10 ms·

I don't have a lot of fondness for companies which offer a free product until it becomes entrenched, then take it away. I think of how MS and Adobe both turned

by LanceH 3y ago

I don't have a lot of fondness for companies which offer a free product until it becomes entrenched, then take it away. I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy until everything else had been killed off, then they went hard on piracy. That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator. Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them. Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of. Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).

richardjam73 3y ago
That is not what Microsoft did at all.
dredmorbius 3y ago
The point of this post is that the contributors to this subreddit are one person. And has been for going on ten years. The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years. Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.) That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit. Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...> That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been: Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...": <quote> Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear. TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional. And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with. (A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.) Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs. Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not. That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control. I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one. </quote> <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this_subreddit_is_not_fully_dead_yet_but/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...> Links: 1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesByToxlab https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> 2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/u/toxlab https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> 3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_and_community_what_works_what_raises_flags/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> 4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/9ebkjh/current_plans_on_migrating_this_blog_elsewhere/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits. And in this case, that one person happens to be me.
smsm42 3y ago
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?
mercenario 3y ago
Completely agree with you, if reddit didn't provide anything useful it would be really easy to just leave it and go somewhere else. Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort. This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/
kimbernator 3y ago
I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. I've seen willingness to pay a reasonable amount from most people. Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.
- LanceH 3y ago
  > I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table. Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort. I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  What is a reasonable amount?
  - ambicapter 3y ago
    Much, much less than what they were asking for. The top reddit app was being faced with a yearly bill in the tens of millions of dollars, and comparison to other social media website APIs saw a price discrepancy of 20x iirc.
    - that_guy_iain 3y ago
      The other social media API is Imgur. Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that. Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request. Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests. So really, what is a reasonable pricing?
simion314 3y ago
Some sub reddits voted on this, so we can't blame the moderators in all cases.
- LanceH 3y ago
  I disagree that someone gets to add my voice to a protest need on a vote.
bee_rider 3y ago
I don’t really see the need for a video, if they say they need to apps to do moderation, IMO take their word for it.
nolok 3y ago
I'm not saying you are wrong. But the point you are missing, in my opinion, is that the people using the API and third party apps are the power users. It's simple, you start using a site/tool/game so much, you learn the addon/plugins/whatever for it and start using it, tale as old as computing. Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back. But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ? It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO. The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show. PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation. Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.
naikrovek 3y ago
third party apps serve far fewer ads, or no ads, and offer functionality that neither the website nor the official app support. life is better on Reddit with a 3rd party client.
- MikeHolman 3y ago
  Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them? The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    why haven't they served ads via the API then? no one is stopping them. they haven't done so because they have chosen not to. they are still choosing not to. this is a calculated move by reddit to extract the highest amount of money possible from 3rd party app developers, and the users of these apps are who is going to suffer. reddit waited until API use was counted on by some portion of its users before they pulled this lever. it's predatory.
  - 7ewis 3y ago
    I don't think they should - I'd be happy if they served ads over the API. I use a third party app because I prefer the interface, not purely because it's ad free although that is obviously a nice benefit. I wouldn't personally pay for Reddit Premium so if ads are the only way to keep third party apps viable then so be it.
CharlesW 3y ago
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators. Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.
- soco 3y ago
  "The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."
- mcv 3y ago
  At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Very little, and almost none from a technical POV I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on. The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.
  - nkjnlknlk 3y ago
    The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)
    - kingofheroes 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing. They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.
andrewstuart2 3y ago
> Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.
passwordoops 3y ago
>I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of. This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform
DarkNova6 3y ago
Excellent take
photochemsyn 3y ago
See this on pushshift and apps that used it like the camas search tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 and here's a comment excerpt from this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat... > "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub." So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.
boredhedgehog 3y ago
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.
giancarlostoro 3y ago
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them. I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data. Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit. You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs. None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  Reddit won't open any source because that would make apparent how badly made their products are. The site is really just a bunch of kluges barely held together with duct tape....
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Reddit was previously open sourced. I've contributed code to the project. (OP, FYI.)
pnathan 3y ago
Reddit and its communities (comprised of users and mods) are in a symbiotic relationship. Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other. I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.
pierat 3y ago
I wrote about this exact phenomenon yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409577 This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) And in this case, the grievance is against all companies that give away "free service". I also wrote up the thread about GitLab doing what they're doing should never be called free. And I believe that an interpretation of FTC guidelines actually does call this behavior out as bad. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-251 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
afterburner 3y ago
First, that is certainly an interesting way to bring up the anti-mod wedge the pro-Reddit-admin side are trying to push. Divide and conquer, right? Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one. This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.
jredwards 3y ago
https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctorow-on-the-enshittification-of-social-platforms.html https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctoro... "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them." - Cory Doctorow
riffraff 3y ago
Didn't Ms have a pretty lax stance on piracy in the last decade or so? Letting you download images, windows just showing "not genuine" instead of refusing to start etc.. Or are you referring to the '80s?
s1artibartfast 3y ago
>That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it. This is a universal truth.
rewmie 3y ago
> Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". Is it wrong to claim that, though? Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out? > Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all? All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities? There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse. This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.
bigbillheck 3y ago
> I think of how MS ... turned a blind eye toward piracy until 1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- kens 3y ago
  Yes, the original claim is wildly ahistorical. I seriously think that one of Microsoft's key innovations that made it successful was the idea that software should be paid for, not shared, and this should be enforced by law.
jrochkind1 3y ago
When I look for reddit alternatives... the ironic thing is that I can't find any that seem to me comparable and offer even as much API as reddit does currently! (If you know of some, happy to hear suggestions). Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there. Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest. But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out? It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)
causi 3y ago
I'm all in favor of big subreddits protesting. What I don't like is that very small, slow subreddits are also protesting when doing so is likely to be fatal. Each of these small communities barely came about in the first place, and subs that get ten posts and fifty comments a day aren't going to recover after being shut down for a month.
D0TheMath 3y ago
It would probably be at least a more meaningful protest if the moderators went on strike instead of privating their subreddits. But I don’t think many have the stomach for this.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
If we are talking about "value" as Reddit the company sees it, moderators provide 99.9% of that. Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it). Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled). If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.
petesergeant 3y ago
> I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy I remember this very, very differently than you do, apparently
downrightmike 3y ago
It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.
ranger_danger 3y ago
> I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them. "Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.
wpietri 3y ago
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.
seydor 3y ago
> Every subreddit is just a click away from moving Are they? I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere. The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there. Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.
- pierat 3y ago
  Reddit's /r/piracy has completely moved to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy after Reddit de-modded the top mod. And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy. So, there's 1 for you.
  - seydor 3y ago
    "completely moved" when only 15K out of 1.1M users have moved is a bit of overstatement. Even so, this is the remarkable exception(-ish) to the rule, and the subreddit still seems to be pretty active , in fact with a lot more comments than Lemmy
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  r/StarTrek and r/DaystromInstitute partially moved to startrek.website
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING. But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels. Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen). >for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of. of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.

