Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit.
The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevant or actively contradictory to user needs. Or just flat out ignoring things users liked, as with them closing down Vine and letting TikTok come in to win as the short, fun video platform.
But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
I have a theory, after working for one of the UK’s largest social networks, that no-one who runs a social network understands what made it work or why it continues to work.
Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit).
Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
I stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.
Not weird at all. This is the problem of the modern internet.
There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence.
Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle)
If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.
Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in.
See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.
There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
Uh doesn't Reddit owe its community 10% per sama's Series B article https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit ?
"So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time."
Whatever happened to this? Will we end up getting it before or after sama gives us UBI, open AI, and fusion completely altruistically?
Is it possible that reddit tried to pull of the same monetization trick as twitter, however they forgot to check with the target audience. And that public is really stretched financially, it does not consist of establishment figures who have an extra five dollars to spare for their hobby.
But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?
>It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable.
Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.
Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub.
The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of that is labor I value.
The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times.
So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
Fair enough. Usually this is the stance I would take in these sorts of discussions, since usually power users misunderstand how much they represent the majority of users.
But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the passive way it is used.
I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit will have shrunk by that time
Its community knowledge, just like wikipedia right now. Infact someone mentioned in another thread that maybe thats the ownership structure Reddit should have had.
Same. One thing that I've noticed is that this seems to be a rebellion of power users and not the average Joe, which is why this has gotten so much traction on HN. To the Average Joe, if Apollo shuts down, they'll just download the Reddit app. However, HN users look at the Apollo dev and see themselves, so they're jumping on this out of solidarity.
I personally think this will last a few days and then all the default subs will either open by mod decisions or be forced open by Reddit admins. If it's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with Reddit admins. I also expect that usage of the official app will jump and there won't be any major disruptions to Reddit usage.
Same. Regardless of how they've bumpy the pay increase and related comms have been, it's their platform. Nobody uses third party apps to access Pinterest, tiktok, Facebook, ig, or any other major internet property and I don't see a problem with reddit running their company to make money. Yeah it sucks that Apollo, rif, etc all are getting shut down.
I will probably do too but much less frequently. Apollo increased my reddit engagement, without it mu usage will likely fall back to the occasional scroll 1-2 times a day.
The entire goal of these API changes is to intentionally price third-party app developers out of the market without imposing a strict blanket-policy ban.
And the goal of this is to attempt to further monetize the platform on the backs of other people's content by forcing them to see as many ads and upsell opportunities as possible.
And the goal of this is to appear more appealing to current and future investors in order to drive up the IPO price and build demand.
And the goal of this is to make those with significant equity stake filthy rich.
The issue is that the changes they're trying to make are inherently hostile to the community whose free content and moderation has made the platform what it is today. And if the community decides to leave the platform and not come back, then regardless of potential for extra ad revenue, the inherent value of the platform will disappear because ads will be shown to less and less users. This is assuming people leave and actually don't come back, which remains to be seen.
The whole "front page of the internet" idea was pretty neat, and is a stark contrast to the days where each internet community had their own niche forum somewhere. Maybe we'll see some other platform overtake Reddit as the new front page of the internet, or maybe an old platform like Digg will make a resurgence. But that's a tall ask when Reddit is now so entrenched in that space.
Edit: technology -> platform, in the last paragraph above.
This isn't over one app. Many (most?) the app makers have noted the change is unsustainable for them.
One way to look at it is that Apollo, the app you're referencing that was able to charge $10 a year, would have to charge 2.5 times as much just to cover the access fees, and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit.
The issue here is that the ARPU calculation and assumptions are wrong. Is reddit losing out on that entirely if someone comes to them from a separate interface but still is served through them? Also, it's just too optimistic. Reddit has revenue of less than a dollar per site user (or maybe slightly more than a dollar now?). Most references I'm seeing showed reddit with an ARPU of well under $1 in 2021, closer to half a dollar. Are we expected to believe there's been a 40x increase in a year, or that after all the years reddit has functioned they'll be able to achieve that in the near future?
Lmao. Do you even realize what all these are about...? Reddit's pricing API policy is making ALL the apps unsustaniable. It's not "the app".
> Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US.
Yeah so? Only users and mods in the US matter and fuck the rest of the world?
Plus Reddit is, surprisingly, not Facebook. I don't even understand why you're comparing them. Actually I believe many people use Reddit because it's not like Facebook.
Reddit announced this price 30-days before they planned to enforce/charge it. If there was any doubt at all that Reddit wasn't trying to ban third-party apps with deniability, then that should settle it. That isn't reasonable.
Plus $2.5 to Reddit, means that apps need to charge $3.60 before 30% App-Store fees. But the app developer also needs new infrastructure to handle the billing, payment, and tracking, between end-users & Reddit along with their existing overhead. So the current $1/month aka $0.70/month after fees they're operating on likely isn't sustainable.
So now we're looking at $3.60 to Reddit + the existing $1/month = $4.6, but also all this new payment/billing infrastructure. Could easily exceed $5/month which frankly nobody is going to pay, and then get all this done in just 30-days even though that date is completely arbitrary from Reddit's end.
It's not Reddit's content, it's the community's. It's literally users wanting to access their own stuff in a different way.
If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that nothing is left of their business when those communities have moved elsewhere. To even create this war against your own users is complete folly.
I think the pricing model is per API call, and Reddit was claiming that a typical user, with the app using the data the way Reddit envisions, would use that quantity of API calls.
This, of course, assumes that every app is designed similar to the way Reddit expects, i.e., Reddit is assuming that nobody will do anything to add any value on top of Reddit's own design. But isn't that value-add part of the reason these apps exist in the first place?
He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million. What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with much less friction.
The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipulative (unrealistically short period for apps to adapt, API prices far above what other services charge) indicates that the $20 million number is a lie made to make themselves seem less scummy.
As it stands, Reddit hasn't even tried even simpler solutions like returning ads in the API requests and requiring that the 3rd parties include those for free usage.
If it's that low they could have just locked 3rd party apps behind a reddit premium account with some reasonable rate limits for non commercial use. So similar to what Spotify does.
There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong.
Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a power user. If you moderate a subreddit, you're probably a power user. If those power users go away then you lose a large swath of content and moderation which negatively affects the regular users at other parts of the curve. It is not going to be immediate but this is reddit slowly bleeding itself to death.
Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it because—surprise—they ban those people.
Honestly, the mod structure on reddit needs to change. This protest will almost 100% backfire. If it actually impacts revenue the admins will just ban a few dozen mods and the protest will, effectively, be over. Users will probably be better off for it too.
The oppressive moderation that happens on reddit is not necessary. The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people post what they want and vote on it.
1. First, look at the incentive structure for being a mod of a large subreddit: it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation. The vast majority of people with a life are not going to want to do this. So of course it appeals to people who can power trip off it, and I can't see those dynamics really changing. I do think that reddit should change the rules to make it easier for particularly egregious mods to be voted out by the subscribers of a sub, but that's a relatively small change. For example, some of the r/lgbt mods were notorious assholes, which is why some people split off to make r/ainbow. Should be easier for subscribers to essentially "impeach" shitty mods.
2. "If it actually impacts revenue the admins will just ban a few dozen mods and the protest will, effectively, be over" People keep saying this, but I doubt it. The vast majority of reddit users, at least in the subs I've seen, support this - a bunch of the subs even had polls to ask what they should do. It's one thing for the admins to remove mods who are acting against the wishes of most is a subs' subscribers, but I think it would be total chaos if they tried to replace mods specifically to get their way WRT to the API changes.
At the end of the day, reddit is nothing without it's community. Company management can only go so far before it kills the goose that laid the golden egg.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll have you blacklisted from modding other subs". That same exact mod on multiple occasions has deleted my posts from subs he mods, just to reupload them for karma himself. I don't even care about the karma, I just wish mods wouldn't delete my posts that don't break any rules in any way, shape, or form, especially when it's for blatant karma farming.
If you look around Google you can even find several posts of subreddits getting "liberated" of this particular multi sub mod... Something needs to change so this stops happening
Self-moderation doesn't work for any reasonably large community, if you don't want your community to be generic Facebook/Instagram quality posts. Community-based moderation inevitably makes any subreddit into "fun phots/videos" because people who browse largely don't care about where the post is, they might not even realize what subreddit it is in when up-voting.
Subreddits like askscience or askhistorians would be impossible without extremely strict moderation, for obvious reasons.
> The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people post what they want and vote on it.
This only works (mostly) for legal content. Unfortunately a lot of illegal content would be highly popular and upvoted if not moderated. It also doesn't really work when a subset of users engage with the system in bad faith or leverage bots.
Paid moderation is expensive - even if offshored - and I'm surprised that Reddit is willing to risk having to take on increased moderation costs. There's no way the lost potential revenue from 3rd party app users is enough to make up for that.
If you've ever moderated a large subreddit before, you would know that it's not self-moderating. Garbage comments attract more garbage comments, and pretty soon your userbase is toxic as everyone else who's looking for a civil conversation leaves.
I do agree this is an issue that needs to be addressed but you are also posting this on a website that is heavily moderated and runs as smoothly as it does because of the efforts of dang and the other moderators so I can't agree that reddit should just be the wild west.
Except if you search in Reddit right now you'll find plenty of posts where mod asked the users if they should join the blackout (sometimes rather meekly) and userbases, almost always, said yes.
The fact that you can go on reddit right now and enjoy it without all the annoying power users is only more reason to start visiting in my books. Hell I might even finally download the app.
The reddit replacement I am scoping out eliminates mods and subreddit squatting. I don't see a need for mods as they exist in reddit really, just "janitors" like in 4chan, most likely paid. Moderation seems like it could be done purely on the basis of voting and a sitewide content policy.
Agree completely. Get rid of all the large-sub mods, replace them with paid moderators who are instructed to only remove spam and illegal content. Giant, giant improvement. The mods as they are just power trip on their own politics. Why else would they do it for no money?
> Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users.
This is it, and it's the same with Twitter. At some number of connection in the social graph, or some amount of content produced, a user becomes more valuable than the ad money they could bring in. i.e. the opportunity cost flips, and it's worth giving up the ad revenue or API usage in order to keep them. To use an extreme, if a Kardashian said they were leaving Twitter, it would obviously be worth a lot of money to keep them on the platform. But my guess is that the percentage of users bringing more value than their ad revenue is closer to 1 in a 100 than 1 in a million.
As you said this then plays into the third party client issue directly, because those users are almost by definition power users, and power users get so much value out of third party clients with micro optimisations for their use-cases.
The problem is that this feels so obvious that I can't believe Reddit (or Twitter) don't have a measure of this internally, and I don't know why they wouldn't be optimising for it. My only conclusion is that it's too much nuance for a Musk-driven product team to handle, and that Reddit are shit-scared that they're going to collapse before IPO'ing and can't make rational decisions.
> because those users are almost by definition power users
Why is this the case and being repeated everywhere by everyone?
Reddit originally didn't have a mobile app and only third party clients existed. Everyone who wanted a mobile experience was using a third party app. Many of those original users never switched to the official app. How are they power users by definition?
So, what happens if reddit just kicks out the mods participating? It's not like the owners of the subs actually own anything, they just happen to do work in exchange of clout or money(from 3rd parties). There will be unlimited supply of volunteers waiting in line to acquire this privilege. If anyone actually manages to do some damage, they can just roll back the database or something.
I've seen so many boycotts on the internet and the only one that worked was DIGG->Reddit and it worked only because Reddit was ready to take over.
It would be poetic if Reddit goes away the way it come but I wouldn't bet on it. The relationship is symbiotic but the parties are not equal, it's the platform that holds the power. Unlike the real world where atoms behaviour is absolute, in this virtual environment the platform decides about how the nature works and the only real power is in the hands of those who control the servers.
What happens if reddit crosses that line is completely up to community response. People could go on as usual and nothing happens or there could be an even more visceral backlash. History says business as usual but no one really knows what would happen.
> I've seen so many boycotts on the internet and the only one that worked was DIGG->Reddit and it worked only because Reddit was ready to take over.
Agree. Reddit had the critical mass and content to absorb Digg.
Unfortunately, I don't see anything out there that is in a similar situation. I looked at kbin / lemmy yesterday and today and it feels like starting over again (content-wise).
