I'll stand by the idea that people were not mad about the API going paid, they were just disgusted by the way spez managed the whole situation. This was a PR nightmare from the beginning and his competence as a CEO should be questioned after all this is done.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Management, certainly. Some specific bits, though, that may or may not fall under that umbrella:
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Comparatively high price tag.
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Short lead-in time to the change.
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Shambolic communication with devs, mods, and users at large.
Most users, I would wager, would have been fine with Reddit making money off of their data. That’s the tacit contract most of the internet runs on— you provide me a space and a framework, I allow you to monetise what I do there. It’s when those monetisation decisions start to hurt my experience being there that problems arise.
For me, what is much, much worse is the dismissal of such a large outpouring of discontent from the community. People are willing to put up with a lot they don’t like so long as they feel heard.
We felt heard by the mods, and heard by each other, but Huffman, the face and voice of the company, offered instead minimisation, condescension, and calumny.
That's because Huffman doesn't believe that ongoing community is his ticket to millions. He believes selling data to ai learning programs is. They don't need continuing users for that when they're sitting on almost two decades of content.
Just look at the actual actions of the admins. They're removing mods for privatizing subs. They're restoring erased content. They're shadow banning comments critical of the system. They're forcefully reverting changes to sub rules.
They aren't trying to get 20 million from the likes of a 500k/year company like Apollo, they're trying to get 20 million from billionaire companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. that are maybe more willing to shell out that kind of money for an emerging technology. Killing third party apps wasn't their goal, it was just an incredibly unpopular but necessary side effect because those apps use the same api that ai learning programs do.
The problem with this theory is that they could have done two tiered pricing. Reddit could have charged TPA developers one price and the LLM trainers a much higher price for API access. In fact, I believe that is exactly what Reddit is doing, they just haven't been public about what they are trying to charge the LLMs. The Verge asked Spez about whether the LLM folks are biting on this and what that price would be, he just responded that they are "in talks."
If Reddit didn't want to kill TPAs, they also could have given them a year or so to figure out their business models, rather than the 30 days they were given. Hell, Reddit could have backed down at any point and extended the time period for implementing charges.
If Spez thinks he's going to make money off LLMs, I think he's delusional. The OpenAIs, Googles, and Metas out there have already used the Reddit data to train their models. That ship has sailed. The focus in the LLM world now is making better models, more compact models, refining their answers and making them more accurate, etc. The days of throwing vast amounts of random data at these models is probably over. For GPT 5, OpenAI is probably not looking to spend 50 million on new Reddit comments. Instead they will spend that to hire experts to revise GPT 4s outputs and use that as training data.
Plus, scraping exists. No need to pay for API access if it can scrape what is publically available
Plus, storage exists. No need to pay for API access to scrape if you already scraped to your own storage once already.
I don’t think it’s all over personally. The AIs will need to know any future changes to coding languages and similar things where parts are deprecated etc
The english articulation language part is over though.
Yep. Reddit is going to die, the question was how quick and what do we do about it.
Like, reddit might stay around as another 9gag, but that's not really reddit then.
Agreed. I've had to accept that the Reddit I used to use and still somewhat miss is gone.
It's crazy to me how it so quickly changed. Doesn't have the same feel anymore, which has definitely helped keep me off of it
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I'll go even further and say people were mostly upset about the API because of its harm to 3rd party apps. Having 3rd party apps isn't even really the norm for websites, but reddit's app is awful. If they had a decent app, this probably never became a big deal in the first place.
exactly. the apps made the site useful on mobile.
the reddit app makes the reddit experience awful. and so does their default mobile site which harasses you to use the app.
Twitter used to have a ton. I used to use one for Twitch myself but it doesn't work anymore. I browse YouTube exclusively through a 3rd-party app that supports several other sites as well. 3rd-party social media site apps being rare is a new phenomenon
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The AMA did it for me, a chance for him to explain the situation to the users instead became 14 replies IIRC. One of them was slinging insults at the Apollo dev. Then came the media interviews, each making spez look dumber than the last. Elon Musk my arse.
Elon Musk my arse.
No, he def is Elon.
Yeah, I don't use 3PAs so it didn't affect me, but when I read that mods need them to effectively do their (unpaid) jobs I was immediately supportive of the blackout. Reddit is already full of shitty posts, but I know there are way more that I never see thanks to them. Spez doubling down drove me away from the site forever, and after coming here I'd almost forgotten what a forum of decent people was like. I would have come here regardless years ago if I'd known about it.
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Everyone was looking for a reason to ditch reddit, this was a great one.
Reddit was dead the moment they added social media features like profile photos
Doesn't lemmy support profile photos?
been looking to ditch since 2020. however no place really had a good quality userbase to make it worthwhile. hopefully enough people come here that it becomes a replacement. i miss reddit from 10 years agowhen it was like 1/10 of it's current size, 50million users vs 500million, heck even 5million would probably be great.
back then it was full of quality content and was far less censored, which made it a great place for learning. then it got started becoming an echo chamber around 2015 and the 2016 election cycle, where mods banned you for offering any opinion that wasn't within their orthodoxy. now most subs apart from very tiny niche ones are focused on only allowing the 'true believers' to post.
