone, but at least one of them applies to most people protesting. Reddit has built up so much bad will. They could have been a great steward of the internet (and made money doing it!), but instead they decided to attack their community of moderators (the same insult they hurl at moderators, saying they are attacking their community of users!) Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues.

ornornor 3y ago
> Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues. Yet. Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money. I wouldn’t trust discord to not pull a Reddit in a few years. Not. Your. Platform. Not. Your. Content.
- aflag 3y ago
  Discord already makes it very clear you don't own the data in the platform, but you do have a lot of freedom to moderate as you please.
  - inhumantsar 3y ago
    For now
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      Exactly same scene playing out with a different timeline. Anyone using discord and complaining about the reddit changes must be new to all of this
      - noirbot 3y ago
        Or we're very used to all of this and are relatively fine migrating to the next new place that is still in the "pretending to be good" phase. A social network isn't a bank or a house. I'm not using it with the assumption that I'll grow old and die still using it. When Discord gets bad, I'll move to something else. Or if Matrix or whatever else comes along and is a good option, I'll move to it just like I moved to Discord from TeamSpeak and the dying forum I was on.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  In my not so educated opinion, federated networks seem to be the way toward permanently fixing this issue. But, they don’t seem to be quite ready yet. It is inevitable that Discord will also become terrible eventually, but they might be the last centralized social network.
  - stingraycharles 3y ago
    Federated social networks have been talked about for decades, I have yet to see it gain any traction. I’d be happy if I ever saw one taking off in my lifetime, but the economic incentives are just not there.
  - ryathal 3y ago
    I don't think federation is a good solution without a way to also centralize those communities. Discoverability and overlapping communities leads to way too much balkanization.
- nobleach 3y ago
  This is a cycle we can expect for any platform that has the bills. Hosting is not free. Storage is not free. Bandwidth is not free. Labor to fix bugs and develop features is not free. So this constant expectation that it should all be free (or even cheap) is not a realistic world view. We joke about the fact that "the cloud" isn't real, it's just someone else's computer. But isn't that kinda the basis of the current delusion? "We want to have complete freedom, be completely safe, get the features we want, have it for free and... don't bother me with any advertisement".
  - a4a4a4a4 3y ago
    I don't think any of the third part devs are asking for it to be free. The Apollo devs initial response to the announcement was "I'm honestly looking forward to the pricing and the stuff you're rolling out provided it's enough to keep me with a job. You guys seem nothing but reasonable, so I'm looking to finding out more." Then they announced pricing which is 29x the current revenue per user, and are blocking NSFW content from the API anyway. Latest update from him: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    I do free community building all the time, both irl and online and can tell you the #1 thing lacking ... leaders. We could have exactly what you describe but people just don't step up and take responsibility and leadership. Its frustrating, exhausting and disheartening to constantly be dragging people into taking care of each other.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      As someone with similar experience, 100% agree. Free, competent, altruistically interested Pick two when looking for leaders. The "volunteer leader problem" boils down to looking for an altruistic individual who's capable and willing to put up with a ton of shit for... love of X. There aren't many. There shouldn't be any, but some people are awesome. In reality, you end up having to substitute some package of incentives (prestige, authority, etc.) in order to entice on-the-fence candidates, and then ride herd on ensuring they don't succumb to their baser instincts. So when mods say mod tools are important, what they're really saying is: "I put up with a lot of shit, to make you money, and I don't get paid. Give me something in return that makes me feel like you're thankful." Reddit's been pretty bad, historically and presently, at doing that.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money. Who was running Reddit back then? Leadership matters. Take climate change for example, or anything really.
- softsound 3y ago
  Looking at who created Discord, I would agree. They will start selling data a lot and do other stuff when the numbers get big like they did with their other business but for now it's a smooth ride on freeness.
- 8note 3y ago
  > Not. Your. Content. It is my content, but I've licensed it. The platform existing doesn't take away copyright law
  - ornornor 3y ago
    Okay yeah sure, technically. In practice, you have little to no control over it or your audience and good luck migrating it when you feel like it or when the platform turns hostile.
senko 3y ago
> Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues. Yet. Give it time (and clout). They're going to try to move and expand that's for certain, and then it'll be time to become profitable / sellable. As others commented, they've taken VC money and that comes with strings attached. For another indication, look at the current unique names migration that, while nowhere near the scale of Reddit drama, is leaving a lot of people pretty annoyed.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  > look at the current unique names migration For context, Discord went from appending 4-digit identifiers, such as “username#XXXX”, to removing them entirely and demanding names be changed en masse. This has naturally led to multiple cases of stolen identity, which ironically this was advertised to reduce as you could supposedly unify your identity across-platforms. However it was a staggered, unprioritized rollout, not to mention the entire movement to a less private and secure username model being unnecessary. It truly shows that Discord is unsurprisingly just as bad as Reddit, if not worse in many respects.
  - senko 3y ago
    Yeah, also apparently the premium (paid) members have priority for name picking, meaning someone can subscribe to Discord for a few months, squat the name and cancel. This makes a complicated situation even more annoying as it paints the thing as a cheap attempt at increasing monetization of the platform.
bentcorner 3y ago
https://infosec.exchange/@mainframed767/110566074308214399 https://infosec.exchange/@mainframed767/110566074308214399 > As they make it halfway across, the scorpion, named Reddit, poisons the frog they were riding on. Killing them both. > Seeing this betrayal, the other frog on the shore turns to his scorpion, named Discord, and says "surely you see now and won't do the same to me." "Of course not" replies the scorpion.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  If you only care about API access, Discord already stung the frog on the shore years ago. Reddit was the last holdout for relatively open API policies on a large social platform. Hell, the Fediverse is chock full of people who oppose open access and thought it was unindexable. At one point someone was harassed for the audacity to try and make a Fediverse index. My Mastodon feed is full of people really worried that Meta might try to interop with the Fediverse, even though that's our win condition! For me personally, API access wasn't the final straw - it was Spez's repeated and malincompetent attempts to justify it. Actually, Spez has had a long history of abusing admin privileges for stupid reasons, and I probably should have left years ago. I can't think of anything in Discord's history that's even remotely as bad as, say, editing the posts of an idiot /r/TD poster to make them look stupider than they already are. So I can understand why someone might move from Reddit to Discord even though Discord has the same policy everyone is angry at Reddit for adopting.
commandlinefan 3y ago
> Reddit has built up so much bad will I think what bugs me the most about this current backlash is that _API pricing_ was the thing that offended everybody, not the reams of things that reddit has done over the past 10 or so years to deserve a backlash.
- revscat 3y ago
  It wasn’t, and isn’t, about API pricing. 3Ps have repeatedly expressed their understanding in that regard. It was the exorbitant rates being charged, the 30 timeline given to make the changes, and the unwillingness of Reddit corporate to even take the money of those who expressed a willingness to pay. All of this is a result of bad faith efforts from Reddit corporate which never would have happened had it been handled differently from the outset, or adjustments made at any point in the process. Instead, Huffman has chosen the “do or die” route.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    I'm not sure the good wording for it, but it's sort of the "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" situation. Some small set of folks were mad about the original API stuff. The response to those people was so wild, acrimonious, and abusive that it pushed a lot of other people over the edge. I would probably have still been using Reddit today if it was just the API change, but at this point I've quit out of almost pure spite.
emaginniss 3y ago
> and made money doing it How do you see that happening? Part of the reason for the pricing on the APIs was to ensure that more people saw the ads. I know I never see them when I use BaconReader. Monetizing something like Reddit is always going to be a struggle, especially since the Reddit crowd is more tech-savvy than the Twitter and Facebook users, thus more likely to use ad-blockers. I honestly don't know of a way that a social networking system can ever have a near-universal scale and still make money. Sure, a niche community that relies on contributions from its members to offset development and hosting could work, but not Reddit or Twitter with they way they're going. FB is still going pretty strong, but last I checked, 70% of the main feed content I saw were ads.
- rossriley 3y ago
  Let's put this in context, Reddit has somewhere in the region of 1.2 Billion users a month and supposedly earn somewhere in the region of $350Million a year in advertising revenue. This is a very good business and something that could easily be profitable. The issue is they took in VC investment at a $10Billion+ valuation and for that $350M is not enough they need to probably triple it to get somewhere close to that valuation. So let's not confuse on paper profitability with desired profitability at current VC valuation.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Personally, I moved because the redesign (from years ago) pushed the community in a bad direction. I don't like the current reddit, and people talking about alternatives is what pushed me.