> I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a power user.
I've seen this repeated elsewhere but I've seen zero actual evidence of it.
And the counterpoint is quite easy: that people use these apps/extensions for a better viewing experience. Because on the creation side, typing into a text box or pasting a link is just typing into a text box. The apps/extensions are great for consuming.
Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users, while the Apollo app has 1.5 million monthly users. That's nothing.
The bigger question seems to be around moderators who use power moderation tools. Will Reddit keep allowing moderation tools? If not, will they improve their own? If they lose moderators, are there other moderators willing to take their place, or will they start investing in more ML-based moderation, etc.?
> Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users
Not disagree-ing with your points, but do you have a source for this? It doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
1.5B people is ~ 20% of the world population, and probably closer to 50% of those with computers & internet capable of downloading reddit.com, an image heavy forum.
I'm in the demographic for Reddit (30s, male, western country), and I think maybe 10% of my friends, family & coworkers even know what Reddit is, let along are an MAU.
If management has shown themselves to be adversarial in this case because they think the power users aren't correct, a 2 day strike isn't going to do much to convince them otherwise.
This would have to be a month or more. And I think that's the real threat - the 2 day is a shot across the bow, if it impacts statistics I think it will likely be extended until management cries uncle.
If I were management I'd do everything in my power to make this strike look like it failed (since the alternative to actually preventing the strike by negotiation seems to have been scrapped or unconsidered).
Sure, but the degradation of the UX based on these changes seems to be pretty exaggerated in my view. How many of these powerusers are only using Reddit through a 3rd party client and would quit the site over having it closed? My guess is that the answer is "not many", and Reddit is clearly banking on this... and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own internal analysis?
More concretely, my impression is that these changes will not hit RES meaningfully. If they did, I would be unhappy but it would not break the site for me.
With how low post quality has gotten on Reddit, the only reason I'd continued using it is because Apollo offers a nice smooth experience that isn't trying to sell me anything or shove irrelevant posts in my face and makes it reasonably easy to filter. The official app crapifies the experience enough for it to no longer be worth using.
The developer of RES said they do not know if the changes will hit them and it is up in the air.
> Reddit's public statements have been limited on this method, however we have been told we should see minimal impact via this route. However we are still not 100% sure on potential impact and are being cautious going forwards.[0]
Developers behind third-party clients were also told they should be fine with the new changes so reddit's word isn't worth anything. This is not just about clients but tools and bots as well.
> and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own internal analysis?
This is literally authortiarianism and the problem is that you can use it to justify any change by any company ever.
They're the owners so they know better because they're the owners.
No move can be criticized.
It turns out that you end, like many that defend this and is irrationally against others protesting, with a comment about how it doesn't affect "you".
Ok. So you don't get it. Good for you. Keep on doing whatever it is you're doing. Some people will absolutely quit using it with different UXs or decrease over time until they move elsewhere.
It's a risk and a decision and we will see what happens down the line.
But it'll be fun if other sites get much of the traffic and they likes of you come out with "it was obvious this would happen".
This is brought up a bunch, but I’m kind of sceptical about this.
Although only a small percent post, I believe those users are largely interchangeable and replaceable. This isn’t twitter - apart from a few exceptions, there are not personalities on Reddit that people would feel the loss of. All the big/main subreddits are all pretty low-effort content, just reposting memes and videos from elsewhere.
Mods maintaining the subreddits are the real ‘power users’ who would impact the site if they left.
If it’s slowly then it likely doesn’t matter in the context of going public and making a lot of cash for the investors. It’s hard to imagine that the people who are given the power to decide the fate of Reddit don’t care about its long term fate at all - but it might well be the case.
The vast majority of people who are visiting subreddits are doing so because they're actively seeking out the material being presented to them. These people are subscribers to the subreddits. Subreddits that "go dark" are not blocked for everyone. Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have not yet subscribed to the subreddit.
So this giant display of enlightened asshattery affects almost nobody. And even if it did, it's a 2 day ordeal.
Which means jack fucking squat. It's the equivalent of wearing an MLK bandana on Juneteenth day and spending the rest of the year voting and campaigning for politicians trying to abolish what's left of the Voting Rights Act.
> The vast majority of people who are visiting subreddits are doing so because they're actively seeking out the material being presented to them. These people are subscribers to the subreddits. Subreddits that "go dark" are not blocked for everyone. Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have not yet subscribed to the subreddit.
I don't believe this is true but I'm willing to test it out. I'll subscribe to a bunch of subreddits that intend to go dark and see what happens.
Strike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life".
Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do you know what message that sends? What would you think if your customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm coming for the rest of the year" ? Would you give a damn?
Reddit is a commodity. Admittedly a great one. Used to be at least. We'll create another one or they'll fix themselves, but they won't unless they know you're not going to use them unless they fix themselves.
No strike is successful unless you actually make them understand that they can't live without you or that ••AT LEAST* that you're doing your part.
Like, is reddit scared of me deleting my account? I think it doesn't give a damn. Is reddit gonna give a damn if another 100k accounts start getting deleted along with mine? At least they're gonna start noticing. And at least I can say that I've done my part.
Ive deleted my reddit account and I'm done with Reddit. Until they fix themselves and realize that acting that greedy and immaturely with lies about conversations that never happened between the Apollo programmer and /u/spez are not gonna pass. At least not from me, i'm fairly disgusted by the Reddit leadership.
I use to be a reddit power user, but my relationship with the platform has been extremely casual (less than 5 hours/yr) for the last 10 years. Even after all this time, Reddit could win me back as a power user if the platform was better.
The two parties here are the public, and the corporations owning social networking sites.
You're not sending a message to Reddit, true enough... but it does send a VERY strong message to the rest of the tech bros and their investors that Reddit f*cked up, bad, if their numbers crash.
> "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life".
"for the rest of my life" is a big assumption. This strike could/should be the first in a series of escalating strikes. If parties truly seek change, and not just punishment, it is tactically unwise for one's first response to be maximum retaliation.
I'll be doing the strike, and possibly an extended strike. Then I'll briefly return to see where the communities I follow are migrating to. After that I'll have no more need for reddit since most of the communities I follow are tech related and will almost certainly be looking for a new home should the behavior at the top continue.
