I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly. I'm no Harvard MBA, but here's an easier way out – instead of asking small-time app developers to pay millions, put API access contingent on the account subscribing to Reddit Premium. That way users get to keep the experience they enjoy, independent developers can keep doing their thing, Reddit gets to make up for the lost ad revenue in the form of subscriptions, and if people complain about it they are the ones being cheap.
Yes! Speaking as a heavy Reddit, but non-sub user, this is exactly what would have gotten me to pay them $50 a year. Not NFTs, stickers and avatars.
I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd how dark they've been towards this user class. It's very similar to the Twitter changes.
The nuke approach they've done will send so many of their important, core users off the site.
Can someone explain what value new Reddit data has for LLMs?
Presumably the entire 2005-2023 (up to March) dataset which is (was) freely available on Pushshift / torrents is enough?
Also, not that Sam Altman is unbiased, but he did say that social media (Reddit, Twitter) were not super important for developing LLMs (But of course, that's exactly what he would say if they were useful!)
There's pretty much no scenario where Reddit wants to encourage 3rd party app developers to run their own intermediate "proxy" service for Reddit's API. For one it adds another barrier between Reddit and their own users, and two it would mean that there's just one more small step for the app developer to take to just implement the backend services themselves and stop using Reddit's APIs completely. I see a lot of suggestions already that app developers should do this. This of course is completely impractical for anything more than a trivial number of users unless the developers want to start paying millions to run their own infrastructure instead of just paying for access to Reddit's backend systems.
> Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers.
This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not that scrapers won't settle for html scraping).
While I have issues with mods of various forums being little hitlers, I can see why they are rebelling, evidently only the 3rd party apps provide a decent way to mod on mobile. They're already working many hours for free, why would they put up with using crappy tools to do a job they do for fun and for free?
That small time developer who discussed paying millions also said it came out to $2.5/month on average[1]. Which actually isn't that bad for the service Reddit is providing
One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying members their value. The developer now feels he cannot charge lifetime members an extra $2.5/month because he promised them he wouldn't
Beyond the discussion of is Reddit about to die or not, selling LIFETIME access to someone elses free API is a dumb move, which will always end badly
I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
Then Reddit can and should charge that to the user directly. Not screw over app developers like this.
Perhaps you should read Christian’s post on Reddit [1] where he described, in detail, what this truly means and how he was effectively lied to by Reddit; and an interview where he states that he actually understands Reddit charging for API access — he doesn’t understand why the burden is being put on the app developers and why they didn’t give app developers considerable more time to make the adjustment with respect to their own pricing [2].
Reddit isn’t wrong for trying to monetize their API to cover service and server costs. Reddit is absolutely wrong for lying to app developers, charging an egregious amount to the app developers, and for not giving them enough time to be able to change their pricing terms and not leave developers on the hook for millions while existing pricing tiers (such as someone who paid in advance) still have months before renewal.
Key word here is 'on average'. Most people are not going to spend $25/year for access to a third party reddit app. That leaves the hardcore users who are going to cost the dev much more than $2.50/mo, and when ads are no longer able to be served and NSFW content is also gone where is the profit then?
Putting aside the bad salesmanship and planning of selling a forever license, it is absolutely way too much money.
> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
That's my point though. Reddit is NOT charging $2.5/mo for API access. It is charging a set amount per app (based on overall usage), and the developer has to now be in the business of creating and charging for a whole new subscription themselves to make up for what they have to pay Reddit.
It’s reductive to say Reddit is providing the service, the app developer is also providing a service. The value originally is provided by the communities, then Reddit adds something on top, and the indie app devs add some more value.
> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.
The _average_ user costs $2.50/mo in API requests. I’m willing to bet people who pay for the “ultra” tier of an app are above average users at best, especially when you consider Apollo also has free users.
lifetime memberships are useless because a corporation can be dissolved in seconds and you can bet that lifetime for free was bound to the the life of the corporation.
