- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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It’s really amazing to see the incompetence of Huffman. As the CEO, it’s his responsibility continue to drive his company while being committed to its values. They’ve lost touch with what made reddit special in favor for the lowest common denominator user base.
Reddit has three real function, first as a cultivated collection of subreddits, second as a warehouse of incredibly niche and specific information, and lastly as a place to scroll.
They’ve catered to this third audience which I see as the most shallow of user. This part of their function can be easily replaced by plenty of other services. With such tone-deaf and dishonest actions of spez, it’s obvious there was no foresight on trying to set up a smooth transition.
There absolutely could have been a solution here to generate income for Reddit without coming to this painful nuclear ending. It’s been writing on the wall for a while with the stretch toward IPO that their motives and value had become entirely based on money.
See that’s not how companies work though. They may need to be profitable to exist but they exist to provide a service or product. By sacrificing and disenfranchising a loyal core of your user base out of lack of foresight and problem solving, this is just another nail in the coffin of their inevitable demise.
Huffman is a loser and a sell out. Get fucked Spez.
Steve has never been committed to any values that the company has ever tried to say they adhere to. He’s a kid who doesn’t have a clue how to handle people. And never has.
Now now, he did brag about how he thinks reddit could “definitely influence elections” and then immediately tried to smother it when people started to comment on r/The_Donald’s role in the 2016 election. It takes truly bold leadership skills to brazenly lie about your own conduct, especially when it’s on public record.
Thing is, I’m kind of settled with the idea that Reddit will still win out monetarily with this. 99% of users are going to take the path of least resistance, which is kinda expected.
So my goal is more around just having a good conversational community, and I kinda like the change in pace now that I’m using alternatives. I don’t really focus on “Reddit losing”. I just like having a good place to chat. It might be funny to see if they end up reversing course, but I’m not losing sleep on that turnout.
That is my feeling. I want Lemmy to be good, so I hope a lot of quality users jump ship from Reddit, but if Reddit retains the millions of passive users, then I’m happy for Reddit to keep them. One part of Reddit’s issue was the diluted quality of posts and comments, so let it continue to exist to filter people who want that experience. ___
Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.
If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.
Reddit won’t come out on top. They’ll survive, but it’s going to hurt them. They seem to have pissed off most communities on the site. It’s the largest protest they’ve ever had.
Reddit doesn’t run a profit yet, so all they need to achieve is enough to get into the black. Like Twitter, Reddit I don’t think will crash and burn but the quality will drop dramatically. Reddit doesn’t care about quality long as there’s enough users on the site to make the paid ads have value. In the short term I think they’ll succeed in that but it’s going to turn into a cesspool.
But if those up for actual conversation and vaguely respectful debate come over here & leave the trolls and the karma farmers with Spez then that’s a great result!
Should be noted, Twitter is actively crashing and burning and may file for bankruptcy this year.
…And Mastodon seems to be a much nicer place to be than Twitter, even if it is a smaller “community”
But if those up for actual conversation and vaguely respectful debate come over here & leave the trolls and the karma farmers with Spez then that’s a great result!
Excellent point. Those of us who actually value conversation will make the effort to find, sign up for, and learn another platform. For the trolls and karma farmers, that’s just too much trouble. There will still be enough targets on Reddit to satisfy trolls, plus we’ve got the sunk cost fallacy working for us: karma farmers would lose their precious karma by leaving. Reddit is much more bot-friendly, too.
Thanks for being a greedy jerk, spez! Reddit is serving the Lemmy community as a bullshit filter!
They are taking the pig to market. The pig is not going to be okay, but a few people are going to get fat. That was the whole point all along and why didn’t everyone see that.
It’s just a question of if it sticks or not. Will people complain and mods relent or admins intervene and oust mod teams for a new batch of dummies? I feel the answer is yes.
I really hope this doesn’t happen, but I fear the same. Often these corpos will just bet on people being lazy, forgetting how bad the scandal was after a few weeks/months, and just roll over for them.
I just hope Reddit utterly collapses as a message to the wider industry, but I doubt it will and even if it did, I think the message would likely fall on deaf ears.
I’m ok with the smarter people forming communities elsewhere like Lemmy. Reddit brain drain will definitely be a thing. It’s going to be the new Facebook when this is all over.
I don’t know where reddit’s going from this, but I agree that the main focus should be what happens here. Seems like it gave the userbase a nice boost, and that’s mostly it.
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People jumping ship will no longer be commenting or posting new content, so hopefully there are a few big hitters.
What I’m really hoping for is a lot of the mods to leave or go on strike. There’s only so many people who are willing to do the work for free, especially qualified people who care about the content.
out of curiosity, what alternatives are you using? im only on lemmy rn but i wanna try other stuff out
I also signed up to kbin. Can’t give opinions yet, because I just started using both of these.
