Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually.
Aside from this move that is an obvious way to steer user toward the official app and have tighter control, the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit [1].
Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).
Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.
> the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit
For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out, so that's very on brand?
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
I think people who speak no english don't end on Reddit in the first place. It had very few traction in France as a far as I know, and facebook groups would be the go to places for most people.
So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.
Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.
I’d say most, but certainly not (almost) all. There are quite a few (real) German subreddits, and most of my countrypeople prefer their native language over English, and are often not even that comfortable with it. Forum culture is also still relatively big in Germany, so for niche hobbies there are probably several forums, I know that for ecigs, the German reddit community can’t hold a candle to the several ecig forums.
Reddit is hiring and some of the job descriptions talk specifically about international expansion, so I guess at least Reddit thinks it is or will be significant.
Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
>Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually.
If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
IPO doesn't have to mean ads, though. There are other ways to monetize a user base and to generate money based off of a 'community'. They're just ways that require more time, more concerted effort and planning to execute.
Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.
So far…
- PaLM
- GPT3
- Falcon
Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.
But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.
Perhaps because killing third-party apps is completely unrelated to LLMs? While they’re both related to the API lockdown, the core problem is not LLM-related. It’s Reddit’s own short-sighted incompetence.
They can EASILY provide high prices to LLMs and low prices to app devs. They just won’t. It’s in their best interests to remove third parties and force everyone on the inferior, ad-ridden official app. They could even make premium-based account tokens to allow them to use third party apps, but that’s too long-term oriented. They have to pump’n’dump NOW.
While it seems that some people feel reddit is "owed" something when its data is used by machine learning companies, the reality is that reddit themselves claims that posts are owned by users and so really they are not in any position to be owed anything.
They can fully dictate the terms of their API sure, but unless they want to drop off all search indexes there is nothing they can do about people scraping the data the old fashioned way.
Isn't this mostly closing the barn door after the horse left? The AI companies already have their data. It may grow stale, but the bulk of the corpus has already been ingested. Either that or they do old-fashioned scraping.
Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free.
In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either
It's quite key to the legal strategy of all the LLMs that they do not need a license for their input data. So if they want reddit data they'll just scrape it (which is also legally protected). And if they do need a license then reddit does not have one to sell to the AI companies, at least for most of the text on their site. I don't believe it's a reasonable strategy for any platform (except maybe marketplaces like shutterstock) to attempt to charge money for data for machine learning.
I find it funny also. This fact seemed to have its moment in the sun for about 15 minutes a few months ago when everyone was first talking about ChatGPT and then everyone forgot?
This isn’t how the world works. We live in a class based society. Reddit could just have LLMs pay more and focus on moderating correct API payment usage.
Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.
When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
Faking activity to bootstrap real activity is probably fine. To expand into international markets, they need to present existing activity to draw and retain users. But I don't see a problem with this.
Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins not do it now if it worked then.
..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well:
> Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs.
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
I wouldn't be surprised if they try to stop this protest by allocating a large block of IPO shares to moderators. As they should given how much moderators contribute to their success.
Actually paying the moderators for their time and effort to manage and build your product? I mean - it would be the right thing to do, for sure, but to suggest that Reddit Inc. under its current direction would have such foresight is a fantasy.
That's part of a whole program; while reddit lets many mods work for free they are paying these "mods" $20/hour to "organically" drum up subscribers on non-US subs. I shared some links about this a few months ago:
I moderate a reasonably sized community (50k - 100k users). Without using an external app like Sync or Apollo, it is insanely hard. Their own app is so clunky: sometimes it just fails to load posts or the feed. At times the video doesn't load - instead showing a screengrab. The worst offender is that sometimes the UI shows moderator controls for even some communities one doesn't moderate (This is a known bug going on for several months in the official Reddit app and the admins/devs acknowledge it). You have to go about closing the app and clearing the cache. For e.g., here's a screenshot, which shows a warplane subreddit that I don't manage (having mod controls):
Keeping third party apps open for Premium users is one way out. Another alternative would be to keep API costs low enough that developers can reasonably pass that cost to subscription users. But the current state would just lead to massive disruption. They will end up killing the golden goose.
See Apollo as an example. You have a single dev, with very fine apple ios ecosystem knowledge, who always adds the latest apple api's and listens to community feedback and makes the best app, he alone can make in whatever way serves him to learn new coding skills and community requested features.