ornornor 3y ago

> Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues. Yet. Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money. I wouldn’t trust discord to not pull a Reddit in a few years. Not. Your. Platform. Not. Your. Content.

aflag 3y ago
Discord already makes it very clear you don't own the data in the platform, but you do have a lot of freedom to moderate as you please.
- inhumantsar 3y ago
  For now
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Exactly same scene playing out with a different timeline. Anyone using discord and complaining about the reddit changes must be new to all of this
    - noirbot 3y ago
      Or we're very used to all of this and are relatively fine migrating to the next new place that is still in the "pretending to be good" phase. A social network isn't a bank or a house. I'm not using it with the assumption that I'll grow old and die still using it. When Discord gets bad, I'll move to something else. Or if Matrix or whatever else comes along and is a good option, I'll move to it just like I moved to Discord from TeamSpeak and the dying forum I was on.
bee_rider 3y ago
In my not so educated opinion, federated networks seem to be the way toward permanently fixing this issue. But, they don’t seem to be quite ready yet. It is inevitable that Discord will also become terrible eventually, but they might be the last centralized social network.
- stingraycharles 3y ago
  Federated social networks have been talked about for decades, I have yet to see it gain any traction. I’d be happy if I ever saw one taking off in my lifetime, but the economic incentives are just not there.
- ryathal 3y ago
  I don't think federation is a good solution without a way to also centralize those communities. Discoverability and overlapping communities leads to way too much balkanization.
nobleach 3y ago
This is a cycle we can expect for any platform that has the bills. Hosting is not free. Storage is not free. Bandwidth is not free. Labor to fix bugs and develop features is not free. So this constant expectation that it should all be free (or even cheap) is not a realistic world view. We joke about the fact that "the cloud" isn't real, it's just someone else's computer. But isn't that kinda the basis of the current delusion? "We want to have complete freedom, be completely safe, get the features we want, have it for free and... don't bother me with any advertisement".
- a4a4a4a4 3y ago
  I don't think any of the third part devs are asking for it to be free. The Apollo devs initial response to the announcement was "I'm honestly looking forward to the pricing and the stuff you're rolling out provided it's enough to keep me with a job. You guys seem nothing but reasonable, so I'm looking to finding out more." Then they announced pricing which is 29x the current revenue per user, and are blocking NSFW content from the API anyway. Latest update from him: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I do free community building all the time, both irl and online and can tell you the #1 thing lacking ... leaders. We could have exactly what you describe but people just don't step up and take responsibility and leadership. Its frustrating, exhausting and disheartening to constantly be dragging people into taking care of each other.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    As someone with similar experience, 100% agree. Free, competent, altruistically interested Pick two when looking for leaders. The "volunteer leader problem" boils down to looking for an altruistic individual who's capable and willing to put up with a ton of shit for... love of X. There aren't many. There shouldn't be any, but some people are awesome. In reality, you end up having to substitute some package of incentives (prestige, authority, etc.) in order to entice on-the-fence candidates, and then ride herd on ensuring they don't succumb to their baser instincts. So when mods say mod tools are important, what they're really saying is: "I put up with a lot of shit, to make you money, and I don't get paid. Give me something in return that makes me feel like you're thankful." Reddit's been pretty bad, historically and presently, at doing that.
mistermann 3y ago
> Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money. Who was running Reddit back then? Leadership matters. Take climate change for example, or anything really.
softsound 3y ago
Looking at who created Discord, I would agree. They will start selling data a lot and do other stuff when the numbers get big like they did with their other business but for now it's a smooth ride on freeness.
8note 3y ago
> Not. Your. Content. It is my content, but I've licensed it. The platform existing doesn't take away copyright law
- ornornor 3y ago
  Okay yeah sure, technically. In practice, you have little to no control over it or your audience and good luck migrating it when you feel like it or when the platform turns hostile.

