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The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

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Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#101

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

nineplay wrote: post #42

A few hard truths - No alternative is going to show up which can host anywhere near the amount of traffic that reddit receives/received. That takes a lot more money than any new contender can drum up. - reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit - A lot of users are going to wander back over to post-blackout replacement subreddits - A lot of communities are just going to disappear. It breaks my…

> reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit

They could, however, take a saner approach to making a profit. If profit was their actual goal, for instance, it's entirely likely that they could actually make more money by either reducing the API pricing or charge it to the user (by making it a function of Reddit Gold). Of course, that assumes that money is the goal of the API changes, which was never obvious to me.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#102

Post by why-so-serious »

CleanCoder wrote: post #29

Who owns the user-generated content? Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit? One could potentially even claim the same username by verifying their ownership of it on Reddit. Of course it's not easy but a mass social migration might be more practical than mass segregation in hopes of something else to slowly gaining traction.

>Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit?

Lol, no; this is why I rarely worry about developers encroaching on operations concerns. A completely trustworthy site (https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-comments-are-pub...) states that that reddit had 303 million posts and 2 billion comments, in 2020. Could you imagine, how long it would take, and how much you would need to spend, on compute, to scrape 5+ million comments a day, using something like Selenium? I am guessing that it's a number approaching infinity. Plus, they would figure it out and just shut you down.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#103

Post by why-so-serious »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #93
IAmNotAFix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainstream's reddit experience is clicking on Reddit links from Google. Many of which are dead as of right now.

According to the API, reddit post and comment frequency is higher than it was 4 days ago: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ Seems like the blackout is not working even a little bit.

That's completely speculative, plus those are not the KPIs that the business gives a shit about, in terms of engagement oriented revenue. Advertisers care about impressions, and unique users, and that's it and I would bet your childrens' lives, that both have seen a statistically significant hit.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#104

Post by xuto3 »

wmeredith wrote: post #30
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #3

> What happens next. Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord... Which is awful, with how siloed and noisy Discord is. I hope I am wrong, and that a good alternative gains traction.

Discord will not replace Reddit. It's a chat client. I don't understand why people keep saying it's a replacement. It's not. I have tried!

[dead]

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#105

Post by alarm_hz »

yowzadave wrote: post #96
avgDev wrote: post #28

I'm done with reddit. My account is 12 years old with nearly 70k karma. I moderate a niche subreddit and have helped build a wealth of knowledge. I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit. This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to c…

> We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards. This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API. The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. T…

The facade of platform capitalism continues to deteriorate(?)

Unfortunately Reddit is probably right that this will simply blow over eventually. Most people are entirely captured by platforms nowadays, used to the slurry of the algorithm and without much ability or drive to really leave the lazy river to either find content outside of that or create content outside of that.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#106

Post by jfengel »

yowzadave wrote: post #96
avgDev wrote: post #28

I'm done with reddit. My account is 12 years old with nearly 70k karma. I moderate a niche subreddit and have helped build a wealth of knowledge. I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit. This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to c…

> We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards. This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API. The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. T…

That unspoken contract is interesting. As I understand it, from Reddit's point of view, the contract was "We give you a place to a thing that you want to do, and will provide you storage space and bandwidth. In return, you give us the content you produce."

I imagine that this was, in fact, spoken -- in the terms of service. Not that anybody reads the terms of service (and I'm doubtful that any of them are really legally airtight).

It sounds as if users expected more, though I'm not sure what. Even as an unspoken contract, "free access forever" is a lot to ask. Those users can ditch Reddit, but I don't know if they'll find a (spoken) deal that's any better.

(Though I'm not sure why. Servers and bandwidth cost money, but not that much money.)

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#107

Post by CleanCoder »

why-so-serious wrote: post #102
CleanCoder wrote: post #29

Who owns the user-generated content? Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit? One could potentially even claim the same username by verifying their ownership of it on Reddit. Of course it's not easy but a mass social migration might be more practical than mass segregation in hopes of something else to slowly gaining traction.

>Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit? Lol, no; this is why I rarely worry about developers encroaching on operations concerns. A completely trustworthy site ( https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-comments-are-pub... ) states that that reddit had 303 million posts and 2 billion comments, in 2020. Could you imagine, how long it would take, and…

Interesting read (from HN today) about crawling a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours, for $580, over 10 years ago.
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