On the other hand on Reddit official app, you have tons of product managers forcing developers to work on many features that are outright against community feedback. See things like reducing information load, or making ads indistinguishable from content. Those features benefit reddit but many users hate them,
Apollo has dense vs wide posts and no ads. Official reddit app doesn't.
The value proposition and the audience they are catering too is very different. Buying the app is not gonna fix the fundamentally opposite goals of both apps. Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that. it also wasted months of their time making some fake reddit nft side proyect that was dead on arrival.
They bought Alien Blue and turned it into the official app. I'm sure if they bought Apollo they would find a way to introduce all sorts of bugs (and worse, anti-features like ads and microtransactions) in no time
I'm confused. I used to use and absolutely love Alien Blue. I love gestural swiping. It makes collapsing comments and moving rapidly between posts easy.
Reddit bought Alien Blue. Sure, it's got ads and other bullshit, but the core UX is the same. I've never had it crash or cause any problems. I've always been confused by what people mean when they utterly trash on the "official reddit app". Is there another one I'm not aware of?
No benefit. I am just passionate about some topics & I try to maintain a good discussion with scientific temper around it.
I do the same work as @dang would here, without the pay and with a little more unreasonable users. (Its not hard to believe HN is the most behaved discussion platform on internet)
Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) is going to be discontinued. Its a third party tool too. You probably missed the announcement a year ago where they announce to be only in maintenance mode and eventually sunsetted
As for desktop: Going by last week stats, in my community, there are about 83 posts/day and 969 comments/day on average with 6 posts getting reported for breaking ToS, and numerous other flagged comments. If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with their tools.
My tool of choice should be able to highlight new answers quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't do this by reddit mobile and their new desktop UI. Reddit's old interface won't allow all mod tools (such as assigning removal reasons) and the new UI is half baked. The mobile third party interfaces have been at least reasonably consistent.
Honestly, hearing that killing off third party apps will make moderators have to work harder to do the damage that they do to reddit is the first positive thing I've heard about this API change.
It's interesting to watch Reddit lose control of the narrative on this. If you read the relevant threads Reddit admins swear up and down that the new API pricing is reasonable and not intended to kill third party apps.
Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
> the new API pricing is reasonable and not intended to kill third party apps.
It’s quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved, but it’s completely implausible when you add that NSFW content will be removed from the API entirely, and that third party client will not be allowed to be ad-supported.
> It's quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved
why is this assumed? In my assessment, Reddit is offering a quite reasonable charge per API call. If this will somehow cause a third-party app to ride up $20M in costs, it behooves them to optimize. As far as I can see, Apollo caches an absurd amount of data pre load which is not a mandatory advantage any app needs to offer
I've done my best to research this and I'm unable to find any numbers on the matter besides one app developers miscalculation of 20 mio. for billions of requests.
I can however find official documentation that backs up what the admins are saying. The new Data API terms says they no long allow commercial use of their APIs and might implement a cost pr. request. It links to the Data API docs that says 60 req. pr. minute are free as long as it is non-commercial. I would think unofficial reddit apps goes under the non-commercial clause.
To me it looks to be a complete overreaction by the Reddit community because of a miscommunication on parts of a single developer and the Reddit orgs too slow reaction to stop it from spreading.
This also kills off apps like 'removeddit' that sheds light on rampant moderator abuse - it will be even _harder_ to see what the moderators have been up to behind the scenes after this, which is an aspect of the narrative that reddit has been trying to get a handle on for quite a while now.
My initial thought on the timing is how much it coincides with the timing of Twitter's API becoming ridiculously expensive ($42k/mo). That maybe Reddit thought they could hop on that bandwagon and make some coin. But LLM also makes a ton of sense.
If that's the case, whitelisting the most popular apps might be somewhat of a solution, no? Also I think being transparent about the fears that LLMs take from your site without returning any value would probably be met with understanding from the userbase.
How difficult is it to rate limit API requests? Just Fibonacci the increasing slowdown.
And require something like a public key to access the API so you can track requests coming from multiple hosts.
Then any rate of access above that of a power user can be charged for appropriately. And make it so that activating API access is something that can't be automated so people can't create thousands of API dummy accounts.
This is my read as well. I don't really understand the argument that Reddit wants to kill 3rd party apps, so makes an unaffordable API. If they want to kill 3rd party apps... why wouldn't they just kill them directly? Why leave any ability to purchase API access unless they have a customer in mind that can afford to buy it at that price?