Spez just got muskified.
He was thinking (or more likely, his hubris was babbling): "If Elon can do it, I can do it!" without realizing that reddit is the exact opposite of twitter.
Meanwwhile in the real world, twitter's value is all about its users (as in, empty but famous shells making some noise) while reddit's value is in the content its users bring. On reddit the influence isn't the person but what they bring along, and if they stop bringing it along then reddit's just a second-hand internet time machine.
Not even talking about users who (like me) have deleted their "lifetime" contribution while keeping their account alive (in order not to find it restored with a dummy handle). Reddit is getting the Thanos treatment, bit by bit.
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I have been peaking over at reddit periodically, morbid curiosity really. Schadenfreude.
The number of apathetic users who thinks that protesting has accomplished nothing is unsurprising, logically, but is viscerally a gut punch. The fate of social media and the internet at large is important as its a stepping stone (often times overvalued but important none the less) to addressing bigger societal issues. The fact that so many people don't care about an issue as it doesn't effect them directly and they have no curiosity or empathy on how/why it's impacting other, bluntly fucking sucks. It makes the bigger issues seem even more unsolvable.
This is what is so frustrating to me as well! I have visited a few old subs to see where/if they were moving and the amount of people saying essentially "why would the mods do a useless protest" and "nobody cares about kbin/Lemmy nobody is going to switch" is so perplexing to me. I also get frustrated at "this change won't affect me so I just want to sub opened" when I have seen it explained multiple times that a lot of the useful mod tools are built on these API calls so if you want to have well moderated subs, you want this to be worked out! And even without that, just the way that reddit is handling this whole situation sucks.
I mean the part of the problem is people have this irrational hatred of moderators. Like obviously some of them are power tripping people but I think people sort of forget these at the end of the day volunteers who are making the place actually usable for its purpose. Obviously this isn't to give them a free pass and they are as fallible as any other human and should be held accountable when they make mistakes but it feels so many people want a perfectly moderated space but without the mods.
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The good part is that those users who are happy to stay with Reddit aren't the kinds of people we want here, anyway.
Potentially, but let's see what happens after the API change. I am curious how many are still using other apps and will have a rude awaking. (Assuming it happens.)
I just want all of reddit to move to kbin and done with reddit, spez had his chance to correct his course, but instead went full throttle on idiocy.
I miss reading reddit but will not use it any more since the powers that be forgot what makes their corner of the internet work, the users.
Reddit used to be some kind of refuge from the unmitigated cesspool of corporate bullshit that other social media have become. Or so I kept telling myself. The fact is they're doing all they can right now to jump headlong into said cesspool. Social media that isn't centralized and owned by greed driven megacorporations is the only way forward in my opinion. I hope kbin/lemmy/Mastodon can become that.
Yeah and considering it’s the users creating the content, for free, only a full blown idiot would shit on such a golden ticket. Hope he lives with nightmares of John Oliver’s face forevermore.
I agree, but it's going to take a few months for the Fediverse alternatives to reddit to ramp up with apps / server capacity / etc; we want the demise of reddit to be inevitable but slow, so that by the time Lemmy and Kbin and friends are seeing MAUs in the 7-figure range the infrastructure is there to support all of them.
amazing considering we were still using reddit constantly during the blackouts to complain and post fuck spez. and it's already a 6% drop. now I don't even go there anymore, kbin 100%. the 6% will keep growing
After June 30th it'll be lights out for me. I've been using Reddit mostly through apps and without those I'm definitely out.
Not everyone tho i wasnt using Reddit bc im trying to avoid giving it traffic. Some ppl also just left like deleted their account even just before the blackout
And I expect it to fall another 6% or more on July 1st. So long, Reddit
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I really hope that arrogant bastard Spez gets humbled at the end of this
I used to think of Reddit as the "good" social media platform...then I found out the CEO is a douch. Frankly it's getting active enough here that I don't even miss Reddit.
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Implying that dipshit spez can feel humility or anything even approaching it.
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57M * 8:31 = 485.4M minutes 53M * 7:17 = 386.0M minutes 386.0 / 485.4 = 79.5%
If those numbers are right, reddit's engagement time dropped 20% by the end of the blackout.
I doubt it's that low now, but it is having an impact on their bottom line.
What we really need is for the media to cover Lemmy and Kbin’s growing userbase. Once most of Reddit’s users are aware that there’s a viable alternative in the Fediverse, the next exodus might make these dumbass CEOs think twice before taking their users for granted.
This is glorious. Fuck his IPO. Hubristic arse.
I keep accidentally typing "red.." into by browser and visiting the site through muscle memory alone! So I'm definitely still contributing to the daily visitor metrics they seem to be showing here.
But as of yesterday I've completely made the switch. All in on Lemmy to fill that void Reddit used to.
Here's to hoping more people make the switch, instead of putting up with Reddit thinking there's no viable alternatives (like I did just a few days ago)!
I switched the reddit app on my phone with a link to kbin because I kept instinctually clicking on it lol
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He’s destroying his company (and a great website) for no good reason. Then again, I did lead me to discover Lemmy. Not the same yet, but it’s growing on me!
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