senko 3y ago

> Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues. Yet. Give it time (and clout). They're going to try to move and expand that's for certain, and then it'll be time to become profitable / sellable. As others commented, they've taken VC money and that comes with strings attached. For another indication, look at the current unique names migration that, while nowhere near the scale of Reddit drama, is leaving a lot of people pretty annoyed.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago
> look at the current unique names migration For context, Discord went from appending 4-digit identifiers, such as “username#XXXX”, to removing them entirely and demanding names be changed en masse. This has naturally led to multiple cases of stolen identity, which ironically this was advertised to reduce as you could supposedly unify your identity across-platforms. However it was a staggered, unprioritized rollout, not to mention the entire movement to a less private and secure username model being unnecessary. It truly shows that Discord is unsurprisingly just as bad as Reddit, if not worse in many respects.
- senko 3y ago
  Yeah, also apparently the premium (paid) members have priority for name picking, meaning someone can subscribe to Discord for a few months, squat the name and cancel. This makes a complicated situation even more annoying as it paints the thing as a cheap attempt at increasing monetization of the platform.

bentcorner 3y ago

https://infosec.exchange/@mainframed767/110566074308214399 https://infosec.exchange/@mainframed767/110566074308214399 > As they make it halfway across, the scorpion, named Reddit, poisons the frog they were riding on. Killing them both. > Seeing this betrayal, the other frog on the shore turns to his scorpion, named Discord, and says "surely you see now and won't do the same to me." "Of course not" replies the scorpion.

kmeisthax 3y ago
If you only care about API access, Discord already stung the frog on the shore years ago. Reddit was the last holdout for relatively open API policies on a large social platform. Hell, the Fediverse is chock full of people who oppose open access and thought it was unindexable. At one point someone was harassed for the audacity to try and make a Fediverse index. My Mastodon feed is full of people really worried that Meta might try to interop with the Fediverse, even though that's our win condition! For me personally, API access wasn't the final straw - it was Spez's repeated and malincompetent attempts to justify it. Actually, Spez has had a long history of abusing admin privileges for stupid reasons, and I probably should have left years ago. I can't think of anything in Discord's history that's even remotely as bad as, say, editing the posts of an idiot /r/TD poster to make them look stupider than they already are. So I can understand why someone might move from Reddit to Discord even though Discord has the same policy everyone is angry at Reddit for adopting.

commandlinefan 3y ago

> Reddit has built up so much bad will I think what bugs me the most about this current backlash is that _API pricing_ was the thing that offended everybody, not the reams of things that reddit has done over the past 10 or so years to deserve a backlash.

revscat 3y ago
It wasn’t, and isn’t, about API pricing. 3Ps have repeatedly expressed their understanding in that regard. It was the exorbitant rates being charged, the 30 timeline given to make the changes, and the unwillingness of Reddit corporate to even take the money of those who expressed a willingness to pay. All of this is a result of bad faith efforts from Reddit corporate which never would have happened had it been handled differently from the outset, or adjustments made at any point in the process. Instead, Huffman has chosen the “do or die” route.
- noirbot 3y ago
  I'm not sure the good wording for it, but it's sort of the "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" situation. Some small set of folks were mad about the original API stuff. The response to those people was so wild, acrimonious, and abusive that it pushed a lot of other people over the edge. I would probably have still been using Reddit today if it was just the API change, but at this point I've quit out of almost pure spite.

emaginniss 3y ago

> and made money doing it How do you see that happening? Part of the reason for the pricing on the APIs was to ensure that more people saw the ads. I know I never see them when I use BaconReader. Monetizing something like Reddit is always going to be a struggle, especially since the Reddit crowd is more tech-savvy than the Twitter and Facebook users, thus more likely to use ad-blockers. I honestly don't know of a way that a social networking system can ever have a near-universal scale and still make money. Sure, a niche community that relies on contributions from its members to offset development and hosting could work, but not Reddit or Twitter with they way they're going. FB is still going pretty strong, but last I checked, 70% of the main feed content I saw were ads.

rossriley 3y ago
Let's put this in context, Reddit has somewhere in the region of 1.2 Billion users a month and supposedly earn somewhere in the region of $350Million a year in advertising revenue. This is a very good business and something that could easily be profitable. The issue is they took in VC investment at a $10Billion+ valuation and for that $350M is not enough they need to probably triple it to get somewhere close to that valuation. So let's not confuse on paper profitability with desired profitability at current VC valuation.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Personally, I moved because the redesign (from years ago) pushed the community in a bad direction. I don't like the current reddit, and people talking about alternatives is what pushed me.