Many of us are quitting Reddit for good on June 30 when Apollo and the other third-party apps are killed. This week's strike is just a warning shot across Reddit's bow.
FWIW, Many of the participating subs are going dark indefinitely. And the real APIcalypse will happen in a couple of weeks, when people actually using third party apps literally can’t anymore.
But sometimes sites do die. Digg is a big example of this. It started with the top users like MrBabyMan posting against the site and then it quickly snowballed taking the whole site with it.
Doesn't always happens but it can happen and we can still hope.
That Louis Rossman quote is really great actually. I feels to me like a lot of people see very popular platform services "suddenly and unexpectedly" turning around and start changing things in ways that are very unpopular, but I don't see it very common for people (on reddit at least) to point out the common characteristic between them, that they're almost always startups with investors to answer to, is the reason that they end up making unpopular changes. It really does feel a little bit like an abusive relationship that it keeps happening and yet people keep using these investor-backed startup platforms that initially offer deals that are too good to be true.
I honestly didn't expect this from Reddit. It seems like investors are really tightening their grip and they are banning subreddits and long-time users who oppose these changes left and right.
I built a free API emulating the Reddit API[1]. It was returning the same data as the existing publicly accessible .json endpoints on reddit.com (for example https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps.json). They not only blocked my requests, but also banned the subreddit I created and my 13 years old personal Reddit account (permanently!).
I don't know of any site that will allow someone to set up a "secondary" API where they proxy all user requests, especially if they're using a variation of a trademark.
They want to go public, have wanted to go public for about 2 years now but when the market got soft and started demanding income more they’re trying to juice those numbers before they IPO. I don’t really use Reddit anymore anyway, but that is what is driving these decisions I think. Kind of basic commentary but this has a lot to do with upcoming IPO
Would be cool to have a "federated" group of people offering their endpoints to route things like this API. With enough of them, they wouldn't be able to block it. Actually now that that I think of it, we could already use the Tor network for this
Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
I think they're right. Lemmy/Kbin exist, but they're not ready for it. They're in a worse (less mature) place than Mastodon was with Twitter, and even that was rough.
With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist.
Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc. I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem.
I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse". If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
> the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
Discord.
I know, I know—it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap, maybe permanently.
Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things I would think belong on a forum.
Another thing they're betting on is that most users could care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back later after this is all done.
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's. Reddit got Digg's business because Digg gambled away all of it's good will. That was a long time ago, Reddit since been going down the same path.
Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python scripts.
Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board and you don't own a single word your users type.
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's.
Then where would all the hn users go? I'm still mad I couldn't get a lobster.rs account 10 years ago, so I'm not going there. And I most definitely don't want to use a website that the average person has heard of.
I think lobsters might be better, it's very much like HN, but I think it being open source and looking at the code it wouldn't be too hard to have sub groups.
Having the code is fine but they do have infrastructure and the architecture of it which is necessary to run the site. That part someone else will need to figure out again over time and optimize.
I think its important to remember that digg was changing the way content was generated and promoted to users. They kneecapped the entire democratic principles of the site, and reddit, a site entirely based on democratic promotion, was waiting in the wings.
Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.
I don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.
The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out...
People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It just stagnates and rots.
The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
This is different. Maybe you are referring to the Voat thing a few years ago when people were mad about the "fatpeoplehate" subreddits being banned. As it turns out, only a vocal minority opposed that move and left Reddit.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
> The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama, too.
To self-reinforce my participation in the strike, I logged out of reddit and disabled Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Old.reddit Redirect add-ons, and looking at the front page without those improvements (which I'm sure a minority of users use) it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is for the uninitiated. For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.
I don't get it. If I log out and go to reddit.com I see it he "Popular" view with a pretty good looking UI, 4.5 "cards" per screen height, I don't think that's what someone could mean by
> it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is
On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use.
Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI? Am I looking at the wrong thing?
This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/ueQfJsc.png. Huge cookies popup, I don't even see one full post immediately. When scrolling the feed I mostly see 2 posts, sometimes a bit of a third one. With old.reddit.com it's a compact list where you see a lot more content at once.
Also I found reading comments in new UI to be terrible, they load maybe one comment from 2-3 levels down, and everything else requires you to click to load more: https://i.imgur.com/C6DXttC.png.
And what are those posts on the right? I _just_ opened a post that I'm interested in, do I have to be shoved samples from completely irrelevant communities.
Also, try opening a post on new Reddit and then go back (in history) — for me the previous page loads from scratch, all the way on the top. Old reddit behaves as expected.
The list probably goes on, but I never spent more than 5 minutes I did now to find out all the issues. I'm pretty sure one of the issues Reddit has with 3rd party apps is that they let you browse Reddit with old.reddit philosophy — see lots of content, choose what you find interesting, and make it easy to dig into the discussion. As opposed to shoving the content in my face and pushing me to only read one top-upvoted comment on each level
The thing I think this conversation should be about is how horrible their site is.
I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with disabilities and allow people who wouldn’t deal with their trash UX to still generate content for those who do.
The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.
> I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money
What is this based on? All of the third party clients that I've used don't show reddit ads, so as long as I'm using the client, it's a cost sink for reddit. I don't contribute content.
>For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.
The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money ruining their UI.
For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1].
Yeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API requests their users are going to make and if they underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also, it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly, especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX.
If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium? Reddit gets more premium subscribers and clients don't have to deal with all the complexities of how to handle API request prices.
It reeks of just wanting to destroy third-party clients in favor of their own (terrible) client.
> If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium?
Wouldn't this be the worst of both worlds for the 3rd party app developers? In the current model, the developer of Apollo could charge $2.99/month and pay themselves $0.47/month/user. If we assume 80k paid users, that's $450k/year - not bad for a passion project!
If Reddit instead took it out of developers hands and made users of Apollo pay Reddit for access, that would seem mighty unfair to the developer of Apollo, wouldn't it?
Per the Apollo developer's post, a huge amount of the problem is existing subscriptions already sold for $10/year, which are now massive costs - and negative on net if there's even four months left on them. Not that having the price of your app suddenly quadruple from $10/year to $40/year because of API fees would be a small problem on its own!
