321–330 of 1001 posts
Does subreddits going dark for 2 days matter? Seems like an insignificant ampunt of disruption to make much of a difference, or am I wrong?
Many are now committing to either going dark indefinitely, or to reassess after the 14th, maybe with a poll to their members on how to proceed. This will definitely be going on for more than 2 days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you ran a website, would you allow 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free?
> 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free You mean... like Reddit, which's reproducing and selling users' data...? (play canned laughter) To answer your question, I'd charge them to cover the bandwidth cost.
The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of users who are not paying their fair share which in turn means more ads for everyone else to make up for free loaders.
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.
It has nothing to do with the amount of the price, the scheme (charge per request, not /user/month) makes third party apps impossible on purpose. Not to say that this abrupt and unannounced dumping of beloved community apps is just the latest misstep of a long string of anti-user moves from Reddit. They had it coming, but their estimation is that a large majority will keep silent. Let's see - Twitter had also not tru…
I expect that quite a few will survive, despite people saying it is "impossible."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
It’s popular despite itself… but It’s not successful. One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back. You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable. Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a…
Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub. The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of t…
I mean, if you're going to Reddit to marvel at the sidebar rules or CSS stylings, then I guess you're going there for the mods qua mods. But I would assume that this represents a relatively rare user psychographic. Beyond this, my point is that it's unfair to give the mods credit for indirectly cultivating communities but refuse to extend this same consideration to the admins or platform.
>The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top.
Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created. Treating this protest as being about the basic question of whether Reddit should have moderation or not is disingenuous.
>But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
Well, the powermods aren't having it. We'll see what "Reddit-the-community" thinks when the dust settles. A bunch of activists can't claim to speak for it, though obviously they'd like to pretend that they can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevan…
I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…
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?
That anomalous behavior would be easy to filter out, especially given they have protections against brigading.
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
Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.