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Reddit Strike Has Started

reddark.untone.uk

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#281
post #219
post #139

I think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make that data junk for awhile to make a statement?

I suspect Reddit already has protections in place against this type of coordinated attack, as it would look exactly like when a whole sub (or 4chan) decides to brigade another sub for some other reason. There’s probably a hidden limit somewhere that when you downvote too many things at once, those vote become shadow-votes that don’t really count anymore.

That is a good point. Are there modifications to the voting strike idea that would make it effective?

For instance, what do you think about an "inverted-voting" strike instead? Everyone on strike does things roughly as normal, but swapping most of their down votes for up votes, and visa-versa? That way, people on strike will continue to vote about the same amount as before, and in the same subeditors as before, so it would be harder to identify them. The hope would be that although Reddit could do work to clean up the voting data, it would be annoying & take time, and presumably still end up as significantly lower quality data than they had before.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API requests their users are going to make and if they underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also, it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly, especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX. If R…

> If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium? Wouldn't this be the worst of both worlds for the 3rd party app developers? In the current model, the developer of Apollo could charge $2.99/month and pay themselves $0.47/month/user. If we assume 80k paid users, that's $450k/year - not bad for a passion project! If Reddit instead took it out of developers hands and made users of Apollo…

It seems ideal to me where Reddit loses the ability to complain about usage by being able to control pricing for access and app developers get to recoup whatever they feel is necessary to maintain the app.

This may be myopic though.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#283

Thinking on how to forward from here. Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem? Instead of raising API price, what if Reddit injects ADs as real content for non premium API calls, so those API free riders/crawlers would get ADs indistinguishable from content. Well intended apps like Apollo could allow users to provide their premium identity and get AD free content. If this works, Reddit could even lower the…

The age of adtech as the dominant technology revenue model is drawing to a close and Reddit missed out on the golden age. Trying to make ads work now, when it’s clear the future is subscriptions and the like, is just dumb.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#284

For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1]. For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/... [2] https://www.reddit.com/premium

I don't see why the fuck anyone would buy reddit Premium. Enough with these subscriptions;

Maybe if I could then bypass the ridiculous rules some mods put on their subreddits I would.

Imagine paying for Spotify, and then some ego tripping power nanny decides you aren’t allowed to listen to some of the music. It’s absurd.

The lex Friedman subreddit especially is like this. The number of people banned from that sub for simply disagreeing with Lex is ridiculous. Why on earth would I pay for something like that?

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#285
I have to hand it to those app devs. The way they managed to dupe millions of Redditors into protesting was masterful.

They didn't produce any good evidence that the new API price is excessive (some cherry-picking here, a deceptive comparison there) but they still managed to convince 99% of Reddit that it was true anyway.

Bravo! It was a beautiful exercise in propaganda and the delusion of crowds.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#286

For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1]. For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/... [2] https://www.reddit.com/premium

Of course it would be doable but Reddit doesn't want this. They rather have complete control over the platform. They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#288

To self-reinforce my participation in the strike, I logged out of reddit and disabled Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Old.reddit Redirect add-ons, and looking at the front page without those improvements (which I'm sure a minority of users use) it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is for the uninitiated. For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.

The thing I think this conversation should be about is how horrible their site is.

I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with disabilities and allow people who wouldn’t deal with their trash UX to still generate content for those who do.

The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#289

Thinking on how to forward from here. Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem? Instead of raising API price, what if Reddit injects ADs as real content for non premium API calls, so those API free riders/crawlers would get ADs indistinguishable from content. Well intended apps like Apollo could allow users to provide their premium identity and get AD free content. If this works, Reddit could even lower the…

Aside for my own curiosity: Why do you capitalize the word `ad` like that? It’s not an acronym, it’s an abbreviation; short for `advertisement`.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#290
post #182

For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1]. For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/... [2] https://www.reddit.com/premium

Would people maybe have been more okay with this, if the change was that you needed to pay for Reddit premium to be able to use API/other apps with your user? Then it was not be a bill forwarded to other apps, but a bill to each individual user using these apps? They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.

This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a premium subscription comes to mind.

That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically) have more opportunities to monetize both users (including premium users) and their data, which probably looks better for a prospective IPO.

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