RIP 3rd party Reddit clients
June 1, 2023 1:54 AM Subscribe
Reddit has announced its pricing for 3rd party app developers to access its API... and it's a lot higher than expected. The creator of the popular iOS Apollo client estimates it'll cost him $20 million/year to pay for all his users' API access, far beyond what he can afford. The change will affect all Reddit clients, with the developer of Android app Reddit is Fun assuming they want all third party apps gone.
I miss PHP forums.
posted by johngoren at 2:26 AM on June 1, 2023 [27 favorites]
posted by johngoren at 2:26 AM on June 1, 2023 [27 favorites]
Can U Digg it?
posted by Artw at 3:03 AM on June 1, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by Artw at 3:03 AM on June 1, 2023 [18 favorites]
Is there a federated alternative for people to (maybe) flee to which will be far better should it actually gain traction? Looks like there might be: Welcome Reddit Refugees
It might actually work better than Twitter -> Mastodon as Reddit is already a series of weird little islands.
posted by Artw at 3:08 AM on June 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
It might actually work better than Twitter -> Mastodon as Reddit is already a series of weird little islands.
posted by Artw at 3:08 AM on June 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
This is so stupid I had to re-read it twice before I realized it didn't say "Twitter".
posted by mmoncur at 3:18 AM on June 1, 2023 [46 favorites]
posted by mmoncur at 3:18 AM on June 1, 2023 [46 favorites]
Absolutely astonishing to me that they looked at Musk’s Twitter as anything other than a cautionary tale to be avoided by any means necessary
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:58 AM on June 1, 2023 [39 favorites]
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:58 AM on June 1, 2023 [39 favorites]
Reddit’s decision to monetize its API comes just months before Reddit is expected to file for an initial public offering (IPO).
posted by mediareport at 4:07 AM on June 1, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by mediareport at 4:07 AM on June 1, 2023 [18 favorites]
This is so stupid I had to re-read it twice before I realized it didn't say "Twitter".
Twitter's API access is 3.5x more expenseive.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:13 AM on June 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
Twitter's API access is 3.5x more expenseive.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:13 AM on June 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
Reddit’s decision to monetize its API comes just months before Reddit is expected to file for an initial public offering (IPO).
Nothing makes the line go up like being the biggest, most destructive assholes possible. They should fire most of their staff as well.
posted by Artw at 4:29 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Nothing makes the line go up like being the biggest, most destructive assholes possible. They should fire most of their staff as well.
posted by Artw at 4:29 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
I'm on Reddit quite a lot, mostly for hobby stuff like video games, D&D, plants, gardening, local and weirdo stories and other curiosities. I find that over the last couple years (more so than the previous ten years) the lack of moderation is wrecking even quiet, obscure subreddits like those having to do with plant identification, wild animal and insect identification, etc. Those places are becoming more and more avalanches of dumb jokes, wild guesses and just dumb behavior, where in the past they were mostly on topic and contained useful info. I guess this will only make things worse.
I've been on Reddit for nearly 10 years, and I know the refrain "Reddit is ruined now!" has been a common thing to hear even way back when. But with this and the IPO, I don't see it getting any better.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:32 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
I've been on Reddit for nearly 10 years, and I know the refrain "Reddit is ruined now!" has been a common thing to hear even way back when. But with this and the IPO, I don't see it getting any better.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:32 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
They should fire most of their staff as well.
Or, at least the devs who built the execrable Reddit app and the “New Reddit” version of the desktop site.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:36 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
Or, at least the devs who built the execrable Reddit app and the “New Reddit” version of the desktop site.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:36 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
I literally just went back to Apollo after the latest official Reddit app update was so unattractive. Cursed!
posted by mittens at 4:40 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by mittens at 4:40 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
Despite all the "this will be the death of Reddit" comments, it's worth putting this in perspective:
Apollo is one of the most popular Reddit third-party apps. There was enough data in the owner's Reddit post to figure out that they have ~660K users.
Reddit overall is estimated at ~1.2B users.
Even if the total market for third party Reddit clients is 100x Apollo's userbase, that's still only ~5% of Reddit's userbase. And some portion of those users would simply migrate back to using Reddit's official app.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:42 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Apollo is one of the most popular Reddit third-party apps. There was enough data in the owner's Reddit post to figure out that they have ~660K users.
Reddit overall is estimated at ~1.2B users.
Even if the total market for third party Reddit clients is 100x Apollo's userbase, that's still only ~5% of Reddit's userbase. And some portion of those users would simply migrate back to using Reddit's official app.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:42 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
I suspect it’s akin to Twitter clients, where yes, only like 10% of Twitter’s users used third-party clients, but they were also by and large the most valuable users, the hardcore users who posted the stuff that brought others to the platform to read it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:58 AM on June 1, 2023 [31 favorites]
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:58 AM on June 1, 2023 [31 favorites]
Even if the total market for third party Reddit clients is 100x Apollo's userbase, that's still only ~5% of Reddit's userbase.
I don’t use Reddit, but my sense of it is a community that is particularly dependent on its power users, so changes that disproportionately affect them have outsized effects on the site.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:59 AM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
I don’t use Reddit, but my sense of it is a community that is particularly dependent on its power users, so changes that disproportionately affect them have outsized effects on the site.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:59 AM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
All these brilliant decisions to drive people towards their shitty apps filled with nothing but interstitial advertisements or I guess towards some version of a paid marketplace b/c they all seem to want us on some fucking subscription. Such a depressing model that might generate short-term funds but at the cost of longer term usage.
posted by Fizz at 5:00 AM on June 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 5:00 AM on June 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
Sometimes I have to use Reddit from a platform other than my usual (Firefox loaded with adblockers, Old Reddit), and it reminds me how shitty the Reddit that Reddit wants you to use really is. No, I'm not paying for a subscription, and no, I'm not putting up with your ads, especially the Jeezus ones.
I'm old enough to have been around for the miracle of the Internet That Was, and miss it, because the Internet Where Four Shitty Billionaires Monetize Everything You See is real crappy.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:11 AM on June 1, 2023 [72 favorites]
I'm old enough to have been around for the miracle of the Internet That Was, and miss it, because the Internet Where Four Shitty Billionaires Monetize Everything You See is real crappy.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:11 AM on June 1, 2023 [72 favorites]
I don’t use Reddit, but my sense of it is a community that is particularly dependent on its power users, so changes that disproportionately affect them have outsized effects on the site.
I think that's true, as it is for many websites. But I'm not convinced that there's complete alignment between Reddit's power users and the third-party app userbase.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
I think that's true, as it is for many websites. But I'm not convinced that there's complete alignment between Reddit's power users and the third-party app userbase.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
… b/c they all seem to want us on some fucking subscription.
Reddit is owned by the same corp that also owns ArsTechnica, which has instituted a moderately aggressive push to get you to subscribe, complete with enormous nag popups, seemingly with every other click you make. So, yeah, it’s not hard to see that coming to Reddit soon.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Reddit is owned by the same corp that also owns ArsTechnica, which has instituted a moderately aggressive push to get you to subscribe, complete with enormous nag popups, seemingly with every other click you make. So, yeah, it’s not hard to see that coming to Reddit soon.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Reddit can be fun but is far from essential. If it ceased to exist tomorrow my life would not be appreciably different.
posted by East14thTaco at 5:25 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by East14thTaco at 5:25 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Reddit is where I found the communities that helped me learn to stop smoking, stop doing drugs, start running, start paying attention to eating well, be a better parent, be a better son, be a better partner, and a host of other major and minor miracles. I feel that I've always known it would not survive that transition into disdainful territory that happens to everything poisoned by Silicon Valley's amoral business acumen, whatever we're calling it. Nevertheless, it's sad to see something like this rushing that inevitable so much closer. Maybe it's just my age and life trajectory talking, but I've happily put down and deleted everything from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter without feeling a need to replace it with anything else. If it's Reddit's time, so be it. I'll be a little sad for the memories, but the loss will be worth avoiding whatever its leadership is trying to become. It might be too early, but:
.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 5:31 AM on June 1, 2023 [66 favorites]
.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 5:31 AM on June 1, 2023 [66 favorites]
Reddit is essential for when you want to find out about a new thing, so you Google “new thing + Reddit” to find out what actual humans think of it, rather than SEO garbage.
posted by The River Ivel at 5:31 AM on June 1, 2023 [64 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 5:31 AM on June 1, 2023 [64 favorites]
Any site that tells you “this site is better in our app!” is actually telling you “we don’t care enough to build a functional mobile version of our site, and also we want to track your every move more closely!”
Being forced to use a website without being able to use tabs, adblockers, etc. - you know, all the conveniences that made the modern web usable! - is a hard no for me.
I get that Reddit apps are trying to counter the shit design of the website, but the website is designed to be shitty on purpose. To force you into using their even shittier app.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:45 AM on June 1, 2023 [27 favorites]
Being forced to use a website without being able to use tabs, adblockers, etc. - you know, all the conveniences that made the modern web usable! - is a hard no for me.
I get that Reddit apps are trying to counter the shit design of the website, but the website is designed to be shitty on purpose. To force you into using their even shittier app.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:45 AM on June 1, 2023 [27 favorites]
I'm a long time Apollo user and I think there are some things that the app could do to minimize API usage. One of the biggest ones is the option to turn off "infinite scrolling" and load comments in small blocks (like 20 or so). I do this to try and keep Reddit from becoming a rabbit hole for me.
If that was a default setting, would it make a dent in API traffic?
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:55 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
If that was a default setting, would it make a dent in API traffic?
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:55 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I suspect it’s akin to Twitter clients, where yes, only like 10% of Twitter’s users used third-party clients, but they were also by and large the most valuable users, the hardcore users who posted the stuff that brought others to the platform to read it.