While the APIs make it significantly easier to ingest for LLM training, scraping will still work.
Unless they put 100% of content behind a login-gate, it's currently legal* to scrape and use for derivative works, as long as you have the money and the chutzpah to deal with lawsuits that may or may not come.
I mean I'm sure the number crunchers have Declared that it's reasonable, but if the effect is that it will kill third party apps, then the net result is the same.
> I'm sure the number crunchers have Declared that it's reasonable
They would have to come up with a very hard to understand reason behind it though.
Even napkin math shows their numbers to be undefensible and malicious. The very obvious reason behind them is to kill 3rd parties and force people into the official app.
The apollo dev for iOS said 50 million queries was 166$ on imgur which is owned by the same company as reddit and has higher server costs due to images being more expensive to host. Reddit is asking for 12,000 for that many queries.
166 < 12000 and that 2 orders of magnitude are incomprehensible in terms of any technical reason to serve some comments and text posts...
Reddit's messaging is focusing a lot on how moderators aren't going to be affected. Reddit derives value from the unpaid moderators' work, but they doesn't seem to care about the user experience for the regular users, so it still feels a bit self serving whenever they swear mods will still be able to use certain tools.
it's fascinates me how social platforms are never able to control their own narrative, most YouTuber's hate YouTube, most Redditors complain about Reddit. the volume of negative sentiment must be enormous for them not to have configured their recommendation algorithms to suppress content that is anti-them
There's just no need. Negative sentiment doesn't hurt the balance sheet, and users will be back to get their fix tomorrow, every time. Youtube keeps making ads more intrusive and people keep watching. What people say they care about, and what they are actually willing to take action to change, are extremely disconnected.
That might be true for the admins but for people further up the chain things are going exactly to plan. Third party apps absolutely aren't going to be part of Reddit's future, as evidenced by their ridiculous pricing model. My only criticism is that they didn't announce the sunsetting of the API, although the two are functionally equivalent.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the tracking in the official app vs third party apps.
I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if Infinity goes away.
I only use Reddit in the browser, and I've noticed uBlock Origin doesn't intercept nearly as much stuff from old.reddit.com - new Reddit just has a lot more tracking shenanigans.
Yeah, this is what gets me--and at least on IOS you can get a sense of this simply at looking at the difference in what data the app requests access to compared to e.g. Apollo.
From their privacy policy it looks like they may partner with data aggregators and onboard hashed identifiers (email, MAID etc) to join against and enrich their data. It should be very obvious to people why Reddit was pushing for an email on signup, using dark patterns, to get people off a much less identifiable method of authentication.
It seems it would enable them to connect it to various ad industry controls cookieless targeting solutions.
I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
I can see reddit resolving this by giving certain apps heavily discounted API access. Right now at least all the backlash is coming from 3rd party app users, while ML guys are sitting quietly in the back with their fingers crossed.
Doesn't this give reddit an easy way to censor specific apps? It would be better to have a batch API and an "app access" API that rate limits based on user accounts rather than based on API keys. I could see having tiered costs for different usage patterns, but it's hard to design correctly.
If that was the case, it would just be a matter of properly segmenting the users into the right price brackets. When I looked into Twitter's pricing I could either pay $100/month for fewer tweets than I can get using the free API, or $42000/month (hilarious number by the way, Elon).
> I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
Is it not the fraction that uses and posts on reddit the most though? The first party mobile apps are well known as garbage ad-ridden messes of UI. Aren't they killing the golden goose here?
While there is much talk of protest, nobody in a position of power (like those organizing protests in various subreddits) seems to be offering a diaspora option. The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what they want.
I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.
>The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what they want
The community leaders aren't just upset about the policy change, but also trying to avoid contending with managing their communities 100% with reddit's inferior first-party moderation tools. It would make sense for the time-gated protests to be followed by a longer tail of deterioriating quality as mods simply quit.
It looks like that's what the /r/music team is planning to do already. They'll be closing the sub indefinitely on June 12, and one of the mods has remarked in a sticky comment on the announcement thread that they've been paying "$5/month to run our own servers to do stuff that reddit can't for the past 7-8 years."
It's remarkable to imagine creating a platform where community members will be so passionate as to work for free and even spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to enable working for you for free. All the more remarkable to see Reddit treating said community this way.
Yep, I moderate a sub with ~85k subscribers, and pay $5/month to host a better auto mod than Reddit has built. It does an insane amount of moderator work for us. We will not survive without it, but it would cost a crazy amount with the new API fees.
