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Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

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Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#241

Post by mananaysiempre »

OnlyEvenPrime2 wrote: post #74
cubefox wrote: post #36

Imagine there was a free or quasi-free API for Facebook. Facebook would lose large amounts of money on content because they can no longer monetize it with ads.

Facebook pays their moderators though. If reddit would pay subreddit moderators, top commenters, users that submit very interesting stuff, and in the case of Apollo, people creating the Apps that enable you to use Reddit in a pleasant way, then the story would be different.

The problem with making something a viable job is that then most of it will be done by people for whom it’s just a job. That sets a non-terrible but fairly hard quality ceiling. I’m not saying that unpaid labour is better all things considered—rather, all solutions I’ve seen are kind of bad.

Facebook moderation is especially awful, however. Pre-2022 (at least) a fairly common tactic against anti-Kremlin posts was to have the troll farm report the user and/or random posts of theirs in large amounts. Done! Many fought it out and got reinstated after several weeks, but some just gave up and quit Facebook in disgust.

(And that without mentioning the “Khokhlov” incident: “khokhol”, genitive plural “khokhlov”, is in addition to its literal meaning of “tuft” a fairly standard pejorative for Ukrainians; unfortunately for Facebook, it’s also the surname of physicist Aleksej Removich Khokhlov, presidential nominee and later vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which some years ago got several science-adjacent people and IIRC even a science monthly covering the election suspended for “hate speech”.)

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#242

Post by mypastself »

hcks wrote: post #85
deminature wrote: post #3

Pissing off the people doing thankless free labor to keep your subreddits moderated and site functional seems like a poor choice. This is going to be quite an event when it kicks off Monday.

Can we stop pretending the mods are some thankless workers when they literally do it to get power and status over some “community”.

Yep, if they really think they’re being exploited, they’ll simply quit. It’s much different from relying on the only available, poorly paid job to make ends meet.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#243

Post by ElongatedMusket »

gooob wrote: post #221

why doesn't reddit just let users host nodes to serve the subreddits? make it distributed, like bittorrent. that would take a lot of load off of the reddit servers.

If you control the server you can serve ads and collect user data. Those two things make up the majority of reddit's revenue. So you are not wrong, but it would be like saying "why don't restaurants just let the chefs host meals in people's homes?" ... because then the restaurant doesn't need to exist anymore.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#245

Post by AndrewKemendo »

thinkingemote wrote: post #83
fernandotakai wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what puzzles me the most is that reddit's reasoning for charging money for their API is that "it's bad that other people are profiting from our work and it's too expensive to maintain without someone paying it". hey, guess what? reddit "profits" a LOT from unpaid work from their moderators. if you wanna charge for API access, you should also pay your moderators since you are profiting from their work.

Another thing is that many moderators are paid but by other companies and PR firms. Reddit doesn't see any of it. A lot of the content on Reddit is promotion and semi-hidden forms of advertising. Again Reddit doesn't see any of this spend. In both cases Reddit is paying other companies for using their platform for making money. Why would a corporation pay hundreds of thousands for ads when they could spend tens of th…

I started a sub with 100k users and nobody has ever contacted our mod team to try and pay for placement

Maybe this is happening for subs over a million only?

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#246

Post by nbadg »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #143
nbadg wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is a lot of commercial use of reddit that reddit fails to monetize. I have no idea how much of that is moderation, but it doesn't really matter: restricting API usage is the wrong way to solve this problem Instead, the easy fix is to update the standard ToS to be non-commercial use only and introduce paid plans for commercial use. I'm pretty confident that would be way more lucrative than advertisi…

This is pretty much what Reddit is doing. All the major 3rd party apps fall under commercial usage. The main issue is the price is insanely high for commercial apps. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...

You're missing my point here. I realize that the broader discussion is about the API, but this specific thread is about a different kind of commercial use, which could be using the official reddit app or web client. We're talking about user behaviors that are inherently commercial; that's orthogonal to the way those behaviors are actually implemented (official client vs direct API access vs indirect API via third party apps vs...). For example, a PR firm could organize an AMA with an actor to promote an upcoming movie, but that actor could be using the official Reddit client. That's clearly commercial use, but Reddit gets nothing from that.

My point is twofold: first, I think this kind of commercial use is probably the much larger missed financial opportunity for Reddit. Second, if Reddit's intent with API restriction actually is, in fact, to try and capture some revenue from these kinds of behaviors, then they're clearly ignoring the much more targeted, and much more effective, approach of updating the ToS and directly restricting commercial use.

Using the above example, the PR firm would be required to have a commercial account, and Reddit would be free to set the pricing for that commercial account however they wanted. This is better for Reddit (they can charge way more than they would earn via API calls), it's better for users (more transparency re: what is or isn't commercial content), it doesn't affect third-party apps (no restrictions of API usage), and, if the pricing was right, it would be acceptable for the PR firm as well (paying for commercial exposure is standard practice basically everywhere else).

This would also give them a way to distinguish between commercial API usage like third-party clients, where the API is acting on behalf of individual users, vs commercial API usage like "scan reddit for mentions of this keyword and notify me", which is providing a direct commercial service without ever actually interacting with other users. These different kinds of usages could then be funneled into different pricing tiers for API access.

From a strategic perspective, I can't imagine a scenario in which Reddit's current approach is the right move here.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#248

Post by Aachen »

silcoon wrote: post #107

The first digital strike? Interested to see what's going to happen. At this point is probably be useful having mastodon like reddit. If I'm not wrong, archive.org keeps a dump of all reddit discussions until 2023.

What people on stackexchange are doing is more like a strike, if you're looking for a digital volunteer force strike. They're stopping their moderation work.

Reddit people are temporarily disabling the subreddits altogether. Like disabling the busses (the thing the company pays for) rather than stopping to drive them (the work you want to get a certain compensation for).

Not sure it's a great comparison as it's not about wages (or wage-related things) at all in reddit's case

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#249

Post by CamelCaseName »

visarga wrote: post #153
abluecloud wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, along with all the large subreddits, it's all these niche subreddits that have helped train all these LLM to be able to do the things they can do. If reddit is thinking that their content is king, then closing subreddits that help generate that content is not ideal for them.

Do we know for sure which LLMs have used reddit comments in training? I want to know if my comment history is in the corpus.

Yes, absolutely. Sam Altman has come out and said it, although specifically he said that social media wasn't of any particular importance for training data.

This can also be seen when you mention davidjl, who was a user super into r/counting. There was a thread of that yesterday I believe.

OpenAI thanks you for your Reddit contributions.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#250

Post by Aachen »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #161
saos wrote: post #28

Reddit ceo doing an AMA soon…wonder how rattled Reddit they are about all this.

The CEO has already resorted to libelling the Apollo app's developer, so... they must be fairly rattled.

They've already resorted to using server access to change other people's messages that were calling him names, changing it to calling donald not-duck names. It doesn't get much more stupid than that.
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