Apparently near essential if you want to moderate a subreddit there, so not just hardcore users, community builders.
posted by Artw at 6:32 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
Apparently near essential if you want to moderate a subreddit there, so not just hardcore users, community builders.
posted by Artw at 6:32 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
So, Elon Musk took over Reddit?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
On the one hand, it’s a free service they have to be able to make some money somewhere to stay in business.
On the other hand, power users using those apps are probably loss leaders driving other people to Reddit by providing content.
Don’t know if it’s dumb or not but I’m not scandalized by this decision.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:53 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
On the other hand, power users using those apps are probably loss leaders driving other people to Reddit by providing content.
Don’t know if it’s dumb or not but I’m not scandalized by this decision.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:53 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
I guess I'm alone in not minding the web interface for Reddit. It is one of the great failures of the internet that sites like Reddit are pushing people to apps. I work with a company that has a website and dedicated mobile apps, and those apps are a huge PITA because of versioning, not wanting to force-update people, etc. The web is designed specifically to support all types of devices, and particularly for interactive content-heavy sites like Reddit there is no compelling technical reason to create a bespoke experience for Android or iOS. It just adds so much technical debt, particularly when you want to change something fundamental.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:54 AM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:54 AM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
People are getting really mad about this but apps like Apollo are ad free, and Reddit is Fun serves *its own* ads on top of reddit content. Either way those are apps that Reddit is literally losing money on. It's incredible to me that they ever allowed it. Quarter after quarter looking at their massive cloud bill and seeing millions and millions of api requests that simply lose them money. The classic metafilter line: if it's free you are the product is turned on its head here. It costs a ton of money to serve millions of web requests, why would they just give it away? It's interesting how quickly the reddit world becomes communist once they get a taste of capitalism. Yes, the reddit app sucks, and the new UI sucks, but all the same, the first thing I'd do as a reddit PM is measure the actual users on these apps and figure out how much it would matter if they just went poof. Probably not much when you consider the scale of their 1.6 billion active monthly users. People love to say: but the 3rd party app users are the ones producing the content! That's nonsense: reddit content is mostly just endlessly reposted epic meme garbage you find everywhere else, (and on edit and second thought: it's porn, it's all just porn) or made up posts aka Am I The Asshole that will definitely not stop. Anyway, you can't run a website for free, as metafilter knows all too well.
posted by dis_integration at 6:58 AM on June 1, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 6:58 AM on June 1, 2023 [8 favorites]
I hate seeing APIs driven to be revenue generators for companies like Reddit or Twitter. The value is in the content and the ads shown on that content. The content is created for free by people like me and you. In exchange we expect to be able to access that content and part of doing that is a robust third party ecosystem with APIs, clients, interesting uses outside what the corporation itself creates. (Needless to say, I disagree with dis_integration's pessimistic analysis.)
But now we have rent-seeking like this pricing from Reddit and Twitter. The revenue from these programs will be relatively small (tens of millions a year at best) but it will completely kill a whole world of creative and useful third party stuff. We've already seen that happen with Twitter.
I've got no problems with charging a modest amount for an API. To cover the cost of the API servers themselves, or maybe as a way to encourage app developers to be efficient. But these charges are 10-100x that scale. It's exploitative.
Maybe the real purpose of the pricing is just to destroy the third party ecosystem. That's certainly been the result with Twitter. Block Party (an anti-harassment tool) is the latest victim.
posted by Nelson at 7:21 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
But now we have rent-seeking like this pricing from Reddit and Twitter. The revenue from these programs will be relatively small (tens of millions a year at best) but it will completely kill a whole world of creative and useful third party stuff. We've already seen that happen with Twitter.
I've got no problems with charging a modest amount for an API. To cover the cost of the API servers themselves, or maybe as a way to encourage app developers to be efficient. But these charges are 10-100x that scale. It's exploitative.
Maybe the real purpose of the pricing is just to destroy the third party ecosystem. That's certainly been the result with Twitter. Block Party (an anti-harassment tool) is the latest victim.
posted by Nelson at 7:21 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
This suggests to me that old reddit will be going away soon. Remove the decent web interface that doesn't drive the kind of interaction they want, remove any third party clients -- enshittifaction complete.
posted by joeyh at 7:27 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by joeyh at 7:27 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
The iOS Reddit app sucks. If Apollo shuts down, that'll be the end of the mobile Reddit for me.
posted by tommasz at 7:29 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by tommasz at 7:29 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Gotta shut down these third-party apps to reduce the AWS bills from our unpaid moderators.
posted by ryanrs at 7:41 AM on June 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by ryanrs at 7:41 AM on June 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
Idk if they're right or not but the money people think this is the natural consequence of the centralized model that has grown on the web in the last twenty years or so. People use social media, Reddit, etc., to avoid paying the fixed costs of setting up private sites and the search costs of finding them. Maybe, way back when, going to private sites was like a live option for people, and the centralized sites had to be open and interoperable and low-friction in order to compete. But maybe now that's not true anymore, and the centralized sites have the opportunity to charge rents because there's kind of nowhere to go. Hope they are wrong cuz it fuckin sucks.
Federated protocols might be a way of solving the setup and search problems without creating the ability to extract rents. I hope it works out that way, that would be cool. It would also be cool to go back to the previous world where "federation" was a matter of human-readable connections (web links) rather than automated pipes pouring content together. It sort of seems like that's a loser psychologically, but I hope things turn out otherwise. I keep meaning to have a blog again.
posted by grobstein at 7:49 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Federated protocols might be a way of solving the setup and search problems without creating the ability to extract rents. I hope it works out that way, that would be cool. It would also be cool to go back to the previous world where "federation" was a matter of human-readable connections (web links) rather than automated pipes pouring content together. It sort of seems like that's a loser psychologically, but I hope things turn out otherwise. I keep meaning to have a blog again.
posted by grobstein at 7:49 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
This is just math.
The end of investor subsidization of mature social media properties is now. Reddit has to find big new revenue sources or it is gone.
My guess is the API price increase is really directed at LLM AI developers for whom Reddit has to be one of the single richest sources of ingestible data. But, still, charging more for Reddit reader apps which block Reddit's ads is obvious low-hanging fruit. Intentionally making the initiative more aggressive to leave room to walk back things like charging more to third-party apps upon whom subreddit mods depend is basic sausage making.
Were Reddit in my book, I'd be doing this or something similar on APIs, but I'd be focusing even more on cool bells and whistles that could support a $10/month premium membership. 5 million people buy that and you've got $600mm more a year in revenue.
posted by MattD at 7:50 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
The end of investor subsidization of mature social media properties is now. Reddit has to find big new revenue sources or it is gone.
My guess is the API price increase is really directed at LLM AI developers for whom Reddit has to be one of the single richest sources of ingestible data. But, still, charging more for Reddit reader apps which block Reddit's ads is obvious low-hanging fruit. Intentionally making the initiative more aggressive to leave room to walk back things like charging more to third-party apps upon whom subreddit mods depend is basic sausage making.
Were Reddit in my book, I'd be doing this or something similar on APIs, but I'd be focusing even more on cool bells and whistles that could support a $10/month premium membership. 5 million people buy that and you've got $600mm more a year in revenue.
posted by MattD at 7:50 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Maybe the real purpose of the pricing is just to destroy the third party ecosystem.
I think so, yeah. You control the experience so you can market the eyeballs to advertisers more reliably. The revenue expectations from the API fees themselves must be tiny.
posted by grobstein at 7:51 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think so, yeah. You control the experience so you can market the eyeballs to advertisers more reliably. The revenue expectations from the API fees themselves must be tiny.
posted by grobstein at 7:51 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Reddit has always been terrible and I was hoping for the next site to replace from the day they allowed image posts. Now outside of very specific hobby threads it's just an angry conservative recruiting ground combined with bottom barrel LCD content and the worst news of he world. Redditisfun is how I accessed reddit at all this past decade and without it I will treat the site as functionally closed. On some level any reddit/digg/slashdot/fark is doomed by it's need to eventually monetize. Here's hoping some other startup makes a good site for a few years while coasting on investor money lol.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
My guess is the API price increase is really directed at LLM AI developers for whom Reddit has to be one of the single richest sources of ingestible data.
Thing is, if you're just harvesting text in one pass, it must be way easier to just scrape the website than pay for it. Or are you imagining that Reddit will sue those kinds of users? Idk if I think that would work but ig you can extract some fees using threats.
posted by grobstein at 7:54 AM on June 1, 2023
Thing is, if you're just harvesting text in one pass, it must be way easier to just scrape the website than pay for it. Or are you imagining that Reddit will sue those kinds of users? Idk if I think that would work but ig you can extract some fees using threats.
posted by grobstein at 7:54 AM on June 1, 2023
Now outside of very specific hobby threads it's just an angry conservative recruiting ground combined with bottom barrel LCD content and the worst news of he world.
This is not true. Reddit is enormous. I use the Philadelphia subreddit regularly without issue, and just recently used the Harriman State Park subreddit to get intel on the park prior to a backpacking trip. If you are looking for terrible stuff, you'll find it. And just randomly landing on a sub is probably a bad idea? But the small, specific subreddits are great.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:57 AM on June 1, 2023 [44 favorites]
This is not true. Reddit is enormous. I use the Philadelphia subreddit regularly without issue, and just recently used the Harriman State Park subreddit to get intel on the park prior to a backpacking trip. If you are looking for terrible stuff, you'll find it. And just randomly landing on a sub is probably a bad idea? But the small, specific subreddits are great.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:57 AM on June 1, 2023 [44 favorites]
I find Reddit good in various specific communities. TBH it has somewhat replaced Metafilter for me, starting a few years ago when Reddit started getting more serious about moderation and Metafilter started dwindling. Yet another "Plastic Reddit sux / Reddit rox" discussion is the last thing we need here though.