I will turn it off on the 12th, and we will just suffer without it until we all quit and the sub dies. Oh well.
Reddit has in the past taken over and reassigned ownership of a sub when the top mod does something too disruptive, like shut the sub down. They did that with r/KotakuInAction.
I assume they'll do the same to r/Music if they just shut it down. The move for them, imo, would be to automatically allow YouTube and Spotify links, and ban news and discussion posts.
Mods quitting might be the best possible outcome for Reddit, as then they'd have to solve their moderation problem a way that doesn't just create virtual HOAs...
Some of the communities have announced they will remain dark until Reddit reverses their decision, so it will vary by community.
But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it. I mean, they run communities with millions of views a day, surely there's money to be made out of that even if you don't work for reddit?
> Some of the communities have announced they will remain dark until Reddit reverses their decision, so it will vary by community.
If the sub is popular enough Reddit will take it over and appoint new mods. Has happened before and will happen to some of the subs that choose to go dark as well.
> But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it.
Definitely. Every (lead) moderator of a decently popular community is getting kickbacks one way or another. They do it for "free", but the only ones doing it without some compensation are absolute suckers.
> they run communities with millions of views a day, surely there's money to be made out of that
This kills the community.
Or rather, it sets up the possibility of the same thing happening over again on a micro scale: the users (who contribute to the community without being paid) in revolution against the mods.
Protesting corporations is so silly. You're not speaking their language. Corporations only speak Money. You can wave signs around with English written on them, write long protest posts, do these temporary boycotts, and so on, but they won't understand you because you are not speaking their language.
It's like protesting McDonalds for a day and then going back and ordering a Big Mac. The words you say in your language are going unheard, but the words you say in their language: "you buying things for money" are heard loud and clear.
I’m not defending Reddit’s new exorbitant API fees, but having lived through several Redditor revolts before, I think there is only a very small chance the current uproar persists for more than a few weeks.
What's to stop reddit from taking ownership of the subreddits and assigning new mods to them?
This has happened in the past with subreddits with frequent rule breaks, and has even resulting in a reversal of the original viewpoint of the subreddit
Even if the users start posting only black videos on /r/videos, couldn't reddit just remove it from the default subreddit subscriptions and laugh while the protests themselves have been de-platformed?
It's really unclear where this power struggle will end.
These protests aren't the final course of action for reddit moderators. This is just a visible way to voice dissatisfaction and raise awareness. These protests come with the implicit threat of escalation if reddit continues with their planned API changes.
What escalation? These mods need Reddit, but Reddit doesn't need them at all. Suppose Reddit banned every single mod today. They'd have a rush of incoming volunteers, and the quality of moderation might actually improve if anything. I'm saying this as someone who is pretty bummed about losing 3rd party apps.
I heard that reddit has previously threatened replacing mods for any indefinite blackouts, which would be why a 3 day blackout is being pursued. They will lose a lot of money on these days, it just depends on how much.
I hate that it seems every community seems to start on Discord nowadays. That being said, is this not just a huge gift for Discord to eat Reddit up? A huge portion of Reddit users are millenial gamers and likely have Discord installed already.
Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way better.
Discord could replace reddit for interactive feeds/discussion. But I don't think it could replace it as a repository of past discussions. It's quite common for me to add site:reddit.com on google searches.
Also reddits use of threads/upvotes can trend discussion towards a general consensus. If I want a recommendation for something that consensus is useful (eg r/televisions weekly recommendations). Discord is kind of a crapshoot of whoever is active at the time.
Am I missing something with discord? I'm a user but I generally don't engage in large communities. And there is so much "filler" discussion, that is hard to lurk.
Creating new topics looks similarly to creating a StackOverflow question, where it will recommend an existing topic if it exists, meaning that the search is separate from the dumpster fire that is server-wide search. It also supports pinning posts on top, so weekly discussions like the one you've mentioned are a possibility.
A couple of servers I'm a part of that have it enabled are much more usable than those that don't and use text channels, but that's not a particularly high bar. I wouldn't say it's necessarily better than reddit / GitHub discussions / Discourse. If they made them indexable by search engines and in some sort of read-only mode, it could make an impact.