The aim is not _just_ to make money, but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better. Sort of like what Twitter did. It’s also why they had like one dude working on their mobile website one hour a month for the last few years.
And the official Reddit apps sucks big ass in my opinion.
Combine this with the way Reddit nags and misleads you to install it, and that gave me enough reason to never use their fucking app.
> but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better
That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app are materially better than the same users directly paying for the service they actually want.
At least on Android, the official app is terrible. Scrolling is very janky and feels unnatural, and the design is cluttered and soulless. Just need to look at Reddit is Fun to see how good it could be.
They say a product reflects the organization that produced it, and it's clear from the app that this is a company with unchecked Promo-Driven-Development and Resume-Driven-Development. There is no impressive metric that measures app jankiness or design clarity in isolation, and the effort to fix it is disproportionately larger than the line that it adds to your resume or promo package. So even though it's glaringly obvious that the app is broken within 3 seconds of opening it, not a single person anywhere in the org is incentivized to fix it.
Says who? They are only pushing the "official experience" to make up for lost ad revenue. If I pay Reddit $50/yr why would they care what app I use? YouTube does the same thing with Premium, and it is working out great.
Do you think this desire is out of the goodness of their hearts and they genuinely think that it is the best? I cannot believe anyone would think that.
I mean, I think even still charging (a reasonable amount) for the public API, and in return bringing it up to near the standards of the Reddit-built app’s private API, and possibly allowing some ad revenue split with the large apps where by showing Reddit ads (currently impossible with the current API!) is compensated with some minute fraction off the API bill/paid to dev if no outstanding balance.
Reddit won because it was the Digg-alternative, they’ve always been on shaky ground if people just start posting less. What ever per-impression value they get now on their own apps/website will plummet if people just start using it less, regardless if they’re making ad revenue off every user or only some users.
Plus, yeah it’s an awesome LLM training resource. Make it cheap, why not? Your competitors are expensive, and your data is well indexed by topic and conversational in tone.
That would still get a lot of backlash as a lot of users just aren't going to be willing to pay just to use a different app. Turning this around isn't so easy as you make it appear too it's still reddit effectively shutting out 3rd party apps.
Reddit Premium costs more per month ($7) than the expected cost per user for the API ($2). If third party apps can’t make it work with the request-based pricing model, limiting access to just premium users isn’t going to work any better.
As per the usual they should have chosen the middle way and forced reasonable charges for subscriptions for those people who want to use 3rd party aps $3-5 a month. Instead they now have a rebellion, that might turn into a movement to ditch reddit like people ditched digg. I'm not sure where they'd go though, I don't know of any platform out there that is similar to reddit that could handle a large influx.
As an until-recently premium Redditor, exactly this. I voluntarily subscribed. I didn't derive value from subscribing. I just didn't want to be a freeloader since I enjoy the site so much.
Because of Reddit's current practices, I've cancelled my premium membership. I'll likely move on from Reddit unless they chart a path where I and others can continue to use our third party clients happily.
> I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly.
Are we living in different universes?
Less than 1% of Reddit users will be impacted by these changes. If all the people who are upset at this leave, it will have almost no impact to Reddit. A few niche subreddits may die, but that's it.
Facebook's North America revenue is around $50 a quarter per user ("ARPU"), which is ~$15/month. You'd have to charge quite a bit to clear that, given most users won't pay. (Plus 30% to pay for App Store fees.)
Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.
Reddit is garbage these days anyways. Even communities that are scientific/technical seem to be toxic these days. If you want to get to a comment that has any substance regarding some topic or article, you have to scroll all the way down.
Reddit is really mismanaged, the community, contributors and moderators have basically taken over in the past five years or so. People are quick to point out that there are really good subreddit, and I have no doubt that's true, the larger subreddits however have all developed in a pretty toxic direction. There are clearly right and wrong opinions, don't based on fact, "rules" enforced arbitrarily and everyone seems to have some type of diagnosis or social issues.