Back to APIs, another problem with high pricing is that it just makes screen scraping all the more attractive. A big reason to have an API is you can shuttle the automated traffic to a subsystem that is designed for it, can be managed. Screenscraping when done right looks an awful lot like ordinary users and is hard for the server owner to control. Scraping isn't viable for completely legitimate businesses like a third party UI for Reddit but it works great for a lot of.. more creative uses. Also folks less concerned with copyright niceties, like the LLM scrapers we've been discussing here.
A bunch of content sites like Stack Overflow have been negotiating contracts with the AI training companies lately. Those are specific one-offs involving giant dumps, not complex fine-grained APIs like Reddit's. I am certain Reddit is part of that discussion too but I don't have a reference at my fingertips.
posted by Nelson at 8:03 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
Back to APIs, another problem with high pricing is that it just makes screen scraping all the more attractive. A big reason to have an API is you can shuttle the automated traffic to a subsystem that is designed for it, can be managed. Screenscraping when done right looks an awful lot like ordinary users and is hard for the server owner to control. Scraping isn't viable for completely legitimate businesses like a third party UI for Reddit but it works great for a lot of.. more creative uses. Also folks less concerned with copyright niceties, like the LLM scrapers we've been discussing here.
A bunch of content sites like Stack Overflow have been negotiating contracts with the AI training companies lately. Those are specific one-offs involving giant dumps, not complex fine-grained APIs like Reddit's. I am certain Reddit is part of that discussion too but I don't have a reference at my fingertips.
posted by Nelson at 8:03 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
I would be shocked if Reddit does not now have, or least is soon rolling out, a very robust set of systems to defeat LLM screen scrapers. Everyone who owns masses of accessible content is enraged that their content was fed to LLMs without their getting paid, and is bound and determined to get paid for it going forward.
Commercial AI is at least as interested in ongoing live access to Reddit than to the one-time dump of training data. Trend analysis makes money.
posted by MattD at 8:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Commercial AI is at least as interested in ongoing live access to Reddit than to the one-time dump of training data. Trend analysis makes money.
posted by MattD at 8:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I would be shocked if Reddit does not now have, or least is soon rolling out, a very robust set of systems to defeat LLM screen scrapers. Everyone who owns masses of accessible content is enraged that their content was fed to LLMs without their getting paid, and is bound and determined to get paid for it going forward.
So they'll pay for a few logins and have some minimum wage paid dudes in India or Russia scrape it manually. Or hackers. Easy peasy. Then they can sell the data they scraped to make pay the costs of the hacking.
I remember when APIs were going to revolutionize the web. So easy to convey data between applications! Much better than dedicated interfaces!
LOL.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:21 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
So they'll pay for a few logins and have some minimum wage paid dudes in India or Russia scrape it manually. Or hackers. Easy peasy. Then they can sell the data they scraped to make pay the costs of the hacking.
I remember when APIs were going to revolutionize the web. So easy to convey data between applications! Much better than dedicated interfaces!
LOL.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:21 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
The big ad bonanza they may be anticipating — and that the investment bankers who will underwrite their IPO may be looking at as they calculate a value for the IPO — might be the political ads for the 2024 elections in the US, for which expenditures are expected to exceed all previous election ad buying by a huge amount.
In this context, Reddit's large user base outside the US might actually prove to be unexpectedly valuable, because very, very wealthy foreign interests will have a lot to gain or lose in that election, and they will make their money felt, one way or another.
Reddit users can probably look forward to a front row seat in a display of the most awful, evil, utterly false and dangerous advertising campaigns and disinformation campaigns the world has ever seen.
Enjoy.
posted by jamjam at 8:36 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
In this context, Reddit's large user base outside the US might actually prove to be unexpectedly valuable, because very, very wealthy foreign interests will have a lot to gain or lose in that election, and they will make their money felt, one way or another.
Reddit users can probably look forward to a front row seat in a display of the most awful, evil, utterly false and dangerous advertising campaigns and disinformation campaigns the world has ever seen.
Enjoy.
posted by jamjam at 8:36 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
I never bothered with apps, but I expect that sometime soon reddit will also shut down the old.reddit.com access path, which is likely to mostly kill off my reddit reading. Because the new interface has been unbelievably dreadful from the start.
posted by tavella at 8:42 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by tavella at 8:42 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
I was looking up how many people still use Old Reddit and found this:
posted by RobotHero at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
60% of mod actions still happen on Old Reddit and roughly 4% of redditors as a whole use Old Reddit every day.Which fits the same idea that it's a small minority of users, but disproportionately the ones whose free labour keeps the system going.
posted by RobotHero at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
This suggests to me that old reddit will be going away soon.
Yeah, I've been wondering about this too. Like someone commented above, I'm also not super convinced that power reddit is aligned with 3rd party app use, but I am convinced it's at aligned with use of oldreddit. (The backstory, if you don't know, is that in I think ~2018 there was a big redesign, among other reasons to better serve ads, that was so poorly received that they are still maintaining both.)
posted by advil at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2023
Yeah, I've been wondering about this too. Like someone commented above, I'm also not super convinced that power reddit is aligned with 3rd party app use, but I am convinced it's at aligned with use of oldreddit. (The backstory, if you don't know, is that in I think ~2018 there was a big redesign, among other reasons to better serve ads, that was so poorly received that they are still maintaining both.)
posted by advil at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2023
This creates the opportunity for someone else to re-invent usenet. Maybe in the next site I won’t have to keep opting out of the shitty redesign.
posted by interogative mood at 8:49 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by interogative mood at 8:49 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
A reddit user is annually only worth 30 cents. Whatever counts as a regular user can't be worth much more, and that is the metric those IPO bean counters are focused on here.
posted by zenon at 8:50 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by zenon at 8:50 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Guess I'm gonna have to go see if I can remember how to use curl....
posted by aramaic at 8:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by aramaic at 8:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
14 years ago I founded what is now a top 5% sub. It's a local sub and one of the largest for its area. I never use third-party apps to moderate and I abandoned the "old reddit" site a long time ago in favour of the new one. The native app is just fine.
Moderators on reddit are inherently conservative. They don't want new. They want old. They do things one way and they want to keep doing them that one way. So they never work with the new tools. Since my day jobs have always been about the new, I happily jump into them. My sub sees thousands of mod actions every month and the tools reddit has rolled out for moderation took forever, but now that they're coming online at a rapid clip, they've turned out to be pretty good and actually lower the moderation overhead quite a lot. I suspect my sub could double its users and I wouldn't need to add any other moderators.
My problem with reddit is that I've built a thriving, vibrant community in spite of reddit users! They all seem to want reddit to be exactly like everywhere else; like Facebook or New York Post comments or Citizen. So many subs are moderated by people who think the up and down arrows are all that's needed. That's a space where they're especially conservative. Moderators of large subs are absolutely terrified of being seen as biased, against "free speech", and stuff like that. So you end up with, for instance, city subs like r/NYC or r/Chicago that are just flooded with alt right, culture war bullshit trying to scare people.
So I guess this is my perspective of saying, no, I don't think charging for the API (which seems like it is priced ridiculously and I do feel bad for the Apollo developer), is going to kill reddit. Reddit's users are going to kill reddit, especially weak-kneed and lazy moderators who can't adapt to change.
posted by Captaintripps at 8:55 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Moderators on reddit are inherently conservative. They don't want new. They want old. They do things one way and they want to keep doing them that one way. So they never work with the new tools. Since my day jobs have always been about the new, I happily jump into them. My sub sees thousands of mod actions every month and the tools reddit has rolled out for moderation took forever, but now that they're coming online at a rapid clip, they've turned out to be pretty good and actually lower the moderation overhead quite a lot. I suspect my sub could double its users and I wouldn't need to add any other moderators.
My problem with reddit is that I've built a thriving, vibrant community in spite of reddit users! They all seem to want reddit to be exactly like everywhere else; like Facebook or New York Post comments or Citizen. So many subs are moderated by people who think the up and down arrows are all that's needed. That's a space where they're especially conservative. Moderators of large subs are absolutely terrified of being seen as biased, against "free speech", and stuff like that. So you end up with, for instance, city subs like r/NYC or r/Chicago that are just flooded with alt right, culture war bullshit trying to scare people.
So I guess this is my perspective of saying, no, I don't think charging for the API (which seems like it is priced ridiculously and I do feel bad for the Apollo developer), is going to kill reddit. Reddit's users are going to kill reddit, especially weak-kneed and lazy moderators who can't adapt to change.
posted by Captaintripps at 8:55 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Can we please avoid the lazy "Reddit sucks and is just spam and angry people and porn", which has already been refuted multiple times in this thread?
posted by adrianhon at 9:03 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by adrianhon at 9:03 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
I can't count the number of times I've failed to find information I was searching for until I added "reddit" to my search query, but that's probably more about how crappy Google search has gotten than how good Reddit is
posted by straight at 9:07 AM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by straight at 9:07 AM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
I get snitty every time Reddit tells me it "looks better in the app." I still do not get why I should download an app to read ONE DAMN WEBSITE.
Also, what everyone else said about "don't do what Elon does, FFS."
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
Also, what everyone else said about "don't do what Elon does, FFS."
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
I hang out on various subreddits, mostly for TTRPGs and fashion-related stuff, through Apollo. I'm too new to Redditing to know old reddit for all that I've been on there for a few years now. I won't necessarily drop Reddit when Apollo goes dark but it'll reduce my interest in spending time there and I'll probably cut down on the number of subreddits I subscribe to.
