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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

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

#731

Post by gigel82 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #532
Panzer04 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Core" user base != tyranny of the majority. Alienating a huge amount of clearly passionate reddit users in favour of Joe schmoe browsing on the train home sounds like a dangerous decision - reddit sti needs all those people who provide the content people browse for, etc. In any case, at this point the bigger issue for a lot of people is just the total disrespect reddit has publicly announced, repeatedly, towards its…

I think it's also worth noting that the actual contributing members on message boards is a tiny minority[1][2][3]. Activity appears to follow a Pareto distribution. The members that not only contribute, but regularly contribute quality content is a minority within that minority. The vast majority is scrolling and blowing air out their nose, maybe voting, maybe very occasionally leaving a comment. From a monetization…

Let's hope so :) I now actively want Reddit to blow up.

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

#733

Post by thrownaway561 »

Loveaway wrote: post #128

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the In…

what are you talking about... i've used the official app since the beginning and honestly have no issues. I don't get this whole 3rd party app uproar.

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

#734

Post by yanderekko »

photonerd wrote: post #244
olalonde wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and Twitter are not bot ridden ghost towns... but anyways, I'll make the opposite prediction: Reddit is going to turn out just fine and this episode will quickly become a memory from the past.

Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment. It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company. FB is a boomer & genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with…

"Ugh. This place is such a ghost town that it even has Republicans and old people."

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

#735

Post by badwolf »

George83728 wrote: post #440
malermeister wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users , which didn't get to democratically pick him at all. He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead. This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.

Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.) > The community is reddit users, which didn…

In the rest of the interview, spez goes on about how subreddits should be democratized, and be able to vote for/vote out mods. Perhaps he should take his concept further, and let the community vote for/vote out him and his ideas.

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

#736

Post by rndmwlk »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #710
smashah wrote: post #696

This is the result of shamelessness seeping into business. That contrarian business thinking that does away with any pretense of putting anything other than money first. Also, this idea of charging for API access is lazy and unimaginative.

I'm surprised to keep hearing that charging for API is lazy and bad for a business. They can do whatever they want with their API and price their services as they see fit. Reddit isn't going anywhere because it's a good product for the end user. It's expensive to run and unfeathered access to their content was part of their acquisition strategy. Now they want to go public and want to be a real business. I'm with Redd…

An ironic sentiment considering Reddit is entirely reliant upon free labor of both moderators and users who upload content to provide any experience whatsoever.

Reddit is, at the moment, purposely expensive to run. They could have chosen to be a much smaller operation and act as stewards, but they want to turn a Craigslist into a Facebook.

OpenAI will get the data one way or another. Frankly they’ve probably got about as much data from Reddit as they need. The user base isn’t against Reddit moving to monetize and they aren’t sympathetic with OpenAI getting a free ride, these are weak strawmen. There were ways to accomplish both of these goals that wouldn’t involve this change, but their real goal here is to kill off 3PA and it’s very transparent.

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

#737

Post by tialaramex »

pea wrote: post #504
goykasi wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. S…

There was the old adage for Excel that: - 100% of people view spreadsheets - 10% of people use something like SUM() or similar - 1% of people write VB macros You can create a product which works well for the _average_ viewer, but if it sucks for the 1% of 10% (maybe mods or contributors in this analogy), you're going to create a bad user experience for everyone.

Loads of Excel users aren't really doing "spreadsheets" except in the sense that it's Excel and that's a spreadsheet software, so arguably this is a spreadsheet. The same way arguably if I type this novel into Visio now that's a diagram. Like, is "An Oak Tree" a sculpture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Oak_Tree

For many Excel users it's like computerised graph paper, they can write stuff in boxes, maybe use it to make a calendar, they can colour the boxes in - yes, they can do arithmetic on the boxes, but many of them are surprised to find out that's what it is actually for.

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

#738

Post by badwolf »

Accujack wrote: post #105
janalsncm wrote: post #31

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don…

>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with. It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that ch…

It's also important to remember they didn't just 'build an app for phones'

They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn't now exist, and should never have existed.

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

#740

Post by AlexandrB »

wombat-man wrote: post #668
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 don't really work in enterprise sales, but I always thought the idea was to lure em in with low prices. Going from free to $2.50 a user?? I also don't totally get why "by user" is how they wanted to charge. Wouldn't charging by request make more sense?

The API pricing was by request. $2.50/user/month was the estimate that the developer of Apollo made based on how many API requests each user of his app made.
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