The lacking management of Reddit have allowed it to become a pretty weird place, not quite as bad as Imgur, but the idea is much the same. The community have been left to it's own devices for many years, and now the owners are trying to get some control back, in an attempt to make a profit. They're a just so far removed from what the community have built that they have no idea how to manage the site anymore.
Not really, there are a bunch of small reddits that really is a good source of information and community. E.g. r/leathercraft, r/learnmath, r/godot and so on...
The pandemic also ruined a lot of subreddits, especially ones for municipalities. Over 3 years of "OMG COVID" and "we ar liek literally in a pandemic" and "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DON'T SUPPORT MORE LOCKDOWNS" made me give up on a lot of subreddit communities, especially the Los Angeles one. But yeah, the metastasization of Reddit's broad politics also made things worse.
The issue is that the admins only selectively enforce their rules, and are very ideologically driven at that (see the general rule of not allowing bans for other subreddit participation). This sets the tone for the moderation.
Bardfinn is a really, really good representation of this. They're a nutter who controls a huge number of subreddits, talks like they're on a ton of speed, and bans even minor questioning of The Narrative.
Ironically she's a felon who lives in her parents basement. Probably shouldn't be moralizing.
I'm a casual user and it's fine. The specific subs I'm on have very few toxic people, and I either ignore them or block them.
It seems heavily made up of very young people, which means a reliable trope is "I'm just getting into <genre> -- what are some good artists I should check out?"
But that's pretty harmless; you can just ignore them.
The nice thing about Reddit is that you can scroll down. Even if the top voted comments are garbage, you can just continue reading, and read answers from a very diverse audience, even if they are downvoted.
It's a lot more diverse than Twitter, where it seems that only right wing bullshit is shown any more, or HN, where 90% of posters are men aged 20-40.
There is a great deal of diversity in thought on Reddit that is just banned outright by moderators. To pick a non-inflammatory example, a lot of dog subreddits will not allow any references to aversive training methods, which in their eyes include things like snapping your fingers or saying "no" in a sharp voice. What this means is you get a bunch of rival subreddits with different dogmatic beliefs, and people are banned for linking or even alluding to the existence of the others.
There are examples of this kind of strict imposition of dogma by fiat in every reddit community, on matters large and small.
Reddit conversations are mostly memes at this point. I have two geographic subreddits for my city. One is owned by a dude in another city, I'm pretty sure Detroit, who just doesn't moderate anything. The other is owned by a group of people who will straight up ban people for even marginal dissent from their favored ideology. Most of the people active on those subreddits aren't even from Portland. They're conservatives, liberals, and leftists who view Portland as this gateway of cultural relevance. It's the internet equivalent of Ballmer and his wife buying political influence in Portland, a city they don't live in, much less the state.
The rot is root deep at this point if it's let things like this happen.
The problem I see with lemmy, mastodon and similar services (anybody remember the also open source "Facebook killer" from like 10 years ago?) is that they are confusing: is it one service or a bunch of servers? Which server is the good one?
The average is lost on the first page, and you need her for these social based apps. You need the non tech savvy people to get communities like r/medicine.
Otherwise you get shat you see on IRC LiberaChat nowadays: the channels with people are mainly technical or technically related ones. ... which like, is good for people like us. But I come to HN for quality tech related discussions... I want a place for quality InstantPot talk, or quality ChildFree chat.
To argue your point, today on Lemmy.ml the owner advised users the server could not handle the load, and told users to register on other instances (https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770?scrollToComments=true). This would mean multiple logins. There is no way to migrate or synchronise accounts. Federation is a cool idea but Lemmy's implementation is a terrible user experience.
I wish these federated systems would put a bit more effort into the user experience.
I mean, even though you’ve directly linked to the server list (instead of their even less straightforward front page), it’s still confusing. What is a new user supposed to do with this? It’s all incredibly opaque.