by LanceH 3y ago

richardjam73 3y ago

That is not what Microsoft did at all.

dredmorbius 3y ago

The point of this post is that the contributors to this subreddit are one person. And has been for going on ten years. The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years. Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.) That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit. Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...> That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been: Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...": <quote> Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear. TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional. And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with. (A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.) Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs. Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not. That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control. I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one. </quote> <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this_subreddit_is_not_fully_dead_yet_but/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...> Links: 1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesByToxlab https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> 2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/u/toxlab https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> 3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_and_community_what_works_what_raises_flags/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> 4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/9ebkjh/current_plans_on_migrating_this_blog_elsewhere/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...> This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits. And in this case, that one person happens to be me.

smsm42 3y ago

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?

mercenario 3y ago

Completely agree with you, if reddit didn't provide anything useful it would be really easy to just leave it and go somewhere else. Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort. This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

kimbernator 3y ago

I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. I've seen willingness to pay a reasonable amount from most people. Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.

LanceH 3y ago
> I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table. Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort. I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
What is a reasonable amount?
- ambicapter 3y ago
  Much, much less than what they were asking for. The top reddit app was being faced with a yearly bill in the tens of millions of dollars, and comparison to other social media website APIs saw a price discrepancy of 20x iirc.
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    The other social media API is Imgur. Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that. Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request. Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests. So really, what is a reasonable pricing?

simion314 3y ago

Some sub reddits voted on this, so we can't blame the moderators in all cases.

LanceH 3y ago
I disagree that someone gets to add my voice to a protest need on a vote.

bee_rider 3y ago

I don’t really see the need for a video, if they say they need to apps to do moderation, IMO take their word for it.

nolok 3y ago

I'm not saying you are wrong. But the point you are missing, in my opinion, is that the people using the API and third party apps are the power users. It's simple, you start using a site/tool/game so much, you learn the addon/plugins/whatever for it and start using it, tale as old as computing. Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back. But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ? It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO. The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show. PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation. Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.

naikrovek 3y ago

third party apps serve far fewer ads, or no ads, and offer functionality that neither the website nor the official app support. life is better on Reddit with a 3rd party client.

