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Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

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Re: Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

#21

Post by lozenge »

tesseract wrote: post #8
pyeri wrote: post #3

It grew organically to the best of my knowledge. But the extent and addiction of various mods' dependency on these third party apps was something that came as a surprise to me. Didn't knew they actually depended so much more for moderation tools on these 3rd parties than the official reddit platform itself.

I had been under the impression it was relatively common knowledge that the reason Reddit had been keeping both the API and old.reddit alive was that power users - both moderators and the most prolific content submitters - disproportionately used those interfaces and were considered too valuable to alienate. I have been surprised not to see much discussion about what, if anything, changed about that situation leading…

They want to IPO and that means bringing everybody onto an experience they can control- in terms of ads, showing awards and any other features.

Re: Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

#22

Post by gAI »

lozenge wrote: post #21
tesseract wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had been under the impression it was relatively common knowledge that the reason Reddit had been keeping both the API and old.reddit alive was that power users - both moderators and the most prolific content submitters - disproportionately used those interfaces and were considered too valuable to alienate. I have been surprised not to see much discussion about what, if anything, changed about that situation leading…

They want to IPO and that means bringing everybody onto an experience they can control- in terms of ads, showing awards and any other features.

They also found out that GPT 2.0 was trained on reddit links and that other companies were using their API to train their generative AIs. There would have still been pushback with the API lockdown, but it wouldn't have been nearly as large if they'd updated the official app to include better mod tools, features to help those with disabilities, and a better user experience first.

Re: Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

#23

Post by tigereyeTO »

rpd9803 wrote: post #2

i mean I guess Spez started it by trying to monetize the API, unless you meant who started the idea of a blackout as a reaction to that, in which case Im not sure.

That’s not a fair characterization of the problem.

It’s been known for a while that Reddit was planning to monetize their API, and that was never an issue.

The issue was the incredibly high pricing of the API (which would cost some external apps $20 million a year) combined with a surprisingly short-notice notification.

This combination is what made it impossible for third-party apps to adopt, forcing them to make the decision to shut down instead.

Re: Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

tigereyeTO wrote: post #23
rpd9803 wrote: post #2

i mean I guess Spez started it by trying to monetize the API, unless you meant who started the idea of a blackout as a reaction to that, in which case Im not sure.

That’s not a fair characterization of the problem. It’s been known for a while that Reddit was planning to monetize their API, and that was never an issue. The issue was the incredibly high pricing of the API (which would cost some external apps $20 million a year) combined with a surprisingly short-notice notification. This combination is what made it impossible for third-party apps to adopt, forcing them to make th…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

#25

Post by throwawaymobule »

gAI wrote: post #22
lozenge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to IPO and that means bringing everybody onto an experience they can control- in terms of ads, showing awards and any other features.

They also found out that GPT 2.0 was trained on reddit links and that other companies were using their API to train their generative AIs. There would have still been pushback with the API lockdown, but it wouldn't have been nearly as large if they'd updated the official app to include better mod tools, features to help those with disabilities, and a better user experience first.

archives of most of the site's content are already available elsewhere on the internet, I don't see why anyone would be using the reddit api to get that data, if they knew what they were doing.

Re: Ask HN: Who Started the Reddit Blackout?

#28

Post by Shawnj2 »

runjake wrote: post #17
circuit10 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone must have been the first to suggest it

It's pretty common for subreddits to do the blackout thing for various causes (eg. net neutrality) and has been for years.

This was the largest one I’ve seen by a very long shot. The last one was when Reddit hired someone who worked with her father despite knowing he was a sexual predator who had been charged with over 20 crimes and censored people who used her name in comments to criticize her, which didn’t last very long and ended pretty quickly with Reddit firing her.
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