Reddit's app has terrible UI/UX, as does the website redesign (new.reddit.com, which is the default www.reddit.com). The only good UI/UX is old.reddit.com, which isn't very good on mobile.
I believe the estimate is 18-20%. This is roughly 86 billion monthly active users. More than enough to populate an active community. I hazard to guess that third party app users are also more active.
or you know, just ask people to pay $2.50/month to cover their share? I have a weird feeling this is exactly what the Apollo dev will be doing. In order to charge everyone a monthly fee, they need to shut down Apollo and create a new app
If I had an app with 1.5 million monthly active users and the platform I piggy- backed off asked me to pay them $20 million yearly for the privilege, I would start asking VCs for money to pay the bill and hire a couple folks to build the platform my users are going to migrate to before someone else does.
Reddit the company has shown to completely misunderstand the userbase that created their website and they're slaughtering it to make a buck to payoff their own investors. So why not prove them wrong and do it yourself?
I agree. The Apollo dev arguably owns the user last-mile. It wouldn't be a stretch to offer users an alternative. Reddit was open source until 2017 (https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit) so most of the heavy dev lifting is already done. The major cost would be in infrastructure.
A large portion of reddit contributors use 3rd party apps. Will reddit even be worth using if those people leave? That’s a huge risk, and I’m not confident Reddit has fully evaluated the second order effects of this API change.
Assuming the 90-9-1 rule for reddit, chances are that the 1% that post [quality/highly-popular] content are more likely to be invested enough to improve their experience via a better app experience.
I hope something new comes along. I'm getting sick of reddit. They way they allow moderators to run subreddits nowadays is ridiculous. Especially city subreddits that should be completely unbiased and welcoming to all in the region.
The r/Toronto city subreddit is absolute garbage now because of what the mods have done. They decided they would have "no-crime January" as a trial to see what the subreddit looks like if users weren't allowed to post articles about petty crime throughout the city. When someone gets stabbed in a high-profile area it couldn't be posted under the no-crime January rules. They said they would run it as a trial and offer a survey to see what people thought. They didn't run the survey and the rule is now in place permanently. Of course, when a white guy or incel commits a crime it's allowed, but if it's a BIPOC? Deleted.
Now the mods are trying to astroturf the municipal election we have coming up and push one of the candidates. It's the "progressive" candidate and in true Canadian fashion, if you don't vote for the progressive the reddit mob wants you to vote for you might as well be a Conservative because you're handing them the election. The mods allow people to make posts that say nonsense such as:
> To all Progressives - we need to consolidate behind [redacted] now. [He/she] might not be my first choice but this is finally an election where we can put a people-first person in. We can't screw this up by splitting the vote.
To suggest you can be a progressive but want another candidate will result in downvotes and insults. Funny enough, those insults would get you banned under their famous Rule 2 which basically allows them to delete or ban anything they deem as "not excellent" but when directed at someone who is seen as "conservative" they are allowed. The subreddit has been like this for about 5-6 years, it's only the political polarization that's got more extreme lately.
Don't forget that if you don't like Trudeau, you must want Canada to join the states because you're a truck driving gun-nut bigot who also wants to ban abortion and hates lgbt people.
There is enough variety with wider regional subreddits on the national/provincial scale so that doesn't bother me much. The Toronto subreddit is by far the most dominant and the only general Toronto subreddit worth subscribing to which makes the censorship more aggravating because you can't really get Toronto news elsewhere on reddit.
I’ve seen this on Reddit and every other online community over the past few years. Zero tolerance for any sort of nuance or thought. It is concerning. HN is the last hold out.
Readit News
I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd how dark they've been towards this user class. It's very similar to the Twitter changes.
The nuke approach they've done will send so many of their important, core users off the site.
Presumably the entire 2005-2023 (up to March) dataset which is (was) freely available on Pushshift / torrents is enough?