Reimburse the yearly subscription their prorated amount and offer the new subscription amount, or even offer to apply the remainder as credit towards the new subscription. Seems pretty easy and obvious.
I don't get why you can't just bring your own API key with Apollo. It seems pretty simple to have the user go through Oauth to set up an app and have his own quota.
You can, I've already made a modified version of Apollo and sideloaded it onto my phone with a tweak to set my own key instead of Apollo's
However there is a line on the developers page now that says all apps need to accept terms and sign up for a developers program, so I have my doubts it will continue to work either
The API TOS has some nebulous verbiage about doing things that let a developer avoid the per app quotas, I'm sure reddit would apply it to any app that publicly did this
Would people maybe have been more okay with this, if the change was that you needed to pay for Reddit premium to be able to use API/other apps with your user? Then it was not be a bill forwarded to other apps, but a bill to each individual user using these apps?
They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.
This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a premium subscription comes to mind.
That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically) have more opportunities to monetize both users (including premium users) and their data, which probably looks better for a prospective IPO.
do you think 3rd party developers would be okay with this? in this scenario, the Reddit premium subscription fee would be a price floor and developers would have to charge a separate fee to use their app.
That would have been completely fine with me. But it's obvious at this point Reddit's goal was not to effectively monetize third-party apps. The goal was to crush them.
Maybe if I could then bypass the ridiculous rules some mods put on their subreddits I would.
Imagine paying for Spotify, and then some ego tripping power nanny decides you aren’t allowed to listen to some of the music. It’s absurd.
The lex Friedman subreddit especially is like this. The number of people banned from that sub for simply disagreeing with Lex is ridiculous. Why on earth would I pay for something like that?
That assumes cooperation between reddit and third party devs.
Telling the devs about the change 2 months before applying it, low balling the price at first, smiting them at every corner, while not having any room for schedule adjustment... is just unreasonable for a change of that order of magnitude.
Reddit shows absolutely no willingness to make that relationship work, so it's kinda dead whichever way you look at it.
Great. I'd happily pay $2.52 per month. Now Apollo should release a version of the app with bring-your-own-API-keys, I'll sign up for developer access, and pay for my own API usage. Has no one thought of this?
You are missing the point that the developer needs a good working relationship with Reddit. He said very clearly that for him this is not about the money but about a passion project of his.
The 100 requests per minute fee oauth tier is how you would want to handle this right? The requests should be authenticated as if it was the current logged in user anyways.
Of course it would be doable but Reddit doesn't want this. They rather have complete control over the platform. They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.
> They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.
But why not? It's reddit's choice to not push ads into the API, they could certainly change that. They could also provide a telemetry sdk and mandate that all 3p apps use it.
There's a way to make this all work but given reddit is completely uninterested in maintaining the status quo they must have other directions they want to take the platform.
Hopefully this starts a "battery" approach to dealing with APIs, 3rd party apps, keys and a way for end users to quickly and seamlessly sign up to use services via 3rd party apps.
Why not..
1. User installs 3rd party app
2. You accept reddit TOS, an API key is attached to your account. It could even be integrated into apple/android keys or user subscription models. You pay either directly to reddit or via your payments to the 3rd party app service fees
This could work for so many use cases. Why should developers need to do think about all this nonsense like key rotation, constantly changing pricing models, using round robin API key rotation because you're hitting limits with one key, etc. Devs should just set up the experience so users can bring their own battery and plug in to start playing.
Just provide the backend. Let devs build cool 3rd party apps around it. Each user can just get their own API key that's tied to them, either simple case like the reddit account, or its part of the apple id subscriptions + keychain.
Everyone makes money. Everyone gets to learn programming or whatever the fuck makes them make 3rd party experiences. Everyone can just be happy.
That doesn’t sound very far away from how Apollo/etc work today - you authenticate the app with Reddit via oauth and it accesses the api as you.
Reddit already implements some features only when you’ve paid (eg you get access to the lounge when you have gold active), so I don’t imagine it would be a massive stretch to just prevent all access to the api to users without gold.
Though it does prompt the question of why they took the path they have, instead of trying to charge users. I guess their goal is really to get rid of 3rd party clients.
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The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
Therefore they are extremely reluctant to make changes in case they break it (e.g. old twitter), and because they don’t understand it, any large changes they do make are generally negative (new twitter, Reddit).
Plus, in my experience , users will bitterly resist any changes at all because the site doesn’t belong to management, it belongs to them. It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.
There has always been a controversy over the relationship between success and competence.
Two-sided markets are so powerful that you can run one very poorly (e.g. craiglist…) or even actively try to run one into the ground (Musk and Twitter) and they will persist anyway, so the good luck of being in the right place at the right time can mask incompetence, particularly when that incompetence develops over time (see the Peter Principle)
If there wasn’t a powerful force keeping people into bad platforms there wouldn’t be an “enshittification” problem, because people would vote with their feet and bad platforms would immediately feel the consequences of their actions.
One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
Until we get interoperating platforms where people can easily migrate and reward the places that treat them the best we are stuck with the few platforms that managed to create network lock-in.
The social media as a prison operating model.
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See also Twitter and Facebook and many other social networks that are objectively terrible platforms now (they all had periods of greatness that they fell from). Despite continually getting worse, the majority of people (tech and early adopters aside) will continue to use these sites no matter what because that is where their friends are, so they put up with it.
There's an app I have on my phone called Marco Polo. I hate every fucking thing about this app, the fact that it asks me to pay them $120 per year basically every morning as a full screen popup, the fact that it completely wrecks my battery life, the fact that they continue to block more (previously free) features behind paywalls, the fact that video records at like 8 fps (and still manages to destroy my battery by some miracle), the fact that they consume all of your friends contact lists and automatically befriends you with ex-girlfriends and people you would rather not talk to, and the worst sin of all, it completely resets your phone's audio now-playing whenever you open it up. So if i am listening to a podcast or music and I get a marco polo and listen to it, I can't just pick up listening to my previous audio when I am done. I have to re-open Spotify or Overcast to start playing again. But why do I use this monstrosity of an app? Because all my friends use it. We bitch about it everyday, but we are all on it and we all use it to talk multiple times a day between eachother. It has market effect. I want nothing more than for this app to die, but market effect keeps it around.