Fortunately my browser kills a lot of the adverts or I'd already be out of there.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:16 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Fortunately my browser kills a lot of the adverts or I'd already be out of there.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:16 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
So you end up with, for instance, city subs like r/NYC or r/Chicago that are just flooded with alt right, culture war bullshit trying to scare people.I was just going to say, some of the city subreddits are particularly dire. /r/Portland is useless — unless you are looking for fearmongering stories about houselessness.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:16 AM on June 1, 2023 [8 favorites]
Anyway, you can't run a website for free, as metafilter knows all too well.
Googling around a bit, it sounds like Reddit has 700 employees, 50M daily users, and upwards of 400M posts, 2B comments, and 49B upvotes per year. Their total estimated revenue for 2022 was $510 million, of which $423M was from ads. Which, yeah, isn't a ton of revenue for a platform of their size. On the other hand, it's just a really big message board -- even at their scale, it's not gonna be anywhere near as expensive to run as YouTube or Twitter, right? And of course they aren't paying the people who produce and manage their content....
posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:18 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Googling around a bit, it sounds like Reddit has 700 employees, 50M daily users, and upwards of 400M posts, 2B comments, and 49B upvotes per year. Their total estimated revenue for 2022 was $510 million, of which $423M was from ads. Which, yeah, isn't a ton of revenue for a platform of their size. On the other hand, it's just a really big message board -- even at their scale, it's not gonna be anywhere near as expensive to run as YouTube or Twitter, right? And of course they aren't paying the people who produce and manage their content....
posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:18 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
charge $5/month/sub to be a mod
you know they would pay
posted by ryanrs at 9:39 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
you know they would pay
posted by ryanrs at 9:39 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
The backstory, if you don't know, is that in I think ~2018 there was a big redesign, among other reasons to better serve ads, that was so poorly received that they are still maintaining both
Old reddit is one of those unattractive but functionally unimprovable bits of programmer minimalism. It’s pre-responsive design, though, so I use the “new” web UI on mobile. It’s not great but it’s okay, except for when they tested an update for like a day that turned the thread list page into a full on social media feed layout with giant images where you could only see two or three posts on screen at a time.
posted by atoxyl at 9:55 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Old reddit is one of those unattractive but functionally unimprovable bits of programmer minimalism. It’s pre-responsive design, though, so I use the “new” web UI on mobile. It’s not great but it’s okay, except for when they tested an update for like a day that turned the thread list page into a full on social media feed layout with giant images where you could only see two or three posts on screen at a time.
posted by atoxyl at 9:55 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
One solution that would (potentially) serve everybody well is to allow users who have a Reddit Premium account to access using 3rd party apps that make use of the API.
Reddit Premium is $50 a year or $6 a month, so that would offset the money Reddit might make from ads (premium is supposed to be ad-free).
Instead of prohibitive API access fees Reddit could charge a reasonable API access fee for third party clients and/or have a TOS for API-using apps to ensure they're not abusing the API / writing clients that are sloppy in their use of the API in a way that hits Reddit in the hosting fees really hard.
They can certainly restrict the API / TOS to forbid using Reddit to train LLMs.
This seems like a very solvable problem all-around if Reddit / Advance Publications wants to solve it instead of just killing off third party apps. Which seems more like what they want to do.
posted by jzb at 10:07 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
Reddit Premium is $50 a year or $6 a month, so that would offset the money Reddit might make from ads (premium is supposed to be ad-free).
Instead of prohibitive API access fees Reddit could charge a reasonable API access fee for third party clients and/or have a TOS for API-using apps to ensure they're not abusing the API / writing clients that are sloppy in their use of the API in a way that hits Reddit in the hosting fees really hard.
They can certainly restrict the API / TOS to forbid using Reddit to train LLMs.
This seems like a very solvable problem all-around if Reddit / Advance Publications wants to solve it instead of just killing off third party apps. Which seems more like what they want to do.
posted by jzb at 10:07 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
I keep meaning to have a blog again.
Same. There is a great hobbyist community, for which IndieWeb (previously mentioned: 1 2) is an organizer.
posted by casconed at 10:23 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Same. There is a great hobbyist community, for which IndieWeb (previously mentioned: 1 2) is an organizer.
posted by casconed at 10:23 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Wait, there are people who pay $6/month for Reddit?
I feel like I need to go back and re-price my joke.
posted by ryanrs at 10:25 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
I feel like I need to go back and re-price my joke.
posted by ryanrs at 10:25 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
API usage by Apollo will cost $2.50 per user per month for an ad-free Reddit experience. Reddit Premium charges $6 per user per month for an ad-free Reddit experience. So, Apollo is still a better deal.
I’m confused what is inherently wrong by a site saying “view ads or pay us”. Sites aren’t free to operate.
How much does MeFi cost per active user per month? How much of that is funded by advertising? Are we donating enough to stay positive on the remainder?
It seems like the objections and dooming around this change, are centered on Reddit’s plan to charge any amount at all for their ad-free API. There are no alternatives, though; that API costs money to operate, and they’re not willing to corrupt it with advertising, so all that is left is to charge for access to it.
I think that Reddit made a critical error in not marking as “free” the first $2.50/month of API calls made by each Reddit Premium user, because now users will have to choose between Reddit Premium and Apollo Subscription — and that will cost Reddit guaranteed services revenue that they’ll just have to hope that we provide through Apollo.
I think that Apollo will end up selling API credits through in-app purchase and offering a recurring subscription option for users that can afford to do so; applying the “Pay as you go” and “Prepaid” models from mobile phones to the Reddit API.
I think that it sucks that anything costs money and that we don’t have cold fusion and replicators, but in a world where money is an unfortunate thing and I want to see the services I use continue to exist, I don’t see any way other way forward for Reddit here.
Just as it is with MeFi, the core principle remains: If you enjoy it and you can afford to support it financially, please do so. Whether you can pay more than you need to, or only pay the minimum necessary to cover your usage, or only disable your adblocker for it — then do so.
But also, site operators — please set and share an operational costs and profit funding target, beyond which any excess is used to donate ad-free page views and free API calls to app users that month. This will cap your profits at a certain amount, but it will also give your affluent users a way to “pay it forward” for other visitors without feeling like they’re just padding your profits.
posted by Callisto Prime at 10:38 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
I’m confused what is inherently wrong by a site saying “view ads or pay us”. Sites aren’t free to operate.
How much does MeFi cost per active user per month? How much of that is funded by advertising? Are we donating enough to stay positive on the remainder?
It seems like the objections and dooming around this change, are centered on Reddit’s plan to charge any amount at all for their ad-free API. There are no alternatives, though; that API costs money to operate, and they’re not willing to corrupt it with advertising, so all that is left is to charge for access to it.
I think that Reddit made a critical error in not marking as “free” the first $2.50/month of API calls made by each Reddit Premium user, because now users will have to choose between Reddit Premium and Apollo Subscription — and that will cost Reddit guaranteed services revenue that they’ll just have to hope that we provide through Apollo.
I think that Apollo will end up selling API credits through in-app purchase and offering a recurring subscription option for users that can afford to do so; applying the “Pay as you go” and “Prepaid” models from mobile phones to the Reddit API.
I think that it sucks that anything costs money and that we don’t have cold fusion and replicators, but in a world where money is an unfortunate thing and I want to see the services I use continue to exist, I don’t see any way other way forward for Reddit here.
Just as it is with MeFi, the core principle remains: If you enjoy it and you can afford to support it financially, please do so. Whether you can pay more than you need to, or only pay the minimum necessary to cover your usage, or only disable your adblocker for it — then do so.
But also, site operators — please set and share an operational costs and profit funding target, beyond which any excess is used to donate ad-free page views and free API calls to app users that month. This will cap your profits at a certain amount, but it will also give your affluent users a way to “pay it forward” for other visitors without feeling like they’re just padding your profits.
posted by Callisto Prime at 10:38 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
I’m confused what is inherently wrong by a site saying “view ads or pay us”.
I'm going to do whatever I can to liberate myself from advertising, whenever possible. Why on earth would I subject myself to it? As to paying them, well, I'll give Wikipedia money because they perform a great service and I know none of the money will end up lining the pockets of Wall Street.
disable your adblocker for it — then do so
Haha, fuck no.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:56 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
I'm going to do whatever I can to liberate myself from advertising, whenever possible. Why on earth would I subject myself to it? As to paying them, well, I'll give Wikipedia money because they perform a great service and I know none of the money will end up lining the pockets of Wall Street.
disable your adblocker for it — then do so
Haha, fuck no.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:56 AM on June 1, 2023 [16 favorites]
charge $5/month/sub to be a mod
you know they would pay
I modded a large fandom subreddit for years because I love(d) the fandom itself and wanted to create a place for fellow nerds to talk about it. In that time I received multiple death threats and personal threats to my safety (after which I scrubbed all personal information from my account and now purposefully obfuscate my location and lie about small details to throw them off) and dealt with people who thought throwing slurs around was the height of wit on a daily basis, as well as stalkers, harassers, bullies and some plain nasty people. Some of our worst haters made entire subreddits to trash the moderation team and our subreddit. They would mock us with personal insults (in my case transphobic "jokes") and the Reddit admins did nothing to help us.
Reddit expects its volunteer moderators to curate and create the content they then sell on to advertisers and stockholders, while withstanding abuse and hate on a daily basis, without any support and barely any usable tools (the main toolbox for moderators has only recently become actually useful -- for a long time it was also a volunteer-made effort which was absorbed gradually into official Reddit tools).
