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In response to the disastrous Spez AMA, /r/Videos have announced that they will permanently shut down on 11th June, one day ahead of the planned blackout (old.reddit.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

348 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Quote from the post:

Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit's attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.

The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.

In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo's creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.

So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Force their hand. Reddit needs to learn their actions have consequences. They need to experience firsthand how much higher their operating cost will be if they can no longer rely on free labor for their site to be engaging. They need to learn that their goal of moving to a more ad supported model won't work if they don't have ads to show people.

Also on reflection. I don't think I once saw an ad on Reddit I found interesting or tempting. I get worthwhile ads on Instagram all the time. Maybe reddit needs to reevaluate their marketing departments insights into their userbase instead of rolling out a paid API scheme

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

There's absolutely no way they won't find suckers willing to mod a megasub for free.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

You know, that's a good point. Facebook may be littered with ads, but at least they are relevant to my lifestyle. My wife has purchased a fair few things she saw from Facebook ads. Reddit ads pretty much are universally uninteresting garbage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Inspectigator: He gets us.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The cynical side of me says that's because they dont collect as much personal data as FB, or aren't as good at extrapolating invasive details from it...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's what everyone liked about reddit though! That you could be relatively anonymous, I mean. Of course, this had some pretty significant drawbacks too, which is why there's so much unbridled hate speech going on there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Oh absolutely! Them collecting less personal data (it's reddit, so unfortunately its due to incompetence rather than altruism) is good! I agree that anonymityits a double-edged sword, though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

100% agreed on the quality of ads. I've even ordered a few things off Instagram ads. Reddit? Nah, always crap. And I hate that they made the ads look like normal posts. That's when I started hating them.