Well, don't piss off the content makers, or the content consumers.
But how is it possible that the reddit bosses don't know who their users are?
You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable.
Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.
The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of that is labor I value.
The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times.
So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the passive way it is used.
I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit will have shrunk by that time
I personally think this will last a few days and then all the default subs will either open by mod decisions or be forced open by Reddit admins. If it's the latter, I expect all existing mods to get the boot and replaced with people who are friendlier with Reddit admins. I also expect that usage of the official app will jump and there won't be any major disruptions to Reddit usage.
Might not be a bad thing tbh
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The app they’re burning down Reddit over is already charging $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but we usually don’t give out API keys to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our data for free.
And the goal of this is to attempt to further monetize the platform on the backs of other people's content by forcing them to see as many ads and upsell opportunities as possible.
And the goal of this is to appear more appealing to current and future investors in order to drive up the IPO price and build demand.
And the goal of this is to make those with significant equity stake filthy rich.
The issue is that the changes they're trying to make are inherently hostile to the community whose free content and moderation has made the platform what it is today. And if the community decides to leave the platform and not come back, then regardless of potential for extra ad revenue, the inherent value of the platform will disappear because ads will be shown to less and less users. This is assuming people leave and actually don't come back, which remains to be seen.
The whole "front page of the internet" idea was pretty neat, and is a stark contrast to the days where each internet community had their own niche forum somewhere. Maybe we'll see some other platform overtake Reddit as the new front page of the internet, or maybe an old platform like Digg will make a resurgence. But that's a tall ask when Reddit is now so entrenched in that space.
Edit: technology -> platform, in the last paragraph above.
One way to look at it is that Apollo, the app you're referencing that was able to charge $10 a year, would have to charge 2.5 times as much just to cover the access fees, and not any of their own overhead, much less allow for profit.
The issue here is that the ARPU calculation and assumptions are wrong. Is reddit losing out on that entirely if someone comes to them from a separate interface but still is served through them? Also, it's just too optimistic. Reddit has revenue of less than a dollar per site user (or maybe slightly more than a dollar now?). Most references I'm seeing showed reddit with an ARPU of well under $1 in 2021, closer to half a dollar. Are we expected to believe there's been a 40x increase in a year, or that after all the years reddit has functioned they'll be able to achieve that in the near future?
Lmao. Do you even realize what all these are about...? Reddit's pricing API policy is making ALL the apps unsustaniable. It's not "the app".
> Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US.
Yeah so? Only users and mods in the US matter and fuck the rest of the world?
Plus Reddit is, surprisingly, not Facebook. I don't even understand why you're comparing them. Actually I believe many people use Reddit because it's not like Facebook.
Tech people ought to think long and hard about whose content it actually is.
Plus $2.5 to Reddit, means that apps need to charge $3.60 before 30% App-Store fees. But the app developer also needs new infrastructure to handle the billing, payment, and tracking, between end-users & Reddit along with their existing overhead. So the current $1/month aka $0.70/month after fees they're operating on likely isn't sustainable.
So now we're looking at $3.60 to Reddit + the existing $1/month = $4.6, but also all this new payment/billing infrastructure. Could easily exceed $5/month which frankly nobody is going to pay, and then get all this done in just 30-days even though that date is completely arbitrary from Reddit's end.
If Reddit thinks it's theirs, they will soon notice that nothing is left of their business when those communities have moved elsewhere. To even create this war against your own users is complete folly.
I think the pricing model is per API call, and Reddit was claiming that a typical user, with the app using the data the way Reddit envisions, would use that quantity of API calls.
This, of course, assumes that every app is designed similar to the way Reddit expects, i.e., Reddit is assuming that nobody will do anything to add any value on top of Reddit's own design. But isn't that value-add part of the reason these apps exist in the first place?
He wasn't literally offering to sell out for $10 million. What he was saying was that if Reddit was being honest with the claim that Apollo was costing them $20 million per year in server costs, the obvious business decision would be to offer to buy him out first, thus bringing in those users with much less friction.
The fact that they're instead choosing to be manipulative (unrealistically short period for apps to adapt, API prices far above what other services charge) indicates that the $20 million number is a lie made to make themselves seem less scummy.
As it stands, Reddit hasn't even tried even simpler solutions like returning ads in the API requests and requiring that the 3rd parties include those for free usage.
Wouldn't have got nearly as much backlash.
And they couldn't figure out how to transition to it without causing a shitstorm.
Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a power user. If you moderate a subreddit, you're probably a power user. If those power users go away then you lose a large swath of content and moderation which negatively affects the regular users at other parts of the curve. It is not going to be immediate but this is reddit slowly bleeding itself to death.
Honestly, the mod structure on reddit needs to change. This protest will almost 100% backfire. If it actually impacts revenue the admins will just ban a few dozen mods and the protest will, effectively, be over. Users will probably be better off for it too.
The oppressive moderation that happens on reddit is not necessary. The very nature of the site is self moderating. Let people post what they want and vote on it.
1. First, look at the incentive structure for being a mod of a large subreddit: it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation. The vast majority of people with a life are not going to want to do this. So of course it appeals to people who can power trip off it, and I can't see those dynamics really changing. I do think that reddit should change the rules to make it easier for particularly egregious mods to be voted out by the subscribers of a sub, but that's a relatively small change. For example, some of the r/lgbt mods were notorious assholes, which is why some people split off to make r/ainbow. Should be easier for subscribers to essentially "impeach" shitty mods.
2. "If it actually impacts revenue the admins will just ban a few dozen mods and the protest will, effectively, be over" People keep saying this, but I doubt it. The vast majority of reddit users, at least in the subs I've seen, support this - a bunch of the subs even had polls to ask what they should do. It's one thing for the admins to remove mods who are acting against the wishes of most is a subs' subscribers, but I think it would be total chaos if they tried to replace mods specifically to get their way WRT to the API changes.
At the end of the day, reddit is nothing without it's community. Company management can only go so far before it kills the goose that laid the golden egg.
If you look around Google you can even find several posts of subreddits getting "liberated" of this particular multi sub mod... Something needs to change so this stops happening
Subreddits like askscience or askhistorians would be impossible without extremely strict moderation, for obvious reasons.