I lasted until the amount of stress from modding outweighed my enjoyment of the fandom, and then I quit. I would never pay for that experience. Hell, you couldn't even pay me to repeat it.
posted by fight or flight at 11:08 AM on June 1, 2023 [29 favorites]
you know they would pay
I modded a large fandom subreddit for years because I love(d) the fandom itself and wanted to create a place for fellow nerds to talk about it. In that time I received multiple death threats and personal threats to my safety (after which I scrubbed all personal information from my account and now purposefully obfuscate my location and lie about small details to throw them off) and dealt with people who thought throwing slurs around was the height of wit on a daily basis, as well as stalkers, harassers, bullies and some plain nasty people. Some of our worst haters made entire subreddits to trash the moderation team and our subreddit. They would mock us with personal insults (in my case transphobic "jokes") and the Reddit admins did nothing to help us.
Reddit expects its volunteer moderators to curate and create the content they then sell on to advertisers and stockholders, while withstanding abuse and hate on a daily basis, without any support and barely any usable tools (the main toolbox for moderators has only recently become actually useful -- for a long time it was also a volunteer-made effort which was absorbed gradually into official Reddit tools).
I lasted until the amount of stress from modding outweighed my enjoyment of the fandom, and then I quit. I would never pay for that experience. Hell, you couldn't even pay me to repeat it.
posted by fight or flight at 11:08 AM on June 1, 2023 [29 favorites]
I’m confused what is inherently wrong by a site saying “view ads or pay us”.
Safe to say I have a lot of complicated feelings about the general subject, but setting that all aside I think what this framing fails to account for in the current dynamic is the rug-pull aspect: it's not "here's the deal, opt in if you like" in this case so much as "here's the sudden change to the deal that existed for years and years".
Which, circumstances change, budgets and revenue change, sometimes you have to shift how you do stuff and how you bring in revenue. But managing change is a process in its own right, and you can do it well and you can do it poorly. And springing a wildly prohibitive cost wall on your entire third party ecology is not doing it well; the comparison to Twitter is not just that, oh they're both charging for API access, it's that they're both doing it out of the blue at a cost almost no one can afford after years of operating on a totally different premise.
That goes beyond just having "ads are part of our revenue model" as an operating premise. It's yet another case of a corporate social media product scaling an unsustainable model and then making a shock-and-awe decision to try and fix that by brute force. The vibe of "sucks to be you" for users and third party tool developer isn't great!
posted by cortex at 11:09 AM on June 1, 2023 [21 favorites]
Safe to say I have a lot of complicated feelings about the general subject, but setting that all aside I think what this framing fails to account for in the current dynamic is the rug-pull aspect: it's not "here's the deal, opt in if you like" in this case so much as "here's the sudden change to the deal that existed for years and years".
Which, circumstances change, budgets and revenue change, sometimes you have to shift how you do stuff and how you bring in revenue. But managing change is a process in its own right, and you can do it well and you can do it poorly. And springing a wildly prohibitive cost wall on your entire third party ecology is not doing it well; the comparison to Twitter is not just that, oh they're both charging for API access, it's that they're both doing it out of the blue at a cost almost no one can afford after years of operating on a totally different premise.
That goes beyond just having "ads are part of our revenue model" as an operating premise. It's yet another case of a corporate social media product scaling an unsustainable model and then making a shock-and-awe decision to try and fix that by brute force. The vibe of "sucks to be you" for users and third party tool developer isn't great!
posted by cortex at 11:09 AM on June 1, 2023 [21 favorites]
Skipping TFAs and thread to remark that reddit has made itself useless to me on the phone by disabling .compact mode and forcing me into the shitty new front end, which constantly pesters me to use the app. Which I tried, and uninstalled.
I still look at reddit a bit when I'm at a computer, but my engagement has plummeted. Reddit the business enterprise is being run by shitwits.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:09 AM on June 1, 2023 [13 favorites]
I still look at reddit a bit when I'm at a computer, but my engagement has plummeted. Reddit the business enterprise is being run by shitwits.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:09 AM on June 1, 2023 [13 favorites]
Also:
60% of mod actions still happen on Old Reddit and roughly 4% of redditors as a whole use Old Reddit every day.
That's because until relatively recently, the only decent moderator tools worked better on Old Reddit. It's a huge headache to use New Reddit as a moderator because someone decided to turn everything into a widget.
posted by fight or flight at 11:10 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
60% of mod actions still happen on Old Reddit and roughly 4% of redditors as a whole use Old Reddit every day.
That's because until relatively recently, the only decent moderator tools worked better on Old Reddit. It's a huge headache to use New Reddit as a moderator because someone decided to turn everything into a widget.
posted by fight or flight at 11:10 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
"I Am Altering the Deal, Pray I Don’t Alter It Any Further."
posted by Mitheral at 11:19 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 11:19 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
fight or flight, so what I'm hearing is that an extra $5/mo wouldn't have deterred you. As you point out, being a reddit mod is basically self-harm.
posted by ryanrs at 11:26 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by ryanrs at 11:26 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
That's because until relatively recently, the only decent moderator tools worked better on Old Reddit. It's a huge headache to use New Reddit as a moderator because someone decided to turn everything into a widget.
I can't come to that conclusion with that data, especially when the disparity between the percentage of users who use old reddit and the moderator actions on old reddit are so wildly different. If they told us the percentage of moderators who use old reddit, that would be more useful. Some of the top subs have millions of users, so it could really only take a small number of moderators to push the mod actions percentage up that high.
I have not found current reddit to be a headache to use as a moderator at all and as a frequent reader of the various mod support subs, the perception that some moderators have about the current reddit tools is...baffling? And frequently it seems to be more about the style sheet than anything else.
posted by Captaintripps at 12:13 PM on June 1, 2023
I can't come to that conclusion with that data, especially when the disparity between the percentage of users who use old reddit and the moderator actions on old reddit are so wildly different. If they told us the percentage of moderators who use old reddit, that would be more useful. Some of the top subs have millions of users, so it could really only take a small number of moderators to push the mod actions percentage up that high.
I have not found current reddit to be a headache to use as a moderator at all and as a frequent reader of the various mod support subs, the perception that some moderators have about the current reddit tools is...baffling? And frequently it seems to be more about the style sheet than anything else.
posted by Captaintripps at 12:13 PM on June 1, 2023
I'm a moderator for several decent-sized tech subreddits with lots and lots of traffic. If Reddit actually goes through with this, I will have to abandon yet another social network. Only my MetaFilter account (well, my original one) is older than my Reddit account (almost 17 years). I've been giving away valuable moderation for well over a decade. The people currently making these decisions about monetizing Reddit are idiots. It may fall and be replaced just like so many before it.
posted by damienbarrett at 12:20 PM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by damienbarrett at 12:20 PM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Back when Reddit was a hive of criminality, I used to ask people if they could push a button and destroy either Facebook or Reddit, which they would press to reduce the most harm.
Maybe now that question is kinda answering itself as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter continue their individual failure cascades.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:54 PM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Maybe now that question is kinda answering itself as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter continue their individual failure cascades.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:54 PM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
This is the arc of the enshittification cycle. If we want to learn anything from Facebook, Twitter, and now Reddit, it's that we should expect this to happen and be prepared for it. There should always be a platform waiting in the wings for the first waves of users being driven away by enshittification. The platform doesn't need to innovate; it just needs to replicate the good experience that people liked before it became shit.
This is a disappointing conclusion. It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists. This has been borne out over the last decade. The internet was a far better experience ten years ago using all (or most) of the same services people still use today.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:59 PM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
This is a disappointing conclusion. It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists. This has been borne out over the last decade. The internet was a far better experience ten years ago using all (or most) of the same services people still use today.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:59 PM on June 1, 2023 [9 favorites]
disable your adblocker for it — then do so
Haha, fuck no.
Yeah this is where I'm at. If the bargain is, I can't look at your site without looking at ads, then I will not look at your site. If the bargain is, that or I pay, I probably won't look at your site, either. You decide whether you want me to or not.
Some paywalls are obviously productive even if I don't like 'em. Like the New Yorker wants you to pay for their content so they can pay people to make it. Not worth it to me cuz I don't like the magazine (much less the website) but I respect the decision.
Not like Facebook, whose business model is basically to put your friends behind a wall and let advertisers punch you in the brain to talk to them. Reddit seems like an intermediate case, cuz ig the tools really do add some value. But mostly it can make money by owning a salient coordination point for people talk to each other, and in effect charging rent for it. These are at best natural monopolies. They are not valuable for what they do but for the territory they control. Their profits are essentially waste, not economic value. (In fact this is why they are so much more valuable than something like the New Yorker. Extracting rents is just a much better business model than making something and selling it.)
posted by grobstein at 1:39 PM on June 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
Haha, fuck no.
Yeah this is where I'm at. If the bargain is, I can't look at your site without looking at ads, then I will not look at your site. If the bargain is, that or I pay, I probably won't look at your site, either. You decide whether you want me to or not.
Some paywalls are obviously productive even if I don't like 'em. Like the New Yorker wants you to pay for their content so they can pay people to make it. Not worth it to me cuz I don't like the magazine (much less the website) but I respect the decision.
Not like Facebook, whose business model is basically to put your friends behind a wall and let advertisers punch you in the brain to talk to them. Reddit seems like an intermediate case, cuz ig the tools really do add some value. But mostly it can make money by owning a salient coordination point for people talk to each other, and in effect charging rent for it. These are at best natural monopolies. They are not valuable for what they do but for the territory they control. Their profits are essentially waste, not economic value. (In fact this is why they are so much more valuable than something like the New Yorker. Extracting rents is just a much better business model than making something and selling it.)
posted by grobstein at 1:39 PM on June 1, 2023 [7 favorites]
It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists.
