111–120 of 217 posts
Well not that anything would be effective. They really do need to funnel people to their app, their revenue per user is awful.
I don't follow reddit too closely. But I remember there was another big fiasco a while ago and a bunch of clones/spinoff sites were started. Have any of those survived? (and not been completely overrun with fringe political content that's banned everywhere else)
I know there are a bunch of spinoffs that use that codebase though, TheMotte, Ovarit, and rDrama
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Yes! Speaking as a heavy Reddit, but non-sub user, this is exactly what would have gotten me to pay them $50 a year. Not NFTs, stickers and avatars. I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd h…
> Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. This approach mostly doesn't work because, for third-party client apps that don't go through the developer's own server, scrapers could snag those keys from the client. Scraping has always been a thing and I don't see a foolproof solution that allows good actors to use the product without bad actors getting to scrape content (not…
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Yes! Speaking as a heavy Reddit, but non-sub user, this is exactly what would have gotten me to pay them $50 a year. Not NFTs, stickers and avatars. I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd h…
Can someone explain what value new Reddit data has for LLMs? Presumably the entire 2005-2023 (up to March) dataset which is (was) freely available on Pushshift / torrents is enough? Also, not that Sam Altman is unbiased, but he did say that social media (Reddit, Twitter) were not super important for developing LLMs (But of course, that's exactly what he would say if they were useful!)
But sure, there are plenty of other data sources as well. On top of the problem of not wanting to train your data on content you know is littered with bots.
In another thread about this, someone mentioned Lemmy, a federated alternative to Reddit: https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 Looks like an interesting approach.
Sadly it received less publicity and mind share than lemmy, so not everything might be up to the expectations of the HN crowd.
I don't understand the point of a protest like this without some sort of concrete demand. If you're going to take down most of a popular site, you should: 1. Articulate the reason for your action 2. Explain what specific things need to happen to redress the problem I haven't seen any clear statement of (2). Am I missing something?
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It's about ads and tracking sure, but they're also trying to build a TikTok-style algorithm-powered black hole that keeps you sucked in by way of constantly shoving more things in front of you, including posts from subreddits you're not subscribed to. They also want to be able to force whatever new half-baked features they add to work with prominent positioning in their apps.
But to what end ? You have a bunch of users who you know are willing to pay real dollars for a different experience. You couldn't ask for better segmentation getting people with wildly different desires and expectations to both be hooked on your platform.
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The aim is not _just_ to make money, but to force users to use their crappy app so they can track users better. Sort of like what Twitter did. It’s also why they had like one dude working on their mobile website one hour a month for the last few years.
What’s so crappy about it? I’ve seen some bad apps and it’s definitely not that bad. Can you elaborate?
There are technical issues too. Many users report issues playing videos and gifs.
Finally, the Reddit app serves ads.
If I understand this correctly, these third party apps are drawing tons of ad money away from Reddit while at the same time increasing their hosting costs and dev costs for maintaining the API, right? How is this not a win-win for Reddit? They lower the traffic that was costing them money. I know it's user-hostile and that's the crux of the complaints, but it seems a little naive that these communities are basically…
Reddit is a user-generated content app, and many users in the comments have already expressed their plan to stop using reddit if they can't use their favorite third-party app. There are better ways to handle this without just saying "give us millions of dollars". Something like requiring that users pay a subscription to reddit to use it, for example.
I see this kind of thing over and over. It’s a symptom of a larger problem: We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ When you choose where to host your Wordpress or whatever, you don’t worry about someone shutting off the API keys. On this page is a video explaining how that would w…
A free market literally overrun by Nazis is what that means in the end. It's best seen on all the Twitter clone attempts that marketed themselves as "free speech" alternatives - most notably Parler, Gab and Truth Social: they all ended up being echo chambers of Nazis, where no one but them would want to hang out. The "board scene" had similar moments... from OG 4chan to 8chan and others, as soon as the current "hot" platform began to moderate away the worst of the worst (usually due to some terrorist focusing the police and general public spotlight on it), they simply moved away.
The other way, federation of instances like with Mastodon, has a different problem set: while Nazi, CSAM and otherwise problematic instances get cut off from the larger instances, discovery absolutely sucks compared to the elephant (or rather, bird) in the room - there's no way to run "trending topic" campaigns, which was the feature that made Twitter so successful among protesters and dissidents: it allowed them to easily reach a global audience to put a spotlight on government abuses.
The solution to go forward is what the EU is doing with the DSA/DMA: allow big, centralized platforms, and force the operators to adhere to a common baseline of moderation standards.