Also, not that Sam Altman is unbiased, but he did say that social media (Reddit, Twitter) were not super important for developing LLMs (But of course, that's exactly what he would say if they were useful!)
This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not that scrapers won't settle for html scraping).
One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying members their value. The developer now feels he cannot charge lifetime members an extra $2.5/month because he promised them he wouldn't
Beyond the discussion of is Reddit about to die or not, selling LIFETIME access to someone elses free API is a dumb move, which will always end badly
I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23743993/reddit-apollo-cl...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/r3npbm/last_call...
Perhaps you should read Christian’s post on Reddit [1] where he described, in detail, what this truly means and how he was effectively lied to by Reddit; and an interview where he states that he actually understands Reddit charging for API access — he doesn’t understand why the burden is being put on the app developers and why they didn’t give app developers considerable more time to make the adjustment with respect to their own pricing [2].
Reddit isn’t wrong for trying to monetize their API to cover service and server costs. Reddit is absolutely wrong for lying to app developers, charging an egregious amount to the app developers, and for not giving them enough time to be able to change their pricing terms and not leave developers on the hook for millions while existing pricing tiers (such as someone who paid in advance) still have months before renewal.
[1] https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_w...
[2] https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0
Putting aside the bad salesmanship and planning of selling a forever license, it is absolutely way too much money.
That's my point though. Reddit is NOT charging $2.5/mo for API access. It is charging a set amount per app (based on overall usage), and the developer has to now be in the business of creating and charging for a whole new subscription themselves to make up for what they have to pay Reddit.
I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.
Smart on him for selling those…
That's the point: let the users pay you to make up for the (potential?) revenue you're not making from tracking them. Estimates put reddit at something like $0.25 per user. Pushing them to the official app might _generously_ triple that number. Versus the user paying $5/mo? It's a braindead business case to say that users in your official app are materially better than the same users directly paying for the service they actually want.
They say a product reflects the organization that produced it, and it's clear from the app that this is a company with unchecked Promo-Driven-Development and Resume-Driven-Development. There is no impressive metric that measures app jankiness or design clarity in isolation, and the effort to fix it is disproportionately larger than the line that it adds to your resume or promo package. So even though it's glaringly obvious that the app is broken within 3 seconds of opening it, not a single person anywhere in the org is incentivized to fix it.
Why would they force users to do something they're not too pleased about if it wasn't entirely for generating revenue of some description?
Probably not. It's about money, not enforcing a uniform experience.
I’m not saying that Reddit handled it well. Buy your option doesn’t seem to be any better.
Reddit won because it was the Digg-alternative, they’ve always been on shaky ground if people just start posting less. What ever per-impression value they get now on their own apps/website will plummet if people just start using it less, regardless if they’re making ad revenue off every user or only some users.
Plus, yeah it’s an awesome LLM training resource. Make it cheap, why not? Your competitors are expensive, and your data is well indexed by topic and conversational in tone.
Because of Reddit's current practices, I've cancelled my premium membership. I'll likely move on from Reddit unless they chart a path where I and others can continue to use our third party clients happily.
Are we living in different universes?
Less than 1% of Reddit users will be impacted by these changes. If all the people who are upset at this leave, it will have almost no impact to Reddit. A few niche subreddits may die, but that's it.
Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.
Dead Comment
Tell HN: My Reddit account was banned after adding my subs to the protest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192312 (411 points/10 hours ago/174 comments)
Don't let Reddit kill 3rd party apps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179853 (361 points/1 day ago/254 comments)
How Reddit became the enemy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36177876 (172 points/1 day ago/154 comments)
Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162235 (406 points/3 days ago/421 comments)
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 (1969 points/4 days ago/1310 comments)
The lacking management of Reddit have allowed it to become a pretty weird place, not quite as bad as Imgur, but the idea is much the same. The community have been left to it's own devices for many years, and now the owners are trying to get some control back, in an attempt to make a profit. They're a just so far removed from what the community have built that they have no idea how to manage the site anymore.
