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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

old.reddit.com

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Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#551

Post by waiyan13 »

spazx wrote: post #109

Smelled this one coming miles away. Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc. Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push…

And /u/spez also knew it too. They are going to kill the goose for IPO. Then leave.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#552

Post by joshstrange »

jacquesm wrote: post #520

Of course they did. What else did you expect? The thing that I find interesting is that Reddit moderators are apparently not above weaponizing the community but seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'. If something doesn't change then Reddit is dead, so from the managements point of view all they've…

> seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat.

That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on the record would be a good start as well.

> Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'.

Bullshit. Reddit is horrible overstaffed and the last numbers we have are from 2021 when they made $350M. If you can’t run a site with an all volunteer mod staff for $350,000,000 a year then you have no business in tech.

> Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse.

Won’t anyone think of the poor company making over $350M a year? Spare me.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#553

Post by sebstefan »

nindalf wrote: post #542

What makes me really sad was there was a way around this. Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly , Reddits monthly revenue per user is $0.12 at best. They were demanding $2.50 per user per month from third party apps. A simpler solution - “users who want to use third party apps need to pay Reddit $6/month directly by subscribing to Reddit premium”. That would have raised way more revenue! And…

I'm not sure how that would work for third party projects that are just front ends hosted on a github page, like reddit as outlook (https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/). The requests are made by the users themselves there, we can't give them an api key.

We can do a "login with reddit" button approach, show them an iFrame so they can enter their user/password safely and grant us the rights to use their premium to make requests on our web page and such. The iFrame would need to be passed a nonce so we can ask reddit for updates on the user's login process and get a session token at the end, but even then although we've offloaded all the user data handling to reddit, at minima we can leak the session token to some server we own, and get to use their account's session to do whatever the permissions we asked for allow us to do including scrap reddit on their dime

We used to just be able to get the read-only stuff for free and we never needed to ask users to log in or to have an account... I wish they could just load ads in their API responses and kindly ask us to load them in the middle of the posts. We would. But I have a feeling that no advertiser would be OK having their product displayed on third party pages

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#554

Post by OJFord »

goykasi wrote: post #493
pmoriarty wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2])." Lots of people probably install the official app, just to try it out, but that doesn't mean they actually use it. I installed it myself a long time ago, but I never use it because it's garbage compared to Boost (my preferred 3rd party app).

Youre absolutely correct. Thats why I didnt mention install counts. Apple doesnt publish those numbers, and I didnt want to make any assumptions about them. But I am comfortable assuming that those reviews come from users that did install and use both apps. The opinions seems to be very positive for both. I do find it interesting that Apollo had such a steep popularity increase in the last couple of weeks[1]. [1] htt…

Many people reviewing the Reddit app will be reviewing Reddit the platform, not the app as a means of accessing the platform.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#556

Post by themoonisachees »

Kiro wrote: post #510
baq wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage, obviously have false assumptions given they’re actually implementing the plan. It’s a sad thing to watch.

What makes you so sure that you were right? The world is way more irrational than you think and their financial projections may still be accurate.

Facebook was in a much better place when they went for IPO and they stock still fell by more than 50% on the first day. I can't see anyone that has google "reddit" since the last few days look at an IPO and go "ah yes, the website that went down from users leaving it, perfect".

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#557

Post by redog »

luckystarr wrote: post #469
redmerchant2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t care about the old guard of mostly geeks and techies. With Covid and moments of Twitter/tumblr exodus, Reddit has picked up a ton of users that just want generic social media. It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.

The constant of reddit is that user protests come in waves again and again. If this wave will be over soon, the "geeks and techies" will be focused on polishing the alternatives. Even if this wave doesn't break reddits back, the next wave of user protests will have polished alternatives (due to the current influx of users and their demands) with way less friction ready.

Yep, Reddit an alternative to "every other shitty forum on the web" but now they're the big poop.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#558

Post by az226 »

nindalf wrote: post #542

What makes me really sad was there was a way around this. Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly , Reddits monthly revenue per user is $0.12 at best. They were demanding $2.50 per user per month from third party apps. A simpler solution - “users who want to use third party apps need to pay Reddit $6/month directly by subscribing to Reddit premium”. That would have raised way more revenue! And…

That’s the egregious thing. They wanted 20x their own revenues per user. And mind you that’s comparing revenues and costs. So it’s actually like 40-60 times more.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#559

Post by OJFord »

proto_lambda wrote: post #500
JohnBooty wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned. One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for th…

> Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? Telegram does this, and I think they're successful with it.

Telegram? But there's no ads in the official app - are you saying they require them in third-party apps in order to make them a worse experience and push people back to the official one/make money from them if they don't? That'd be.. interesting, but I think I assume you meant something else, not Telegram?

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#560

Post by Klonoar »

nearbuy wrote: post #316
Klonoar wrote: post #62

One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability? I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderato…

What information do you want to know about them, and why? Their name? Address? How many children they have? The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we're concerned with respect to their role as a mod.

I dunno, maybe some kind of idea of who they're affiliated with, etc.
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