True, to hell with them. I’ll do me.
Same. We have seen nothing but reddit shitting the bed. If people are still staying everything, they’re not as likely to leave. If this doesn’t do it, then that’s that. The subs I would consider stating for are dead. Emulation has a post from yesterday, and then 5 days ago. EmulationOnAndroid is still private. Sad to see the community not there anymore, since it was a great way to keep up with everything that was going on, but if they don’t pick up here I’ll just watch some YouTubers and move on.
Depends on the quality of the first-party mod tools and if enough mods stick around. Reddit doesn’t work without free labor. It’ll be overrun by spam and trolls.
That AMA was honestly hilarious… I don’t know what i actually expected, but this was better. Not only did the CEO go after Christian in the comments, but he also admitted that reddit isn’t profitable, lol. This may not seal the deal for reddit, but i wouldn;t be surprised if spez was out of there just based on this PR disaster.
The fact that he was so upset about being recorded was hilarious.
My favorite was the claim that Christian “leaked” the recordings - like it was surreptitious and he wasn’t supposed to do that. Lololol uh, no, he released the recordings, which were his, legal, and he had every right to do. Reddit got caught with their pants around their ankles, again!
I don’t think it was a secret that reddit wasn’t profitable yet, but the way that was posted twisted as a nasty way to take a jab at 3rd party apps was awful.
I mean, have a proper answer ready. Most people would absolutely understand that as a company they need to be “profit driven” to become sustainable as long as they had really open & honest communication with as much notice as possible about changes.
There seems to be this counterproductive instinct by (some) CEOs to just keep silent… it’s not the screw ups that sink you… it’s the lack of communication on it that does. This AMA somehow actually managed to make it even worse by pretending to be ready to talk and then responding with this kind of crap.
One can only hope! I bet if they can him they still won’t even consider changing the course though.
Yeah, agreed… This decision is above the CEO and even if they budge a little on the API, they definitely don’t revert course.
I don’t understand what it was he hoped to accomplish with it. Nothing new was stated and all it did was make things worse. It was worse than half assed too.
Here’s what I think will happen.
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Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit’s side, out of fear that they’ll lose their foothold on the site.
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Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.
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Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
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Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.
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Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.
- Someone will discover an old episode of The Simpsons where somehow, all of this already happened.
Would any power user ever want to touch reddit with the longest pole if the first half of point 1 happened?
No, but are power users necessary? Most of the front page subreddits are just “post whatever you want here” and they have more than enough 14 year old posters to keep the site saturated.
Power users are more likely to use more server resources and less likely to see ads. They probably specifically do not want them.
It would basically transform into a Facebook platform if anything, so it’s easy to see how it can begin it’s very slow decline.
Reddit is already Facebook 2.0
The glory days of the site are quite behind it. And that’s not just me being nostalgic or moody about the current climate. Reddit had an enormous influx of Facebook and Instagram users over the years and the content started to reflect that. It’s specifically apparent on the default pages with looser rule-sets like r/Pics. Like, selfies without context became normalized.
It’s funny hearing about the decline of Reddit so much this past week because I was mostly ignorant of any of it. I’m pretty quick to prune any subs where I wansn’t enjoying the content coming across my feed, so I wasn’t subbed to many of the big subs. (And the big ones I had were very narrow in scope, which helps.)
I guess I noticed the decline in quality in specific subs, but my general experience with quality on-topic comments has remained fairly steady.
Actually, I remember the decline in Reduiquette was really noticeable about a decade ago, but that’s old news.
Indeed, it’s old news. And I should have gotten out years ago, but alas…
That’s a good point. I associate power users with niche subjects and generally higher quality posts, so I’m interested to have that demographic move here. I don’t really care about front page content, so maybe it’s win-win then :D
There are about 13k moderators participating in the blackout IIRC - I don’t think reddit will have the resources or the community goodwill to take over all of the major subs
Isn’t moderation an unpaid volunteer gig? I agree. He’s gonna have a hard time finding a bunch of people who can /will jump at the opportunity
Looks like #2 is starting to get realized: https://beehaw.org/post/487504
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Doubling down on throwing accusations at Christian Selig (dev of Apollo) in the AMA was really a low point. Spez has been a fan of a certain orange politician for years, and seems to be taking his tactic of spewing shit at people whether it is true or not. Sad.
Christian called him out on it and asked for proof. No response.
14 replies. Can that even be called an AMA.
I mean… technically people did come and ask it anything. It just decided not to actually answer any of the questions that were asked.
Even the fourteen comments that were made didn’t actually answer any of the questions that were asked. And that’s if you consider copy/pasting pre-approved responses as actual answers in the first place.
I mean better or worse than talking about rampart?
