I don't understand why the users aren't just leaving? Surely the software/infrastructure can't be that hard to replicate, especially on a "subreddit" level? Why don't a few big mods just go this route and tell everyone else?
What gets me is if all the third party apps had banded together and said 'july 1st, we all pivoting to support a new platform', that would have been enough of a network effect to effectively cold start the network effect on whatever they targeted. It would have been dig all over again, and this time reddit would have been in the dust bin.
The coordination required for such would be quite intense. Also fragile, as the third party apps would quickly abandon any roadmap agreed upon if Reddit changed its mind.
Maybe it can happen now among the apps that have put their foot down about a complete end, but certainly loses a lot of momentum from those who might have already uninstalled them.
My personal (cynical) bet is that Huffman actually understands what Reddit is better than us, and Reddit will be just fine after this. To be completely honest, if a two-day blackout is proven to be the most serious "protest" the community can do, I'll buy Reddit stock when it IPO.
We still don't know what the impact will be of Instagram's upcoming Twitter clone. It does look like more of a hybrid between Twitter and Reddit with the threaded conversations and nerd-friendly API layer i.e. ActivityPub.
It will never have the one thing that people come to Reddit for right? NSFW. Not porn precisely, but a range of freedom of expression that goes beyond the narrow band of expression allowed on Zuck’s platforms.
Reddit has always tried to thread the needle of having 4chan-like freedom without 4chan-like anarchy. That’s the secret to its success.
Original report is available on the verge[1], which contains the full message sent by reddit CEO. 1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
"I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.” Overreaction much ? Are we really become that desensitized as a society? I find that hard to believe.
They can easily do that to the major subreddits without losing much trust at all. How many users do you think really care about the mods of /r/videos? I doubt very many. They should probably make the generic default ones like that admin moderated anyway. The amount of users who actually care about this is shockingly low. Something like 0.5% of users use third party apps? I saw surveys on subreddits with millions of s…
I've only moderated small subreddits and even I know the chaos that results from not having bot-driven subreddit management tools. You may hate Automoderator when it deletes your carefully crafted post for whatever reason, but I guarantee you will hate Reddit itself when your favorite subs become overrun with illegal and off-topic spam. The race will be between Reddit admins recognizing the degradation of the user ex…
This is really tangential to the core issue of charging for API access, as it’s essentially just an implementation detail. Losing moderation functionality is a valid complaint, but Reddit doesn’t need a free API for that to exist. There’s no reason to think that the required functionality won’t be implemented into the service. Your complaint here is also, rather obviously, massively overblown. The free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn, so there’s really no reason to think your claims about that content have any credibility.
Reddit makes like half a billion, it's plenty profitable for what it is. The problem is that management is trying to make it into something that it's not in an effort to make even more money when the site just isn't geared for it. It's like if McDonalds instead of just opening more stores decided that it can make even more money if it turned into a bar and grill because steaks have higher margins.
Reddit management already did this when they began self-hosting all images and videos. It's pretty disingenuous to complain about excessive API call costs when you voluntarily decided to pay for hosting and streaming Petabytes of video and images.
And their hosting is REALLY bad. Videos have NEVER worked right for me on Firefox and it's been years with no progress.
The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page.
Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.
My personal (cynical) bet is that Huffman actually understands what Reddit is better than us, and Reddit will be just fine after this. To be completely honest, if a two-day blackout is proven to be the most serious "protest" the community can do, I'll buy Reddit stock when it IPO.
buying stock makes little sense when an avg user is many times less valuable than IG or tiktok. they're already struggling with worse service on the way. at least Google and meta have world-class programmers. what's reddit's moat?
The only moat Reddit has is the critical mass of users. Numerous clones exist (such as Hacker News), and a new minimum viable product could be built in a couple of weeks. But once you have the users, it is pretty easy to keep them... unless you make them turn against you.
All they had to do was make API access require Premium. $4/month and all the pieces were laying there. Thats twice as much monthly profit as their current super inflated API pricing would bring them for the same users. Reddit made themselves a real mess here and it's all SO stupid.
No shit hey. Fucking rocket appliances apparently. Charge me $4 for premium and give devs 3 months to implement the changes or something. It feels so blindingly simple that this who mess is mind numbingly stupid.
I highly doubt a different dollar amount would have changed the outcome. Reddit wanted $2.50 per user from the Apollo dev. Would $2 have been more palatable? Or $1.50? Would the extra few cents per month really make the difference between a user subscribing or not? The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.
Eh, at some threshold, of course a lower price would have changed the outcome. It sounds like the Apollo dev thought API costs came in at 10-20x what he’d been expecting. I think there’s obviously a huge difference between paying Reddit, say, 50 cents of a $3 net payment (assuming a sub for the app is $5/month) and having a $5/user/month cover charge to Reddit as the price of admission, and then having to build a via…
The average user doing ~300 api calls per day would do about 9000 calls per month and at $0.24/1k calls would be $2/user
Apollo also does polling of the message box for each user for push notifications ( https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/main/i... ) which currently has a rate of 1/minute/user. This is another 1.4k calls per day and changes the price that would be paid.
Even if subreddits don't go dark, the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult and subreddit support bots that eliminate spam and maintain post quality stop working.
>the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult Is there a market out there where I can bet all my money against this claim? The idea that this will lead to a spam wave destroying Reddit is wishful thinking on the part of aggrieved moderators who see themselves as forming a Thin Blue Line against a tide of chaos.