This only works (mostly) for legal content. Unfortunately a lot of illegal content would be highly popular and upvoted if not moderated. It also doesn't really work when a subset of users engage with the system in bad faith or leverage bots.
Paid moderation is expensive - even if offshored - and I'm surprised that Reddit is willing to risk having to take on increased moderation costs. There's no way the lost potential revenue from 3rd party app users is enough to make up for that.
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This is it, and it's the same with Twitter. At some number of connection in the social graph, or some amount of content produced, a user becomes more valuable than the ad money they could bring in. i.e. the opportunity cost flips, and it's worth giving up the ad revenue or API usage in order to keep them. To use an extreme, if a Kardashian said they were leaving Twitter, it would obviously be worth a lot of money to keep them on the platform. But my guess is that the percentage of users bringing more value than their ad revenue is closer to 1 in a 100 than 1 in a million.
As you said this then plays into the third party client issue directly, because those users are almost by definition power users, and power users get so much value out of third party clients with micro optimisations for their use-cases.
The problem is that this feels so obvious that I can't believe Reddit (or Twitter) don't have a measure of this internally, and I don't know why they wouldn't be optimising for it. My only conclusion is that it's too much nuance for a Musk-driven product team to handle, and that Reddit are shit-scared that they're going to collapse before IPO'ing and can't make rational decisions.
Why is this the case and being repeated everywhere by everyone?
Reddit originally didn't have a mobile app and only third party clients existed. Everyone who wanted a mobile experience was using a third party app. Many of those original users never switched to the official app. How are they power users by definition?
I've seen so many boycotts on the internet and the only one that worked was DIGG->Reddit and it worked only because Reddit was ready to take over.
It would be poetic if Reddit goes away the way it come but I wouldn't bet on it. The relationship is symbiotic but the parties are not equal, it's the platform that holds the power. Unlike the real world where atoms behaviour is absolute, in this virtual environment the platform decides about how the nature works and the only real power is in the hands of those who control the servers.
Agree. Reddit had the critical mass and content to absorb Digg.
Unfortunately, I don't see anything out there that is in a similar situation. I looked at kbin / lemmy yesterday and today and it feels like starting over again (content-wise).
I've seen this repeated elsewhere but I've seen zero actual evidence of it.
And the counterpoint is quite easy: that people use these apps/extensions for a better viewing experience. Because on the creation side, typing into a text box or pasting a link is just typing into a text box. The apps/extensions are great for consuming.
Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users, while the Apollo app has 1.5 million monthly users. That's nothing.
The bigger question seems to be around moderators who use power moderation tools. Will Reddit keep allowing moderation tools? If not, will they improve their own? If they lose moderators, are there other moderators willing to take their place, or will they start investing in more ML-based moderation, etc.?
Not disagree-ing with your points, but do you have a source for this? It doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
1.5B people is ~ 20% of the world population, and probably closer to 50% of those with computers & internet capable of downloading reddit.com, an image heavy forum.
I'm in the demographic for Reddit (30s, male, western country), and I think maybe 10% of my friends, family & coworkers even know what Reddit is, let along are an MAU.
This would have to be a month or more. And I think that's the real threat - the 2 day is a shot across the bow, if it impacts statistics I think it will likely be extended until management cries uncle.
If I were management I'd do everything in my power to make this strike look like it failed (since the alternative to actually preventing the strike by negotiation seems to have been scrapped or unconsidered).
Sure, but the degradation of the UX based on these changes seems to be pretty exaggerated in my view. How many of these powerusers are only using Reddit through a 3rd party client and would quit the site over having it closed? My guess is that the answer is "not many", and Reddit is clearly banking on this... and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own internal analysis?
More concretely, my impression is that these changes will not hit RES meaningfully. If they did, I would be unhappy but it would not break the site for me.
It would for me, and thats the trajectory. The new UI is an absolute pig.
> Reddit's public statements have been limited on this method, however we have been told we should see minimal impact via this route. However we are still not 100% sure on potential impact and are being cautious going forwards.[0]
Developers behind third-party clients were also told they should be fine with the new changes so reddit's word isn't worth anything. This is not just about clients but tools and bots as well.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/141hzqj/announ...
This is literally authortiarianism and the problem is that you can use it to justify any change by any company ever.
They're the owners so they know better because they're the owners.
No move can be criticized.
It turns out that you end, like many that defend this and is irrationally against others protesting, with a comment about how it doesn't affect "you".
Ok. So you don't get it. Good for you. Keep on doing whatever it is you're doing. Some people will absolutely quit using it with different UXs or decrease over time until they move elsewhere.
It's a risk and a decision and we will see what happens down the line.
But it'll be fun if other sites get much of the traffic and they likes of you come out with "it was obvious this would happen".
Although only a small percent post, I believe those users are largely interchangeable and replaceable. This isn’t twitter - apart from a few exceptions, there are not personalities on Reddit that people would feel the loss of. All the big/main subreddits are all pretty low-effort content, just reposting memes and videos from elsewhere.
Mods maintaining the subreddits are the real ‘power users’ who would impact the site if they left.
If it’s slowly then it likely doesn’t matter in the context of going public and making a lot of cash for the investors. It’s hard to imagine that the people who are given the power to decide the fate of Reddit don’t care about its long term fate at all - but it might well be the case.
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The vast majority of people who are visiting subreddits are doing so because they're actively seeking out the material being presented to them. These people are subscribers to the subreddits. Subreddits that "go dark" are not blocked for everyone. Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have not yet subscribed to the subreddit.
So this giant display of enlightened asshattery affects almost nobody. And even if it did, it's a 2 day ordeal.
Which means jack fucking squat. It's the equivalent of wearing an MLK bandana on Juneteenth day and spending the rest of the year voting and campaigning for politicians trying to abolish what's left of the Voting Rights Act.
When a sub is set to private "Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions."
I don't believe this is true but I'm willing to test it out. I'll subscribe to a bunch of subreddits that intend to go dark and see what happens.
Private subreddits are indeed invitation only
Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do you know what message that sends? What would you think if your customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm coming for the rest of the year" ? Would you give a damn?
Reddit is a commodity. Admittedly a great one. Used to be at least. We'll create another one or they'll fix themselves, but they won't unless they know you're not going to use them unless they fix themselves.