It was worse than Rampart.
Yes, but let’s focus on Rampart please.
Truly feels more like a PR stunt than anything…
Yep, felt either like an obligation or their attempt to gain control of the narrative. All it did for me was clarify my decision to scramble-then-delete my 12 years of activity and then delete my account.
Fuck spez what a piece of garbage human.
Fuck spez
Fuck spez.
Fuck spez.
Fuck spez
Fuck spez
Fuck spez
Fuck spez.
That’s why I just registered here and it’s my first comment.
I’m so excited to see Huffman burn his company to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted someone to fail as much as him.
I just hope there is any fallout from this. I really hope start mass migrating off reddit, and people don’t begrudgingly return a couple days after all of this dies down
Honestly, after coming to Lemmy, I haven’t looked back.
fuck reddit man My account was created the same time as Apollo, and now we’re leaving it together
I am personally leaving, friends/family also leaving. And Im blocking it on my network, and we got a “lets do it” to block it on our corporate network (1900+ employees). But everyone said “likely leaving”. Kbin maybe about to get the hug of death! May launch a selfhosters one! Lets do this
Wow blocking on work network not to stop wasting time but because of frustration over api is rly funny
Rexxit seems to be picking up speed.
Seeing a lot more posts about deleting comment history.
I won’t be going back (reddit user since the digg v4 fiasco)
I actually prefer the smaller communities, so lemmy is a breath of fresh air
Same just needs a few more people and a few more niche communities and we’re set.
I very much doubt there will be.
They have crunched the numbers, they know they can weather this storm.At the end of the day there will still be natural growth of reddit via people hearing about it and just grabbing the official apps from stores. A lot of techy types will leave, but they haven’t been the driving force behind reddit for a long time.
Reddit will just start heading more towards influencer style content and less of the content that originally built the platform.
My guess is that influencer style content is more profitable and less hazardous for them to host anyway.
I created my account here because of this. Was on Reddit for over ten years. Won’t be using Reddit after June 30th. Trying to figure out what to do with the (smaller, but over 150k subs) subs I moderate now then I’m out.
A ‘small’ portion of the Reddit community used Apollo & RIF (and other third party apps), but those were the power users and mods.
There will for sure be some fallout.
I’d say if you can private them and leave reddit and spez don’t deserve the content
I’m honestly surprised how quickly this is all falling apart. I don’t understand Reddit’s ass-backwards approach to all of these decisions.
In the comments, though, ReddPlanet’s developer (u/lupeski, aka Tony Lupeski) said “this is a blatant lie,” noting that he had tried multiple times to get in contact with Reddit regarding these changes and had been ignored. Another indie app developer said they had filled out a request for Enterprise API access three times and had received no response. They’re not even giving api access to people who could pay. What lying shits.
Pro tip: if you’re doing a line break, you need to add two spaces at the end of the previous line if you want the next one to actually break.
It makes it look like this.Or you can press enter twice, which looks like this.
And yeah, if they breathe, they lie. That’s the commonality between Steve and his cronies.
Thanks for the heads up; I should have used the preview button.
The AMA was just an obligation. It was never going to change his or anyone elses mind.
He knows the reality. This change won’t kill reddit. It will make it more controllable though, at the sake of some of their more techy users. The truth is that its big enough that they don’t need those users anymore though. The people who do leave will be replaced by the natural growth of the site of people who simply download the official app from the various stores over the next few months.
The result will be a more TikTok/Tumblr/Twitter like experience. Less niche, more mainstream serving.
I think it will convince a lot of people who are not fully engaged with the issue, at least enough to decide not to leave any time soon. If you look at his actual AMA post, there is a lot to placate people on certain aspects, e.g. accessibility. Most redditors didn’t even know third party apps existed until a week ago, so they won’t care too much about losing those.
But agree with you that they no longer care about the “hardcore” users. Reddit is definitely in an enshittification spiral, but it’ll probably take years to play out.
Except… they’re pissing off the moderators and removing their tools. Also the top submitters.
When the moderators and top submitters leave, what’s the content that will keep the bulk of the users doom scrolling? There will be a higher proportion of bot-submitted content, and a larger proportion of undesirable comments. Combined with the inline ads and dark patterns, only ignorance and inertia will hold the remaining audience.
It definitely will retain some level of an ad-watching userbase, but will it retain enough for an IPO and long-term survival? Spez & co. seem to be looking at Twitter and hoping they can do at least as well.
Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc.
A few million is plenty to make lemmy a comparable community. As that continues more and more people who didn’t move in previous years will move now, because there are enough people here to make it worthwhile.
I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
Which makes a federated system like lemmy even more competitive.
I’ve given lemmy a try 3-4 times over the last couple years. And I think that presently it is getting fairly close to a big enough crowd that is very usable and is comparable to what reddit was like in 2008 when I switched from Digg.
