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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#351

Post by qwytw »

seydor wrote: post #98
abashore wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those mods held polls in their communities and among their peers before going dark. I don't think the large subreddits are getting unilaterally shut down.

it's always like that -- reddit users always like drama so i did not expect they would vote otherwise. i think the whole idea is bad though Reddit has much bigger problems to solve. First and foremost, that users have no recourse from moderation abuses, and this is killing the community more than the API changes.

> that users have no recourse from moderation abuses

Not participating in subreddits with crappy moderators seems like pretty good recourse?

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#352

Post by mitchell209 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #119
reso wrote: post #71

Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? That's the core issue. Reddit still makes barely $1/user/month while instagram makes $35. Cutting off the 3rd party apps is a cost-cutting move, not a revenue-generating move. Why haven't they managed to find more revenue? I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with ne…

Cutting off 3rd party apps isn't a cost cutting move. It has two clear benefits - firstly they can push users into the officially supported apps where ads can be shown in a more controlled fashion and metrics on those ads can be gathered. Second, it removes the ability for other companies to programmatically gather Reddit's data - this is important in the context of large language models where investors are convinced…

Their ads in the iOS app are formatted exactly like normal reddit posts. I’ve tapped on them by accident quite a few times in the last week. I’m going to assume the New Reddit experience is largely the same, but I’m not about to turn off my adblocker on PC to test that.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#354

Post by hutzlibu »

mgdlbp wrote: post #343
hutzlibu wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is certainly lots of drama going on, but I am unaware of anything remotely dramatic or open fight/strike like is happening on reddit between users and company (non profit foundation).

Eh, do Superprotect and Framgate count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Wikipedia Reddit section needs an update. The page was created following Reddit's 'AMAgeddon', too. 'APIcalypse' this time?

They count, but I don't think it is the same level as with reddit here and now.

The difference is likely the money involved. Wikipedias mission is to share knowledge, a goal shared by most of its participants and there are of course disagreements on the type of knowledge.

Redit the company wants to make money selling ads, reaching the highest "engagement" - which is not what the user wants.

So I also think, a non profit would be the best model also for reddit.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#355

Post by AshamedCaptain »

makeitdouble wrote: post #285
rightbyte wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info. That is only a problem if you have user info. On classical forums, everything was public if there was no PMs.

I guess you still need to manage accounts ? Also under GDPR IP address retention can fall under that in your logs depending on how you manage the info, same way analytics would need attention. It should really be more simple, and I wish we'd have more people just building small sites here and there without having to care much about these details.

Why on earth would you need to retain IP address or have analytics at all?

This scaremongering about GPDR always conveniently forgets that the stuff the GPDR makes scary to do is stuff you should not be doing anyway.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#356

Post by pjc50 »

dale_glass wrote: post #243
azangru wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create. Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them?…

> Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it. > Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? Th…

> each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster

This is why services usually make it a condition of being allowed to post in the first place that you grant them a worldwide perpetual irrevocable license to the content, via the EULA.

And you can see why: having to ask all the users for permission in the future is completely infeasible, so just ask once upfront for everything.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#357

Post by bibabaloo »

Xelbair wrote: post #345
4dregress wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented. Oh the good old days :(

Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel. I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. a…

What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#358

Post by acumenical »

I'm done with reddit anyway. After uninstalling Apollo and shredditing my account (not that I strongly believe in the effectiveness of shreddit, it was more of a gesture toward reddit), I realize that reddit is harmful for me. The bots that manipulate perception, on top of the user-hostile behavior, make me realize one would have to be a fool to continue to use reddit unless it changes drastically.

It does suck to no longer interact with smaller communities but at this point I have to prioritize my own well being first.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#359

Post by boomboomsubban »

opdahl wrote: post #5
boomboomsubban wrote: post #3

Organizing the continued blackout on Reddit is a bad look. I know it's not their aim, but it seems like "users should be prevented from using reddit, but us mods are exempt." That said, short of preemptively having coordinated something, I don't know where else they'd organize. Particularly as I'm unaware of any real "leaders" to this movement.

What are you talking about? How are the mods exempt from the blackout? You think all community mods can see all the private subreddits?

No, but they're continuing to use Reddit.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#360

Post by rcxdude »

frankacter wrote: post #81
abhibeckert wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost is something like $500 per user per year. People just aren't going to pay that much.

This is not accurate. From the data presented, in aggregate, >90% fall well within the free tier of usage (100 API calls per minute for OAuth logged in client). The majority of the remaining fall into a $1/month tier [1]. Certainly there are some outliers that exceed those ranges and unfortunately the majority of the spotlight seems to be on the smallest of the populace. It is also worth noting that app developers ca…

OK, so if each user were to use their own API key, reddit would still have the same costs but nowhere near the revenue, which speaks to a pricing structure aimed at the status quo where the API key is per developer instead. What's the betting that if apps switch to allowing users to specify their own API key that reddit actually allows most users to do this? The '90%' number is meaningless: apps which use the reddit API (or any API with a free tier) have an extremely long tail of niche uses which effectively no-one cares about.

The comment about API optimization is inane, apps already try to do this and bump up against the problem that reddit's API is atrocious (try actually getting all the comments in a comment chain once they get collapsed! if you actually want to succeed, even on a chain with only ~100 comments, you're gonna need around 30 API calls. Most apps don't bother to try, and the 'more comments' button is invariably broken).

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