No strike is successful unless you actually make them understand that they can't live without you or that ••AT LEAST* that you're doing your part.
Like, is reddit scared of me deleting my account? I think it doesn't give a damn. Is reddit gonna give a damn if another 100k accounts start getting deleted along with mine? At least they're gonna start noticing. And at least I can say that I've done my part.
Ive deleted my reddit account and I'm done with Reddit. Until they fix themselves and realize that acting that greedy and immaturely with lies about conversations that never happened between the Apollo programmer and /u/spez are not gonna pass. At least not from me, i'm fairly disgusted by the Reddit leadership.
"Leaving forever" is the only thing that won't send a message. If you're truly gone forever, Reddit has no shared interest with you any longer.
You're not sending a message to Reddit, true enough... but it does send a VERY strong message to the rest of the tech bros and their investors that Reddit f*cked up, bad, if their numbers crash.
"for the rest of my life" is a big assumption. This strike could/should be the first in a series of escalating strikes. If parties truly seek change, and not just punishment, it is tactically unwise for one's first response to be maximum retaliation.
This is quite an escalation though.
I'll be doing the strike, and possibly an extended strike. Then I'll briefly return to see where the communities I follow are migrating to. After that I'll have no more need for reddit since most of the communities I follow are tech related and will almost certainly be looking for a new home should the behavior at the top continue.
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Doesn't always happens but it can happen and we can still hope.
I built a free API emulating the Reddit API[1]. It was returning the same data as the existing publicly accessible .json endpoints on reddit.com (for example https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps.json). They not only blocked my requests, but also banned the subreddit I created and my 13 years old personal Reddit account (permanently!).
1 - https://api.reddiw.com
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With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist.
Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc. I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem.
I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse". If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
Discord.
I know, I know—it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap, maybe permanently.
Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things I would think belong on a forum.
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Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python scripts.
Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board and you don't own a single word your users type.
You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here.
Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.
Then where would all the hn users go? I'm still mad I couldn't get a lobster.rs account 10 years ago, so I'm not going there. And I most definitely don't want to use a website that the average person has heard of.
I really hope not. It would be the eternal September for HN.
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Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.
The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
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People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It just stagnates and rots.
The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama, too.
> it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is
On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use.
Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI? Am I looking at the wrong thing?
Also I found reading comments in new UI to be terrible, they load maybe one comment from 2-3 levels down, and everything else requires you to click to load more: https://i.imgur.com/C6DXttC.png.
And what are those posts on the right? I _just_ opened a post that I'm interested in, do I have to be shoved samples from completely irrelevant communities.
Also, try opening a post on new Reddit and then go back (in history) — for me the previous page loads from scratch, all the way on the top. Old reddit behaves as expected.
The list probably goes on, but I never spent more than 5 minutes I did now to find out all the issues. I'm pretty sure one of the issues Reddit has with 3rd party apps is that they let you browse Reddit with old.reddit philosophy — see lots of content, choose what you find interesting, and make it easy to dig into the discussion. As opposed to shoving the content in my face and pushing me to only read one top-upvoted comment on each level
I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with disabilities and allow people who wouldn’t deal with their trash UX to still generate content for those who do.
The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.
What is this based on? All of the third party clients that I've used don't show reddit ads, so as long as I'm using the client, it's a cost sink for reddit. I don't contribute content.
The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money ruining their UI.
And when I went to log out of reddit, I got https://www.redditstatic.com/youbrokeit3.png
For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2].
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/premium
If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium? Reddit gets more premium subscribers and clients don't have to deal with all the complexities of how to handle API request prices.
It reeks of just wanting to destroy third-party clients in favor of their own (terrible) client.
Wouldn't this be the worst of both worlds for the 3rd party app developers? In the current model, the developer of Apollo could charge $2.99/month and pay themselves $0.47/month/user. If we assume 80k paid users, that's $450k/year - not bad for a passion project!
If Reddit instead took it out of developers hands and made users of Apollo pay Reddit for access, that would seem mighty unfair to the developer of Apollo, wouldn't it?
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w... ("Why not just increase the price of Apollo" section)
However there is a line on the developers page now that says all apps need to accept terms and sign up for a developers program, so I have my doubts it will continue to work either
They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.
That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically) have more opportunities to monetize both users (including premium users) and their data, which probably looks better for a prospective IPO.
Imagine paying for Spotify, and then some ego tripping power nanny decides you aren’t allowed to listen to some of the music. It’s absurd.
The lex Friedman subreddit especially is like this. The number of people banned from that sub for simply disagreeing with Lex is ridiculous. Why on earth would I pay for something like that?
Telling the devs about the change 2 months before applying it, low balling the price at first, smiting them at every corner, while not having any room for schedule adjustment... is just unreasonable for a change of that order of magnitude.
Reddit shows absolutely no willingness to make that relationship work, so it's kinda dead whichever way you look at it.
But why not? It's reddit's choice to not push ads into the API, they could certainly change that. They could also provide a telemetry sdk and mandate that all 3p apps use it.
There's a way to make this all work but given reddit is completely uninterested in maintaining the status quo they must have other directions they want to take the platform.
Why not..
1. User installs 3rd party app
2. You accept reddit TOS, an API key is attached to your account. It could even be integrated into apple/android keys or user subscription models. You pay either directly to reddit or via your payments to the 3rd party app service fees
This could work for so many use cases. Why should developers need to do think about all this nonsense like key rotation, constantly changing pricing models, using round robin API key rotation because you're hitting limits with one key, etc. Devs should just set up the experience so users can bring their own battery and plug in to start playing.
Just provide the backend. Let devs build cool 3rd party apps around it. Each user can just get their own API key that's tied to them, either simple case like the reddit account, or its part of the apple id subscriptions + keychain.
Everyone makes money. Everyone gets to learn programming or whatever the fuck makes them make 3rd party experiences. Everyone can just be happy.
Reddit already implements some features only when you’ve paid (eg you get access to the lounge when you have gold active), so I don’t imagine it would be a massive stretch to just prevent all access to the api to users without gold.
Though it does prompt the question of why they took the path they have, instead of trying to charge users. I guess their goal is really to get rid of 3rd party clients.