Not necessarily. But whenever I post on Reddit for a language or programming sub, I eventually get directed to slack because the reddit answers "won't be that good." Discord can fill that niche as well
I'm developing a svelte site and it seems like the whole community is on there. I had a problem with a library so I hopped on the companies public discord and the main author helped me within hours. Reddit is mostly novice learn to coders and stack overflow is difficult to use these days. It's a bitter irony that open source web projects are using a closed platform. Google is already severely broken by SEO spam so it's a non-starter. Occasionally I'll use phind.com for dev searches.
Why would Discord want to do that? I get why we, as people, want that; I do not get why Discord, as a company, would want their platform less sticky. "You have to have an account we can track before we let you get an answer" is all but a literal goal for them.
Discord is king if you need information that is only available by word of mouth.
I've found that even trying to search for things I know exist on a Discord server can be very hard to find. One example of this is how statements are split up like text messages. If someone explained something in text over five separate side-by-side posts, then searching for something that appears in two posts but never appears in one will not return the result you want.
Yeah it has a forum system now, but it still kind of sucks since nothing gets indexed by a regular search engine and discord's search is kind of terrible.
I've seen the suggestion "why not let Reddit Premium subscribers access Reddit through third party apps" which seems like a fair compromise - Reddit gets cash in exchange for not being able to serve ads at that particular user.
That's very reasonable actually. Pay for the product or be the product, whatever suits you.
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
I pay for a Reddit subscription. But I pay to support Reddit, for the greater community. (99% of the people I talk to on Reddit, don't subscribe). If they slap pricetags on their APIs and kill third-party apps (which is identical to killing all apps and all mobile support -- literally no one uses Reddit's app/website), the community engagement will drop, so there will be no reason for me to keep paying them a subscription.
I pay Reddit so that others don't have to, to keep the forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to understand this, instead spending subscription money on like, avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
> The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money.
Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that existed in every little niche, most of which went away when Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+ million yearly revenue. Reddit won, they have a perfectly fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-functional social media experiences still left on the internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
> I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standard.
If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work. Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service" only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
Not being able to profit from "internet money" was probably a good thing. Remember the South Park episode where the Numa Numa guy together with among others Canada demanded the UN giving them their internet money?
Make it a triple dip. Third party apps don't provide any analytics back to Reddit which is what Reddit really wants - they're A/B experimenting all the goddamn time and to be honest it's annoying that stuff always shifts around or gets shipped in a half broken state.
Also, clearly defined APIs take a lot of flexibility away from them, which is yet another thing that beancounters don't want.
You can create a reddit account without giving out email but when payments come into picture you are not anonymous anymore.This will limit anonymous or throwaway accounts to official apps which again have tons of tracking.
I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
I've often wished for this (a system where some users pay to circumvent tracking/ads, others get the "general experience"). One theory I've heard as to why companies don't go for this idea is that the paying users are the ones that that are valuable to advertisers, because they are actually willing to pay money, vs. the free users who would be endlessly mined for little gain.
This is the exact model that I use on RadioReference.com. We have an API that exposes our entire radio database to end users, but they must be premium subscribers to access the data through the API. This spurred the development of tons of radio programming and other apps in the ecosystem. It's literally a win-win for all of us.
It's easy to detect "abuse" or "commercial use" and we contact those users and license them accordingly for such use cases.
We also went one step further and completely eliminated advertising on RadioReference.com. Given the user base is very niche and highly technical, the goodwill alone we got from that move gave us a sizable increase in premium subscription revenue. Plus, the quality, of Internet advertising has become so poor it's barely worth opening the space up to advertisers.
Readit News
Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).
Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...
For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.
Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.
Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.
So far…
- PaLM
- GPT3
- Falcon
Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.
But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.
Source:
https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon
They can EASILY provide high prices to LLMs and low prices to app devs. They just won’t. It’s in their best interests to remove third parties and force everyone on the inferior, ad-ridden official app. They could even make premium-based account tokens to allow them to use third party apps, but that’s too long-term oriented. They have to pump’n’dump NOW.
They can fully dictate the terms of their API sure, but unless they want to drop off all search indexes there is nothing they can do about people scraping the data the old fashioned way.
In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either
Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.
When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well:
> Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
Dead Comment
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478
Sucks.
https://imgur.io/a/4yOY4Vo
Keeping third party apps open for Premium users is one way out. Another alternative would be to keep API costs low enough that developers can reasonably pass that cost to subscription users. But the current state would just lead to massive disruption. They will end up killing the golden goose.