Yeah, it turns out that if your worldview is that money making is the only thing and damn the torpedoes, you end up making decisions in service of that which somebody else with a less monomaniacal approach probably wouldn't. This seems to be an argument against capitalism. Or at least, for some moderated form of if where money making is important but not paramount. I don't think it's too surprising of an observation that naked capitalism results in bad outcomes for the planet and the people who live on it.
posted by axiom at 1:42 PM on June 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah, it turns out that if your worldview is that money making is the only thing and damn the torpedoes, you end up making decisions in service of that which somebody else with a less monomaniacal approach probably wouldn't. This seems to be an argument against capitalism. Or at least, for some moderated form of if where money making is important but not paramount. I don't think it's too surprising of an observation that naked capitalism results in bad outcomes for the planet and the people who live on it.
posted by axiom at 1:42 PM on June 1, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah this is where I'm at. If the bargain is, I can't look at your site without looking at ads, then I will not look at your site.
I'll amend my original statement to say that if it were limited to non-intrusive sidebar or banner ads, I'd be willing to put up with it: were there a way to filter my adblocker to let only those through, I could be persuaded to do it for sites I respect.
But popups, video ads, "He Gets Us", interstitial ads? Get fucked.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:50 PM on June 1, 2023 [17 favorites]
I'll amend my original statement to say that if it were limited to non-intrusive sidebar or banner ads, I'd be willing to put up with it: were there a way to filter my adblocker to let only those through, I could be persuaded to do it for sites I respect.
But popups, video ads, "He Gets Us", interstitial ads? Get fucked.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:50 PM on June 1, 2023 [17 favorites]
> I think what this framing fails to account for in the current dynamic is the rug-pull aspect
cortex, I think you’re right, and I hadn’t considered this viewpoint yet in this conversation. Thank you for pointing this out. If this had been how they operated from the beginning, it wouldn’t be so deeply offensive that they’re only just now suddenly concerned about staying afloat. And I’m really sad that another community is at risk of self-destructing because of it.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:24 PM on June 1, 2023
cortex, I think you’re right, and I hadn’t considered this viewpoint yet in this conversation. Thank you for pointing this out. If this had been how they operated from the beginning, it wouldn’t be so deeply offensive that they’re only just now suddenly concerned about staying afloat. And I’m really sad that another community is at risk of self-destructing because of it.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:24 PM on June 1, 2023
> There should always be a platform waiting in the wings for the first waves of users being driven away by enshittification. The platform doesn't need to innovate; it just needs to replicate the good experience that people liked before it became shit.
It does need to innovate on not accepting VC funding to operate, though — otherwise it’ll have the same betrayal in a few years when the site operators suddenly discover the necessity of having non-negative net revenue after operating expenses.
> It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists.
Capitalism demands continuous unceasing growth, which is cancerous to human beings.
I would absolutely sign up for a social service that offered accounts with either in-app unblockable ads or paid subscriptions only, capped at X active accounts, because that would be a truly exciting (and non-capitalist!) experience to be a part of, and it could end up being a stable financial endeavor that might be long-term successful for both the operators and the visitors.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:37 PM on June 1, 2023
It does need to innovate on not accepting VC funding to operate, though — otherwise it’ll have the same betrayal in a few years when the site operators suddenly discover the necessity of having non-negative net revenue after operating expenses.
> It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists.
Capitalism demands continuous unceasing growth, which is cancerous to human beings.
I would absolutely sign up for a social service that offered accounts with either in-app unblockable ads or paid subscriptions only, capped at X active accounts, because that would be a truly exciting (and non-capitalist!) experience to be a part of, and it could end up being a stable financial endeavor that might be long-term successful for both the operators and the visitors.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:37 PM on June 1, 2023
NotMyselfRightNow: "Even if the total market for third party Reddit clients is 100x Apollo's userbase, that's still only ~5% of Reddit's userbase. And some portion of those users would simply migrate back to using Reddit's official app."
I'm a bit-part mod on about half a dozen active subreddits, including one with over 2 million subscribers. I'm not a power mod or treat it like a job or anything, I just like having the ability to nuke obvious spam in subs I follow and help straighten out problems when I see them instead of having to report it. But it does give me visibility into some of the backstage workings.
Case in point: the biggest sub, a question-and-answer community, has a point-based reward system run by a bot that handles 99% of functional interactions (marking threads solved, assigning points, etc.), with the human mods answering mail and handling edge cases. This bot shouldn't be affected by the API update. But the maintainer of the bot -- who has implemented dozens of similar bots for countless other major subreddits -- is a heavy user of the third-party Reddit Is Fun app. And they've said on the primary sitewide mod Discord that if RIF dies, they are pulling the plug on all their bots, which will have a massive negative effect on the functionality of countless communities across the platform.
I'm sure the beancounters at Reddit are looking at all kinds of stats and spreadsheets assuring them that Old Reddit and third party apps and the API and RSS are nothing but a resource drain used by a vanishingly small slice of the userbase. But if the major blowback on the announcement post didn't clue them in (only 5% upvoted!), I think they'll find they're fucking with the load-bearing walls for their entire business model. Not a great move in the months before your splashy IPO.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:13 PM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
I'm a bit-part mod on about half a dozen active subreddits, including one with over 2 million subscribers. I'm not a power mod or treat it like a job or anything, I just like having the ability to nuke obvious spam in subs I follow and help straighten out problems when I see them instead of having to report it. But it does give me visibility into some of the backstage workings.
Case in point: the biggest sub, a question-and-answer community, has a point-based reward system run by a bot that handles 99% of functional interactions (marking threads solved, assigning points, etc.), with the human mods answering mail and handling edge cases. This bot shouldn't be affected by the API update. But the maintainer of the bot -- who has implemented dozens of similar bots for countless other major subreddits -- is a heavy user of the third-party Reddit Is Fun app. And they've said on the primary sitewide mod Discord that if RIF dies, they are pulling the plug on all their bots, which will have a massive negative effect on the functionality of countless communities across the platform.
I'm sure the beancounters at Reddit are looking at all kinds of stats and spreadsheets assuring them that Old Reddit and third party apps and the API and RSS are nothing but a resource drain used by a vanishingly small slice of the userbase. But if the major blowback on the announcement post didn't clue them in (only 5% upvoted!), I think they'll find they're fucking with the load-bearing walls for their entire business model. Not a great move in the months before your splashy IPO.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:13 PM on June 1, 2023 [11 favorites]
> It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists.
A service can remain good, surely. A community however can't be run with one eye on the quarterly earnings statement. Reddit tries to make people believe it's a community, but it's not, it's a business whose users aren't even the customers. If it helps the profit margin, they'll cut you out.
posted by dis_integration at 4:02 PM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
A service can remain good, surely. A community however can't be run with one eye on the quarterly earnings statement. Reddit tries to make people believe it's a community, but it's not, it's a business whose users aren't even the customers. If it helps the profit margin, they'll cut you out.
posted by dis_integration at 4:02 PM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]
This creates the opportunity for someone else to re-invent usenet.
They're trying. And I'm saying this as someone that loved USENET in its heyday, I don't think you can go back. Not when the internet is this large and anything that looks remotely abusable is instantly destroyed by bad actors.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:07 PM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
They're trying. And I'm saying this as someone that loved USENET in its heyday, I don't think you can go back. Not when the internet is this large and anything that looks remotely abusable is instantly destroyed by bad actors.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:07 PM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
Reddit is amazingly broad: https://redditmap.social/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMapDotSocial/
I hope it doesn’t get too hurt by these changes.
posted by brendano at 4:56 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
I hope it doesn’t get too hurt by these changes.
posted by brendano at 4:56 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Reddit’s decision to monetize its API comes just months before Reddit is expected to file for an initial public offering (IPO).
I'm convinced these kinds of cash outs are going to come really quick now because the LLMs are going to cause a complete collapse of online trust and will poison all user generated content sites. I think it is going to be game over for community based internet.
posted by srboisvert at 5:17 PM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
I'm convinced these kinds of cash outs are going to come really quick now because the LLMs are going to cause a complete collapse of online trust and will poison all user generated content sites. I think it is going to be game over for community based internet.
posted by srboisvert at 5:17 PM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
This is sad. Reddit doesn't owe us API access, but if it really were about missed ad revenue they would let a user pay $8 a month to be at the top of threads for API access. They'd make a lot more per user from those people than they make with ads. That's what bothers me: this doesn't even look like a financial decision. Some higher-up decided that third party apps must be destroyed, so instead of taking our money they put a price tag that they must have known was unacceptable on the API. And they put the onus on app developers rather than individual users so the decision to stop updating the apps was all or nothing rather than user by user.
I wonder if it had something to do with development time spent supporting the API. I don't know if third party apps use the same APIs as the official Reddit app. Or maybe their official app is gathering an unholy amount of data and they expect that to pay off more than charging for premium access.
I hope something like Lemmy (linked above) takes over. I've enjoyed how Mastodon/ActivityPub/The Fediverse supports different server software and different clients. Reddit was already a collection of different communities (subreddits). Having different people host different communities but allowing those to interoperate wouldn't be much different if they designed it carefully. You have to figure out how to fund them without advertising dollars but I'm already giving money to my home Mastodon instance, I'd fund a Reddit alternative.
posted by Tehhund at 5:24 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
I wonder if it had something to do with development time spent supporting the API. I don't know if third party apps use the same APIs as the official Reddit app. Or maybe their official app is gathering an unholy amount of data and they expect that to pay off more than charging for premium access.
I hope something like Lemmy (linked above) takes over. I've enjoyed how Mastodon/ActivityPub/The Fediverse supports different server software and different clients. Reddit was already a collection of different communities (subreddits). Having different people host different communities but allowing those to interoperate wouldn't be much different if they designed it carefully. You have to figure out how to fund them without advertising dollars but I'm already giving money to my home Mastodon instance, I'd fund a Reddit alternative.
posted by Tehhund at 5:24 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yeah this is where I'm at. If the bargain is, I can't look at your site without looking at ads, then I will not look at your site.