To be honest. Lemmy doesn’t need to out compete reddit or whoever. It just needs to be competitive. Not having the brain dead mainstream masses over here is not a loss. However, people have always moved to the platform with more liberty when most other aspects are the same. Otherwise reddit would never have been a thing. Most people were over at Digg for a reason. They only moved to reddit when Digg gave them enough reasons to leave.
The situation is now as it is, and we can no longer change it. Reddit has often made itself unpopular in the past with wrong decisions in the community. But this time I think they have gone too far and won’t get away with this so easily. Maybe they are going to kill their own product very soon.
We all fully understand that this is a business that needs to make a profit, so they can’t make their APIs totally free for everyone. Running such a service costs a lot of money indeed.
But doing so at the expense of the third-party apps that made Reddit the popular platform it is today for end users in the first place is not a smart move at all. Hands down, Reddit has not been able to bring its platform up to modern technical standards for years. Not to mention that they are not able to provide a decent web and mobile UI to their users. This is exactly the job that third-party apps are currently taking over.
What I would have done instead of Reddit is not to wipe out the very apps that keep my platform alive and make it an enjoyable experience for my end-users - but instead support those apps as much as I could. Why not provide those apps completely free API access and let the Reddit users bring their own API-access keys into those apps? Make a free Reddit tier plan which allows users to browse Reddit for free. As soon as a Reddit user wants to write posts or comments, let them pay a little monthly fee (lets say $2). Not only would that solve the problem for Reddit how to make more money without making small app developers pay, it would also significantly improve the quality of the content on the platform since it would lock out all the trolls and spammers from posting their shitty stuff.
I feel like making users pay a subscription would also kill Reddit.
I’m one of those people that would have paid a subscription if Reddit Premium actually gave me any cool features.
Why do you think that? Apollo users are already paying subscription fees to the app developer right now (me included). And as long as you are just a lurker, access could still be free. Sure not everyone is willing to pay $2, but if just 1/3 of all current Reddit users would do, that’s a ton of money - much more than they would ever get from the app developers paying for API requests.
I would have never paid a subscription fee for Reddit OR a Reddit app. I’m all for paying for software but these kinds of apps either have a one-time-payment or they’ll never see a dime from me.
The problem with that is that it’s not a sustainable business model for the app developers because of the way that mobile apps work.
Traditionally, consumer apps released a version that you bought and that was it. Next year there’d be a new version and you’d buy it if it offered features you wanted and not otherwise. The developer has the motivation to keep coming up with new features to get the repeat purchase.
Mobile apps don’t have the ability to do that. There’s one version which is the latest version so you buy it once and get free updates for life. The only regular income that the developer can get with this model is from new buyers. There’s only so many buyers in the market for a Reddit app (for any app really) so it’s difficult to make a pay cheque with that model.
The solution is either to provide the app for free and to show ads or move to a subscription model for extra features.
I didn’t realise Apollo users paid a subscription. I paid for Relay on android years ago. Must be an Apple thing I guess.
In that case, I agree some users would move over to paying Reddit directly. But I still don’t think that would be enough.
Yes, while Apollo is generally a free app, it has a premium subscription for users, providing advanced features like push notifications and other stuff. Since the app developers have to run their own backend to make those features work, users have to pay a small fee (what is totally OK for me since it is such a great app and I liked to support the developer this way).
You are right that this just solves a small part of the problem. If the numbers I have seen are correct, the API calls from all those mobile apps just make up a small number from the overall. A huge issue seem to be all those search engines and AI dudes feeding their stuff with data from Reddit (🫣 why would someone want to do this…). For those, I think it is still fair to let them pay per API request. So they could just give regular users a large amount of API request and force commercial users who want to scrape content with their bots to have an enterprise business plan and pay per API usage.
Apollo users that believe in the project would probably be way more willing to pay a small indie dev compared to a burgeoning wannabe megacorp. Christian said refunding half of the year for his yearly subs would cost him a quarter mil (half of the 500k he made off those subs this year) which is nuts but like the man made a good app. I paid for the one time premium because I used it so much and I was impressed.
Im waiting for the Internet Historian video on this
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Me too, its gonna be good to see his retelling of all of this shit
Yep, I just deleted my reddit account. The sheer disrespect gosh. I’m glad to be here now lol.
Maybe Christian will repurpose Apollo as a great Lemmy app. The perfect fuck you too spez.
That would be cool, but he’s been pretty clear that it is going to be the end of Apollo. It’s a very complex application with a Reddit-specific backend service and lots of other assumptions that would just not work here. Maybe some of the UI/UX could be reused, but it would probably be easier to recreate it from scratch than to adapt the existing app.