See Apollo as an example. You have a single dev, with very fine apple ios ecosystem knowledge, who always adds the latest apple api's and listens to community feedback and makes the best app, he alone can make in whatever way serves him to learn new coding skills and community requested features.
On the other hand on Reddit official app, you have tons of product managers forcing developers to work on many features that are outright against community feedback. See things like reducing information load, or making ads indistinguishable from content. Those features benefit reddit but many users hate them,
Apollo has dense vs wide posts and no ads. Official reddit app doesn't.
The value proposition and the audience they are catering too is very different. Buying the app is not gonna fix the fundamentally opposite goals of both apps. Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that. it also wasted months of their time making some fake reddit nft side proyect that was dead on arrival.
Reddit bought Alien Blue. Sure, it's got ads and other bullshit, but the core UX is the same. I've never had it crash or cause any problems. I've always been confused by what people mean when they utterly trash on the "official reddit app". Is there another one I'm not aware of?
I do the same work as @dang would here, without the pay and with a little more unreasonable users. (Its not hard to believe HN is the most behaved discussion platform on internet)
Very doable on desktop with RES though, which so far isn't going to be affected by the API pricing changes.
As for desktop: Going by last week stats, in my community, there are about 83 posts/day and 969 comments/day on average with 6 posts getting reported for breaking ToS, and numerous other flagged comments. If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with their tools.
My tool of choice should be able to highlight new answers quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't do this by reddit mobile and their new desktop UI. Reddit's old interface won't allow all mod tools (such as assigning removal reasons) and the new UI is half baked. The mobile third party interfaces have been at least reasonably consistent.
Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
It’s quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved, but it’s completely implausible when you add that NSFW content will be removed from the API entirely, and that third party client will not be allowed to be ad-supported.
Wow. I didn't know about that. That would prevent browsing /r/cigars via API calls. Because every post in /r/cigars is marked as NSFW. Why? I'll give you one guess. https://old.reddit.com/r/cigars/comments/ubu6b2/why_is_rciga...
why is this assumed? In my assessment, Reddit is offering a quite reasonable charge per API call. If this will somehow cause a third-party app to ride up $20M in costs, it behooves them to optimize. As far as I can see, Apollo caches an absurd amount of data pre load which is not a mandatory advantage any app needs to offer
I can however find official documentation that backs up what the admins are saying. The new Data API terms says they no long allow commercial use of their APIs and might implement a cost pr. request. It links to the Data API docs that says 60 req. pr. minute are free as long as it is non-commercial. I would think unofficial reddit apps goes under the non-commercial clause.
To me it looks to be a complete overreaction by the Reddit community because of a miscommunication on parts of a single developer and the Reddit orgs too slow reaction to stop it from spreading.
This also kills off apps like 'removeddit' that sheds light on rampant moderator abuse - it will be even _harder_ to see what the moderators have been up to behind the scenes after this, which is an aspect of the narrative that reddit has been trying to get a handle on for quite a while now.
I wonder how much third party apps are being caught up in this other issue.
And require something like a public key to access the API so you can track requests coming from multiple hosts.
Then any rate of access above that of a power user can be charged for appropriately. And make it so that activating API access is something that can't be automated so people can't create thousands of API dummy accounts.
Unless they put 100% of content behind a login-gate, it's currently legal* to scrape and use for derivative works, as long as you have the money and the chutzpah to deal with lawsuits that may or may not come.
- https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/12/hello-youve-be...
"I didn't mean to" is a very weak defense.
They would have to come up with a very hard to understand reason behind it though.
Even napkin math shows their numbers to be undefensible and malicious. The very obvious reason behind them is to kill 3rd parties and force people into the official app.
The apollo dev for iOS said 50 million queries was 166$ on imgur which is owned by the same company as reddit and has higher server costs due to images being more expensive to host. Reddit is asking for 12,000 for that many queries.
166 < 12000 and that 2 orders of magnitude are incomprehensible in terms of any technical reason to serve some comments and text posts...
I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if Infinity goes away.
I don't think many engineers use the official app.
I get what you're saying... but you don't have to be an engineer to have a clue.
I use Apollo, and Reddit already knows everything I subscribe to and read, what more would they get from forcing me to use the official app?
It seems it would enable them to connect it to various ad industry controls cookieless targeting solutions.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
(my comment on this topic from another thread)
Is it not the fraction that uses and posts on reddit the most though? The first party mobile apps are well known as garbage ad-ridden messes of UI. Aren't they killing the golden goose here?