I'm in the same place but not just because I don't like adverts. I also don't like malware injected into my computer/phone/tablet and I don't trust most internet sites, even big ones, to actually make the effort to be sure the ads are safe. Or in the case of most of them to even care as long as they're getting money from the ads and not getting pressure to do something different.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:59 PM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
I'm in the same place but not just because I don't like adverts. I also don't like malware injected into my computer/phone/tablet and I don't trust most internet sites, even big ones, to actually make the effort to be sure the ads are safe. Or in the case of most of them to even care as long as they're getting money from the ads and not getting pressure to do something different.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:59 PM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
Sadly things like redditmap.social are exactly the sort of thing harmed by exploitative API pricing. It looks like a useful tool analyzing Reddit communities, exactly what I had in mind above when I referred to "creative and useful third party stuff". Reddit, the company and product, is greatly improved by free third party work like this. But it has no obvious viable revenue or business plan, it's just a cool thing a Reddit fan created. They can't pay for an expensive API; if they lose access that'll be the end of it. Which is bad for Reddit and its users.
posted by Nelson at 6:04 PM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 6:04 PM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]
Yep, Enshittification comes for everything that's run as a business. You'd think that the Digg-fiasco would be burned deep into Reddit's coporate DNA but I guess even the most important lessons are forgotten after a decade or two.
I will be mostly out when the API goes and completely out whenever old.reddit.com goes away. I've been making my home over at Mastodon for the past few months. It's not perfect but at least it's ours.
posted by donio at 6:40 PM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
I will be mostly out when the API goes and completely out whenever old.reddit.com goes away. I've been making my home over at Mastodon for the past few months. It's not perfect but at least it's ours.
posted by donio at 6:40 PM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
I’m confused what is inherently wrong by a site saying “view ads or pay us”
There's nothing wrong with saying "view ads o pay us" but modern online advertising doesn't work like that.
In the early days of the Web we had banner ads that were literally just that: a JPG or GIF embedded in the page in a fairly standard format, usually with some rotation and paid for by the 1,000 impressions. And that was it.
Even then some people got pissy about seeing ads, particularly when things started taking off in the late 90s and 2000 bubble and sites were cramming a bunch of banners per page and you had the extra weight of banner ads slowing page loads on your sad dial-up connection.
But those days are long gone and simple view-only ads have been supplanted by what's essentially invasive malware. I don't mind seeing an ad. I do mind a site serving up random ads at me that run random javascript in my browser or in the app on my phone (e.g. Imgur), that try to track my movement across the web well beyond my interaction with the site serving me the ad.
Reducing what Reddit and other sites do to "view ads or pay us" is reductive. It's more like "allow us to place trackers on your computer, run unvetted possibly malware on your device and drain your battery, or pay us."
And it bears remembering that Reddit, Imgur, and similar sites are only valuable because of their audience and audiences-generated content.
While I totally understand that all these sites have overhead and hosting costs, staffing and moderation costs, legal costs, etc. they exist and have value only because of a contributor community. Once ad sales enter the picture the community gets relegated to being a product to be sold. That's an almost-guaranteed adversarial relationship where the site devalues the user despite only deriving value from the user.
posted by jzb at 7:04 AM on June 2, 2023 [25 favorites]
There's nothing wrong with saying "view ads o pay us" but modern online advertising doesn't work like that.
In the early days of the Web we had banner ads that were literally just that: a JPG or GIF embedded in the page in a fairly standard format, usually with some rotation and paid for by the 1,000 impressions. And that was it.
Even then some people got pissy about seeing ads, particularly when things started taking off in the late 90s and 2000 bubble and sites were cramming a bunch of banners per page and you had the extra weight of banner ads slowing page loads on your sad dial-up connection.
But those days are long gone and simple view-only ads have been supplanted by what's essentially invasive malware. I don't mind seeing an ad. I do mind a site serving up random ads at me that run random javascript in my browser or in the app on my phone (e.g. Imgur), that try to track my movement across the web well beyond my interaction with the site serving me the ad.
Reducing what Reddit and other sites do to "view ads or pay us" is reductive. It's more like "allow us to place trackers on your computer, run unvetted possibly malware on your device and drain your battery, or pay us."
And it bears remembering that Reddit, Imgur, and similar sites are only valuable because of their audience and audiences-generated content.
While I totally understand that all these sites have overhead and hosting costs, staffing and moderation costs, legal costs, etc. they exist and have value only because of a contributor community. Once ad sales enter the picture the community gets relegated to being a product to be sold. That's an almost-guaranteed adversarial relationship where the site devalues the user despite only deriving value from the user.
posted by jzb at 7:04 AM on June 2, 2023 [25 favorites]
a complete collapse of online trust and will poison all user generated content sites. I think it is going to be game over for community based internet
Surely this will lead to the wide and competent adoption of PGP! /s
posted by clew at 8:32 AM on June 2, 2023 [9 favorites]
Surely this will lead to the wide and competent adoption of PGP! /s
posted by clew at 8:32 AM on June 2, 2023 [9 favorites]
Surely this will lead to the wide and competent adoption of PGP!
Followed by trust whores polluting the public key dbs by vouching for bots.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:51 AM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
Followed by trust whores polluting the public key dbs by vouching for bots.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:51 AM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
Followed by treacherous attestors being themselves revoked. Every garden needs tending.
posted by clew at 11:36 AM on June 5, 2023
posted by clew at 11:36 AM on June 5, 2023
Update: The community backlash against these changes has led to an absolutely massive "blackout" campaign in which subreddits will go private or restrict posting on June 12th, some for 48 hours, some indefinitely until the API policy is reversed. These protest events have happened before (firing of Victoria Taylor, against COVID disinformation, anti-SOPA/PIPA), but this may be the largest ever, with 2000+ subreddits representing over a billion users participating.
More info:
/r/Save3rdPartyApps
For mods: /r/ModCoord
Open letter
Core demands
Infographic
posted by Rhaomi at 2:58 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
More info:
/r/Save3rdPartyApps
For mods: /r/ModCoord
Open letter
Core demands
Infographic
posted by Rhaomi at 2:58 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
Reddit, accused of trying to kill third-party apps, is cutting 5% of workforce.
posted by Artw at 11:22 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 11:22 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
The balloon only goes up when you release all the ballast. A year after the IPO, it'll be even worse.
posted by rhizome at 1:02 PM on June 9, 2023
posted by rhizome at 1:02 PM on June 9, 2023
Well, Apollo will close down on June 30th. (Post includes some very interesting evidence of the Reddit CEO falsely accusing the Apollo devs of blackmailing them.)
Reddit Is Fun is also closing down on the 30th. So are Sync, ReddPlanet, Relay and no doubt many other apps.
/u/spez (aka Steve Hoffman, Reddit CEO) is currently hosting an AMA on the changes to the API.
posted by fight or flight at 1:44 PM on June 9, 2023
Reddit Is Fun is also closing down on the 30th. So are Sync, ReddPlanet, Relay and no doubt many other apps.
/u/spez (aka Steve Hoffman, Reddit CEO) is currently hosting an AMA on the changes to the API.
posted by fight or flight at 1:44 PM on June 9, 2023
Form the AMA it sounds like Reddit has decided to give various mod tool related apps free access to the API. Seems like they are holding the line against Apollo and some other 3rd party end user clients.
posted by interogative mood at 1:57 PM on June 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by interogative mood at 1:57 PM on June 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Also the AMA is everything I hate about Reddit AMAs. Impossible to find any of questions that were answered and the replies without wading through a mountain of shit.
posted by interogative mood at 2:30 PM on June 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by interogative mood at 2:30 PM on June 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
Sometimes the questions they don't answer say more than the ones they do. A little more readable: mod's comment linking to all the Reddit answers. (This one is messy because it's not just Huffman answering.) Be aware that sometimes the answers are downvoted to near invisibility because people are angry about what they say.
There's also several articles summarizing the AMA; here's The Verge.
I've seen this time and time again; a company builds an API full of good intentions and a goal of encouraging diverse and creative uses of the product. Any uses, oh god, please just bring us more daily actives. Then a few years later the company gets its business goals better organized and realizes they want to corral those third parties in some way, say requiring they get to show their ad revenue against all uses of the platform. Then they pull the rug with the API and it's a mess. Twitter's done this twice now.
I can't think of a single for-profit platform whose primary value is content that has a healthy third party ecosystem where both the platform itself and the API developers are making reasonable money.
posted by Nelson at 1:38 AM on June 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
There's also several articles summarizing the AMA; here's The Verge.
I've seen this time and time again; a company builds an API full of good intentions and a goal of encouraging diverse and creative uses of the product. Any uses, oh god, please just bring us more daily actives. Then a few years later the company gets its business goals better organized and realizes they want to corral those third parties in some way, say requiring they get to show their ad revenue against all uses of the platform. Then they pull the rug with the API and it's a mess. Twitter's done this twice now.
I can't think of a single for-profit platform whose primary value is content that has a healthy third party ecosystem where both the platform itself and the API developers are making reasonable money.
posted by Nelson at 1:38 AM on June 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
Reddark is showing the subbreddits as they switch over to private. Currently at ~1900+.
posted by meowzilla at 4:05 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by meowzilla at 4:05 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
Reddit had a way forward that would have caused upset, but less upset. Reddit premium already exists for $6/month. It's already ad-free. Just say "pay up if you want to avoid our ads, and you can use whatever client you want." Users would have thrown a fit but they might have gotten enough power users to sign up that 1,900 subreddits would not be going dark in protest. But no, they just have to exert total control, or collect obscene amounts of private data with an installed app, or do anything Musk does, or whatever lead to this.
