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Reddit Strike Has Started

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#641

Post by wpietri »

WalterBright wrote: post #577
wpietri wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it. 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 someth…

Making a profit is how it becomes sustainable.

No. Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability. That's part of the devil's bargain of VC money. If it looks like your company will be a modest success, they will push you to make it a giant one no matter how much that increases the risk of failure.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#642

Post by benburleson »

_djo_ wrote: post #552
asveikau wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is true, but I heard that recently, searching Twitter for "cats" led you to videos of cats being mutilated. The story continued that Elon had fired the entire team devoted to preventing such outcomes. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete... Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.

Yes, it’s accurate. I tested it at the time and was shown that video. It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while. There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.

This shows how much I don’t use Twitter, but I was curious to verify this and learned I need to sign in (or in my case create an account) to search…is that true?

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#644

Post by rossriley »

drexlspivey wrote: post #157
WXLCKNO wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees. I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible

They raised $250m 2 years ago and have tripled their workforce since. Now they're losing money of course but why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money recently?

2000 employees at an average cost of 200k / year is a $400m a year burn rate.

If they're not breaking even with revenue then that money starts to run out quite quickly.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#645

Post by wpietri »

memefrog wrote: post #632
a2tech wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with you. Every sub I'm on that has asked people if they should go dark (either temporarily or permanently) have seen overwhelming support for the protest. This includes subreddits such as woodworking, our local city sub, and arduino. These subs are NOT made out of power users and they all supported it.

The people that engage with polls on a subreddit are the power users of that subreddit and are probably not representative of the broader group. Remember: most people lurk.

It depends on what "representative" means here. Most people lurk, but they definitionally don't contribute to the labor that makes the site valuable. I'd be interested in their opinion here, but honoring a strike isn't about what pure consumers want. It's about what the workers want.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#646

Post by jrnichols »

altonas wrote: post #431
themagician wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll have…

This problem became much worse when Covid-19 came around too. Still to this day, there is a mod that will auto ban you from like 30 different subs including /r/pics and others if you so much as make a comment in a sub that they consider "covid minimizing" at all. How on earth reddit continues to allow such actions like that are beyond me.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#648

Post by isaacremuant »

themagician wrote: post #401
OldManRyan wrote: post #314

There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong. Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a powe…

Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…

Except if you search in Reddit right now you'll find plenty of posts where mod asked the users if they should join the blackout (sometimes rather meekly) and userbases, almost always, said yes.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#649

Post by HWR_14 »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #540
wpietri wrote: post #87

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…

>But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase. The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its…

Musk put over $20 billion of his own money into Twitter. If I put 10% of my net worth in a project, I care how it turns out.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#650

Post by lelanthran »

shagie wrote: post #478
wpietri wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could have a free version of the API that includes the inline ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a share of that revenue to client makers. As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated content in an attempt to extract maximum dol…

What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be rendered by the 3rd party client? What incentive is there for the API users to add in ads that reddit serves for the 3rd party client users? Can reddit be guaranteed get a share of the revenue for the IAP of "block all ads?" Is it worth it for reddit to do it when they can't control the price of said IAP ($0.49 for "block all of Reddit's ads")

> What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be rendered by the 3rd party client?

Because if it isn't then reddit can simply revoke their access.

How can reddit know if the ads are being stripped out or not? Simple - download the app, run it and see.

The API license can always force things like:

1. Only for apps, whether mobile, desktop or web (i.e. forget about training your LLM on the data) 2. License revoked if content is modified in any way (i.e. no stripping out ads)

It's not that difficult, honestly. I've signed more strict agreements with companies (NDAs, and so forth) to access their system, their data, etc.

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