I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.
The community leaders aren't just upset about the policy change, but also trying to avoid contending with managing their communities 100% with reddit's inferior first-party moderation tools. It would make sense for the time-gated protests to be followed by a longer tail of deterioriating quality as mods simply quit.
It looks like that's what the /r/music team is planning to do already. They'll be closing the sub indefinitely on June 12, and one of the mods has remarked in a sticky comment on the announcement thread that they've been paying "$5/month to run our own servers to do stuff that reddit can't for the past 7-8 years."
It's remarkable to imagine creating a platform where community members will be so passionate as to work for free and even spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to enable working for you for free. All the more remarkable to see Reddit treating said community this way.
[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/141tzgd/update_rmusi...
I will turn it off on the 12th, and we will just suffer without it until we all quit and the sub dies. Oh well.
I assume they'll do the same to r/Music if they just shut it down. The move for them, imo, would be to automatically allow YouTube and Spotify links, and ban news and discussion posts.
But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it. I mean, they run communities with millions of views a day, surely there's money to be made out of that even if you don't work for reddit?
If the sub is popular enough Reddit will take it over and appoint new mods. Has happened before and will happen to some of the subs that choose to go dark as well.
> But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it.
Definitely. Every (lead) moderator of a decently popular community is getting kickbacks one way or another. They do it for "free", but the only ones doing it without some compensation are absolute suckers.
This kills the community.
Or rather, it sets up the possibility of the same thing happening over again on a micro scale: the users (who contribute to the community without being paid) in revolution against the mods.
It's like protesting McDonalds for a day and then going back and ordering a Big Mac. The words you say in your language are going unheard, but the words you say in their language: "you buying things for money" are heard loud and clear.
it seems reddit is already struggling with that piece, so gotta do whatever you can.
This has happened in the past with subreddits with frequent rule breaks, and has even resulting in a reversal of the original viewpoint of the subreddit
Even if the users start posting only black videos on /r/videos, couldn't reddit just remove it from the default subreddit subscriptions and laugh while the protests themselves have been de-platformed?
It's really unclear where this power struggle will end.
Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way better.
Also reddits use of threads/upvotes can trend discussion towards a general consensus. If I want a recommendation for something that consensus is useful (eg r/televisions weekly recommendations). Discord is kind of a crapshoot of whoever is active at the time.
Am I missing something with discord? I'm a user but I generally don't engage in large communities. And there is so much "filler" discussion, that is hard to lurk.
Creating new topics looks similarly to creating a StackOverflow question, where it will recommend an existing topic if it exists, meaning that the search is separate from the dumpster fire that is server-wide search. It also supports pinning posts on top, so weekly discussions like the one you've mentioned are a possibility.
A couple of servers I'm a part of that have it enabled are much more usable than those that don't and use text channels, but that's not a particularly high bar. I wouldn't say it's necessarily better than reddit / GitHub discussions / Discourse. If they made them indexable by search engines and in some sort of read-only mode, it could make an impact.
Not necessarily. But whenever I post on Reddit for a language or programming sub, I eventually get directed to slack because the reddit answers "won't be that good." Discord can fill that niche as well
I've found that even trying to search for things I know exist on a Discord server can be very hard to find. One example of this is how statements are split up like text messages. If someone explained something in text over five separate side-by-side posts, then searching for something that appears in two posts but never appears in one will not return the result you want.
Last time I used it it just seemed like a nicer Skype, does it now offer posts in the same way reddit does or is it something tacked on?
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
I pay Reddit so that others don't have to, to keep the forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to understand this, instead spending subscription money on like, avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
> The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money.
Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that existed in every little niche, most of which went away when Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+ million yearly revenue. Reddit won, they have a perfectly fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-functional social media experiences still left on the internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
> I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standard.
If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work. Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service" only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
The thing is you'd still be the product even though you'd be paying for premium. Analytics on you would still be collected and sold to third parties
That episode is hillarously outdated.
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Also, clearly defined APIs take a lot of flexibility away from them, which is yet another thing that beancounters don't want.
I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
It's easy to detect "abuse" or "commercial use" and we contact those users and license them accordingly for such use cases.
We also went one step further and completely eliminated advertising on RadioReference.com. Given the user base is very niche and highly technical, the goodwill alone we got from that move gave us a sizable increase in premium subscription revenue. Plus, the quality, of Internet advertising has become so poor it's barely worth opening the space up to advertisers.