If I were feeling optimistic I'd say that's actually their plan: to get through the outrage with this bonkers announcement, then pretend to listen to users and walk it back to paying for access. But I'm not feeling optimistic.
posted by Tehhund at 4:39 PM on June 11, 2023
If I were feeling optimistic I'd say that's actually their plan: to get through the outrage with this bonkers announcement, then pretend to listen to users and walk it back to paying for access. But I'm not feeling optimistic.
posted by Tehhund at 4:39 PM on June 11, 2023
This seems like the eMachines and Apple thing all over again. Apple licensed third parties to make Mac Clones hoping to grow the Mac share of the PC market. EMachines like Apollo made a better and cheaper product; but all they did is end up canibalizing existing Mac sales and not expanding the market for Mac to new customers. Ultimately Apple had to make the decision to end the deal with eMachines and take a short term hit with the community outrage. I think the management of Reddit finds themselves in a similar predicament.
posted by interogative mood at 6:15 PM on June 11, 2023
posted by interogative mood at 6:15 PM on June 11, 2023
Twitch Livestream and total raging tire fire of a chat feed. It looks like it's using the same data as the page meowzilla posted.
Shit is going own in a very reddit way, lol.
posted by loquacious at 8:04 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Shit is going own in a very reddit way, lol.
posted by loquacious at 8:04 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Reddit premium already exists for $6/month
Apollo devs were claiming that they would have to raise the price to around $2.50 a month to afford the API charges, but that was too expensive. I'm not really sure why they didn't just raise the price for their customers and deal with the churn before just shutting down entirely. Or just rate limit their users a bit if they're producing more than a few hundred api calls a minute. But after reading the transcript of the call (which I can't find the link to now for some reason), I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe becuase the Apollo dev comes off as *incredibly* unprofessional and demanding, churlish. Like if I had been on the other end of that called I'd come out of it thinking there was no way to work with this guy.
At the same time, I think reddit would have managed this much better by setting the API price raises to start in Q1 2024, giving the 3rd party devs more time to unwind and decide how to move forward now that their free lunch has ended. I guess they feel like they have to get things in order for the IPO timetable, but now that they've lost the PR war on this, with even /r/wallstreetbets (the Gamespot pumping weirdos) now deciding to work together to tank the stock.. of the website... they use (???) I wonder if they can push through this revolt by the moderators without it leaking into having an impact on their valuation. Really incredible how poorly this was handled. Like it's a reasonable change to me with 100 free api calls per minute (that's a lot of tapping on reddit in a single minute), and if they did it more slowly and maybe paired with some moderator improvements, they could probably have managed it. But it's too late, they've completely lost control of it.
posted by dis_integration at 8:27 PM on June 11, 2023
Apollo devs were claiming that they would have to raise the price to around $2.50 a month to afford the API charges, but that was too expensive. I'm not really sure why they didn't just raise the price for their customers and deal with the churn before just shutting down entirely. Or just rate limit their users a bit if they're producing more than a few hundred api calls a minute. But after reading the transcript of the call (which I can't find the link to now for some reason), I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe becuase the Apollo dev comes off as *incredibly* unprofessional and demanding, churlish. Like if I had been on the other end of that called I'd come out of it thinking there was no way to work with this guy.
At the same time, I think reddit would have managed this much better by setting the API price raises to start in Q1 2024, giving the 3rd party devs more time to unwind and decide how to move forward now that their free lunch has ended. I guess they feel like they have to get things in order for the IPO timetable, but now that they've lost the PR war on this, with even /r/wallstreetbets (the Gamespot pumping weirdos) now deciding to work together to tank the stock.. of the website... they use (???) I wonder if they can push through this revolt by the moderators without it leaking into having an impact on their valuation. Really incredible how poorly this was handled. Like it's a reasonable change to me with 100 free api calls per minute (that's a lot of tapping on reddit in a single minute), and if they did it more slowly and maybe paired with some moderator improvements, they could probably have managed it. But it's too late, they've completely lost control of it.
posted by dis_integration at 8:27 PM on June 11, 2023
Effective or not this is one of the wildest, most anarchic self-organized thing I may have ever seen on the internet.
Like I've seen mass exoduses like when MySpace crashed, or when Digg did the redesign and everyone fled to reddit - but I've never seen something like this where people don't have an alternative to switch to and they're just like "fuck it, we built it, shut it all down."
About 15 minutes ago it hit 12 AM on the US east coast and the count of dark subs went up like 2000, and they're rapidly closing in on the total of 6943 known subs going dark.
The chat on the twitch live stream is like watching a bunch of... I don't want to say hooligans... comrades? burning and pillaging everything they've ever made with their own hands and just about every niche hobby and modern subculture I could ever name like they're reading off the list of names for the dead.
It's like watching lights and stars of a whole galaxy go out in protest and I'm kind of here for it.
posted by loquacious at 9:24 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
Like I've seen mass exoduses like when MySpace crashed, or when Digg did the redesign and everyone fled to reddit - but I've never seen something like this where people don't have an alternative to switch to and they're just like "fuck it, we built it, shut it all down."
About 15 minutes ago it hit 12 AM on the US east coast and the count of dark subs went up like 2000, and they're rapidly closing in on the total of 6943 known subs going dark.
The chat on the twitch live stream is like watching a bunch of... I don't want to say hooligans... comrades? burning and pillaging everything they've ever made with their own hands and just about every niche hobby and modern subculture I could ever name like they're reading off the list of names for the dead.
It's like watching lights and stars of a whole galaxy go out in protest and I'm kind of here for it.
posted by loquacious at 9:24 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
It’s weird. More than 7000 expected now. I shut down mine, a repost sub with between 10k and 20k subscribers. I’ve got nearly a year’s worth of daily content there, with new content scheduled out until mid-July. If Reddit goes down the tubes, what do I do with it? Start a blog? That’s so 2010.
posted by bq at 9:41 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by bq at 9:41 PM on June 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's inspiring I hope it's giving some assholes headaches.
posted by grobstein at 10:06 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by grobstein at 10:06 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
"Let us redevelop the gills of our primordial ancestors and return to phpbb."
posted by loquacious at 12:13 AM on June 12, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by loquacious at 12:13 AM on June 12, 2023 [5 favorites]
Between last night and today I've tried at least 4 times to visit a subreddit only to find it's gone private. Which is good! The whole point is to draw attention to the issue. I didn't realize how often I had questions that are best answered by Reddit.
posted by Tehhund at 5:28 AM on June 12, 2023
posted by Tehhund at 5:28 AM on June 12, 2023
Reddit.com is currently down! Here's an archive of the status page: http://web.archive.org/web/20230612151604/https://www.redditstatus.com/
I think it would be funny if all the subreddits closing down caused some kind of unanticipated state and cascading failure.
posted by Tehhund at 8:19 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think it would be funny if all the subreddits closing down caused some kind of unanticipated state and cascading failure.
posted by Tehhund at 8:19 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
I should head on over to r/sysadmin to see what they're saying...
posted by Tehhund at 8:20 AM on June 12, 2023
posted by Tehhund at 8:20 AM on June 12, 2023
My hunch is Reddit is throwing up errors on purpose to hide the boycott/strike.
posted by riruro at 8:22 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by riruro at 8:22 AM on June 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
So I've got the reddark twitch on in the background and switch over to it every few minutes to see what subs I've never heard of have gone dark. So far r/anarchycheese and r/wolveswithwatermelons are the ones I am the most curious about.
Current count of dark subs nearing 8,000 with the number of subs on the list to join the boycott still climbing.
posted by miss-lapin at 2:50 PM on June 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
Current count of dark subs nearing 8,000 with the number of subs on the list to join the boycott still climbing.
posted by miss-lapin at 2:50 PM on June 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
I have a lot of IFTTT applets that monitor different subreddits. IFTTT keeps emailing me to say "your applet is broken, we're turning it off" because those subreddits have gone dark. It took me several emails to realize why this keeps happening today.
posted by Tehhund at 8:23 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Tehhund at 8:23 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
Steven Huffman's memo about the blackout included this statement:
“We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”
Many mods and users have been waiting for those tools since 2015.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:50 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
“We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.”
Many mods and users have been waiting for those tools since 2015.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:50 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
The protest maade wapo and some key members of reddark said on the discord they were contacted by cnbc last night and expect news to be released some time today.
posted by miss-lapin at 8:13 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by miss-lapin at 8:13 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
#ActivityPub is super cool once you see it in action.
posted by Artw at 8:35 AM on June 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Artw at 8:35 AM on June 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Artw, I spent 20 minutes trying to comment on that link using either my Mastodon account or my Lemmy account. I failed. What's especially funny is my comment is about usability problems.
posted by Tehhund at 10:49 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Tehhund at 10:49 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Haven’t tried the Lenny route but I was able to reply to it from Ivory. Not sure that’s the best way to thread a conversation exactly but SOMETHING seems to be happening.
posted by Artw at 11:11 AM on June 14, 2023
posted by Artw at 11:11 AM on June 14, 2023
With over 5,000 communities still dark, looks like Reddit is going to get scab mods in order to reopen subs that said they would stay indefinitely dark. Seriously shady shit.
posted by miss-lapin at 2:40 PM on June 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by miss-lapin at 2:40 PM on June 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
In this cnbc article, Spez compares the mods to "landed gentry" and wants this "process to be more democratic" ignoring that many of these subs did in fact hold votes about how to move forward and the user base was with going dark.
And I'm honestly sad there isn't more discussion here about all this.
posted by miss-lapin at 4:12 PM on June 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
And I'm honestly sad there isn't more discussion here about all this.
posted by miss-lapin at 4:12 PM on June 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Thank you!
posted by miss-lapin at 5:00 PM on June 15, 2023
posted by miss-lapin at 5:00 PM on June 15, 2023
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Reddit management = Baby, meet bath water
posted by qwip at 2:22 AM on June 1, 2023 [19 favorites]