Not really, there are a bunch of small reddits that really is a good source of information and community. E.g. r/leathercraft, r/learnmath, r/godot and so on...
Ironically she's a felon who lives in her parents basement. Probably shouldn't be moralizing.
It seems heavily made up of very young people, which means a reliable trope is "I'm just getting into <genre> -- what are some good artists I should check out?"
But that's pretty harmless; you can just ignore them.
I enjoy trolling those users by posting circlejerk answers in the unironic subreddits.
It's a lot more diverse than Twitter, where it seems that only right wing bullshit is shown any more, or HN, where 90% of posters are men aged 20-40.
There are examples of this kind of strict imposition of dogma by fiat in every reddit community, on matters large and small.
The rot is root deep at this point if it's let things like this happen.
> aren't even from Portland
Ah, there we go ;-)
https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
Looks like an interesting approach.
The average is lost on the first page, and you need her for these social based apps. You need the non tech savvy people to get communities like r/medicine.
Otherwise you get shat you see on IRC LiberaChat nowadays: the channels with people are mainly technical or technically related ones. ... which like, is good for people like us. But I come to HN for quality tech related discussions... I want a place for quality InstantPot talk, or quality ChildFree chat.
I mean, even though you’ve directly linked to the server list (instead of their even less straightforward front page), it’s still confusing. What is a new user supposed to do with this? It’s all incredibly opaque.
Sadly it received less publicity and mind share than lemmy, so not everything might be up to the expectations of the HN crowd.
If Twitter proved anything, its that its really hard to kill a popular social media network, no matter how badly managed or drama filled it is.
Reddit's app has terrible UI/UX, as does the website redesign (new.reddit.com, which is the default www.reddit.com). The only good UI/UX is old.reddit.com, which isn't very good on mobile.
all together the 3rd party app users and res users consist of millions of the most dedicated tech savvy users that will switch.
myspace and digg technically exist but they're no longer relevant. Reddit is moving in the same direction
Lemmy/kbin is more popular than it has even been and the main lemmy instance is overloaded.
July when the actual apps shut down we'll see a huge migration to the fediverse
Reddit the company has shown to completely misunderstand the userbase that created their website and they're slaughtering it to make a buck to payoff their own investors. So why not prove them wrong and do it yourself?
* https://imgur.com/a/Tg3IXNf
No idea how many of those apps are third party, but I would be willing to bet 'most' of them.
Most top-level reddit posts come from bots reposting old content. Those bots aren't using the first party app...
The r/Toronto city subreddit is absolute garbage now because of what the mods have done. They decided they would have "no-crime January" as a trial to see what the subreddit looks like if users weren't allowed to post articles about petty crime throughout the city. When someone gets stabbed in a high-profile area it couldn't be posted under the no-crime January rules. They said they would run it as a trial and offer a survey to see what people thought. They didn't run the survey and the rule is now in place permanently. Of course, when a white guy or incel commits a crime it's allowed, but if it's a BIPOC? Deleted.
Now the mods are trying to astroturf the municipal election we have coming up and push one of the candidates. It's the "progressive" candidate and in true Canadian fashion, if you don't vote for the progressive the reddit mob wants you to vote for you might as well be a Conservative because you're handing them the election. The mods allow people to make posts that say nonsense such as:
> To all Progressives - we need to consolidate behind [redacted] now. [He/she] might not be my first choice but this is finally an election where we can put a people-first person in. We can't screw this up by splitting the vote.
To suggest you can be a progressive but want another candidate will result in downvotes and insults. Funny enough, those insults would get you banned under their famous Rule 2 which basically allows them to delete or ban anything they deem as "not excellent" but when directed at someone who is seen as "conservative" they are allowed. The subreddit has been like this for about 5-6 years, it's only the political polarization that's got more extreme lately.