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.
Reddit Strike Has Started
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#342Does subreddits going dark for 2 days matter? Seems like an insignificant ampunt of disruption to make much of a difference, or am I wrong?
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub. 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 consider…
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
And do they want to put in the same effort to curating those communities as the moderators there've just overruled? Communities can thrive or fail depending on who is in charge. (What happened with regard to the mod banning an artist because they thought their art looked like it came from an AI? Last I heard the artist was able to show their workflow but the mod was unwilling to back down…)
I expect that disrupting the powermod cabal would be a net positive for the site.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can, I've already made a modified version of Apollo and sideloaded it onto my phone with a tweak to set my own key instead of Apollo's However there is a line on the developers page now that says all apps need to accept terms and sign up for a developers program, so I have my doubts it will continue to work either
How? Apollo’s dev never released the source code to the app, only the server which sends out push notifications.
And why? Before a few days ago, it wasn’t an issue at all.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#346Earlier 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.
And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable.
A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at something larger and much more profitable.
Without a lot of internal data, we'll never know the truth of it. But I suspect that there is a sustainable version of Reddit-the-company that would do everything Reddit-the-community needs without this sort of aggressive destruction of value in pursuit of high revenue numbers.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#347The cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app. Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour, creativity, stories, humour, talent, wi…
Did you see the post where someone had reversed engineered some key encryption/obfuscation(?) function from the Android app which was just a substitution cypher and had a 66 byte memory leak on every call?
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit wanted 2.50/month/app which is like $30 ARPU, Facebook is $200 ARPU in the US. The app they’re burning down Reddit over is already charging $1/month and was ready to sell out and shut down for $10 million. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we usually don’t give out API keys to allow users to wholesale reproduce, redistribute, resell our data for free.
The entire goal of these API changes is to intentionally price third-party app developers out of the market without imposing a strict blanket-policy ban. And the goal of this is to attempt to further monetize the platform on the backs of other people's content by forcing them to see as many ads and upsell opportunities as possible. And the goal of this is to appear more appealing to current and future investors in or…
Unless you have some alternative that has Reddit functionality, but can somehow operate without revenue, I'm just going to assume there isn't and Reddit will continue operating as normal.
Just doing the math $2.50 seems reasonable if you're going to redistribute the data to users while bypassing the ads.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#349To 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.
> it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is
On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use.
Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI? Am I looking at the wrong thing?
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.
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…