MikeHolman 3y ago
Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them? The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  why haven't they served ads via the API then? no one is stopping them. they haven't done so because they have chosen not to. they are still choosing not to. this is a calculated move by reddit to extract the highest amount of money possible from 3rd party app developers, and the users of these apps are who is going to suffer. reddit waited until API use was counted on by some portion of its users before they pulled this lever. it's predatory.
- 7ewis 3y ago
  I don't think they should - I'd be happy if they served ads over the API. I use a third party app because I prefer the interface, not purely because it's ad free although that is obviously a nice benefit. I wouldn't personally pay for Reddit Premium so if ads are the only way to keep third party apps viable then so be it.

CharlesW 3y ago

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators. Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.

soco 3y ago
"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."
mcv 3y ago
At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on. The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.
- nkjnlknlk 3y ago
  The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)
  - kingofheroes 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing. They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.

andrewstuart2 3y ago

> Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.

passwordoops 3y ago

>I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of. This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform

DarkNova6 3y ago

Excellent take

photochemsyn 3y ago

See this on pushshift and apps that used it like the camas search tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848 and here's a comment excerpt from this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat... > "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub." So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.

boredhedgehog 3y ago

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.

giancarlostoro 3y ago

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them. I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data. Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit. You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs. None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.

DropInIn 3y ago
Reddit won't open any source because that would make apparent how badly made their products are. The site is really just a bunch of kluges barely held together with duct tape....
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Reddit was previously open sourced. I've contributed code to the project. (OP, FYI.)

pnathan 3y ago

Reddit and its communities (comprised of users and mods) are in a symbiotic relationship. Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other. I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.

pierat 3y ago

I wrote about this exact phenomenon yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409577 This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) And in this case, the grievance is against all companies that give away "free service". I also wrote up the thread about GitLab doing what they're doing should never be called free. And I believe that an interpretation of FTC guidelines actually does call this behavior out as bad. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-251 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

afterburner 3y ago

First, that is certainly an interesting way to bring up the anti-mod wedge the pro-Reddit-admin side are trying to push. Divide and conquer, right? Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one. This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.

jredwards 3y ago

https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctorow-on-the-enshittification-of-social-platforms.html https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctoro... "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them." - Cory Doctorow

riffraff 3y ago

Didn't Ms have a pretty lax stance on piracy in the last decade or so? Letting you download images, windows just showing "not genuine" instead of refusing to start etc.. Or are you referring to the '80s?

s1artibartfast 3y ago

>That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it. This is a universal truth.

rewmie 3y ago

> Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". Is it wrong to claim that, though? Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out? > Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all? All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities? There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse. This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.

bigbillheck 3y ago

> I think of how MS ... turned a blind eye toward piracy until 1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

kens 3y ago
Yes, the original claim is wildly ahistorical. I seriously think that one of Microsoft's key innovations that made it successful was the idea that software should be paid for, not shared, and this should be enforced by law.

jrochkind1 3y ago

When I look for reddit alternatives... the ironic thing is that I can't find any that seem to me comparable and offer even as much API as reddit does currently! (If you know of some, happy to hear suggestions). Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there. Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest. But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out? It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)

causi 3y ago

I'm all in favor of big subreddits protesting. What I don't like is that very small, slow subreddits are also protesting when doing so is likely to be fatal. Each of these small communities barely came about in the first place, and subs that get ten posts and fifty comments a day aren't going to recover after being shut down for a month.

D0TheMath 3y ago

It would probably be at least a more meaningful protest if the moderators went on strike instead of privating their subreddits. But I don’t think many have the stomach for this.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

If we are talking about "value" as Reddit the company sees it, moderators provide 99.9% of that. Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it). Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled). If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.

petesergeant 3y ago

> I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy I remember this very, very differently than you do, apparently

downrightmike 3y ago

It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.

ranger_danger 3y ago

> I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them. "Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.

wpietri 3y ago

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.

seydor 3y ago

> Every subreddit is just a click away from moving Are they? I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere. The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there. Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.

pierat 3y ago
Reddit's /r/piracy has completely moved to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy after Reddit de-modded the top mod. And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy. So, there's 1 for you.
- seydor 3y ago
  "completely moved" when only 15K out of 1.1M users have moved is a bit of overstatement. Even so, this is the remarkable exception(-ish) to the rule, and the subreddit still seems to be pretty active , in fact with a lot more comments than Lemmy
Shawnj2 3y ago
r/StarTrek and r/DaystromInstitute partially moved to startrek.website

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>Perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING. But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels. Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen). >for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of. of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.