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Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

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Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#151

Post by thomastjeffery »

idlewords wrote: post #138
thomastjeffery wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear to me, given the context: Dear Reddit, You are about to do a bad thing. Don't do that thing, or I will leave your platform. kthnxbai

Read their post! It's impossible to tell which of these, if any, they want: - roll back all API pricing changes to the status quo ante - Offer more reasonable pricing tiers, for some value of 'more reasonable' - do what you want with the API, but give moderators the tools they need (right now only available in third party apps) - something else

Those all sound like valid compromises.

What are you missing?

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#152

Post by duped »

If I had an app with 1.5 million monthly active users and the platform I piggy- backed off asked me to pay them $20 million yearly for the privilege, I would start asking VCs for money to pay the bill and hire a couple folks to build the platform my users are going to migrate to before someone else does.

Reddit the company has shown to completely misunderstand the userbase that created their website and they're slaughtering it to make a buck to payoff their own investors. So why not prove them wrong and do it yourself?

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#153

Post by Timpy »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #147
Timpy wrote: post #69

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…

Imagine you own a store. Every week 2 people come in. They talk and shop for a long time. You spend a lot of money showing them all the products and answering their questions. One of the two spends always buys a ton of stuff and the other one never buys anything. You realize you can save a lot of time and money by banning the other person since they never buy anything. Next week, neither of them come in. Thats reddit…

Thank you, this is the first explanation I've heard that clicked with me.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#154

Post by thomastjeffery »

jacooper wrote: post #12
dsm4ck wrote: post #7

I really hope one of the bigger third party apps finds a way to just point their front end to a reddit clone and eat reddits lunch.

I keep hearing this, but how many of reddit users actually use third party apps? If Twitter proved anything, its that its really hard to kill a popular social media network, no matter how badly managed or drama filled it is.

A lot of people use third-party apps.

Reddit's app has terrible UI/UX, as does the website redesign (new.reddit.com, which is the default www.reddit.com). The only good UI/UX is old.reddit.com, which isn't very good on mobile.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#155

Post by Mindwipe »

beezlewax wrote: post #31
Simulacra wrote: post #8

I presume that going dark means that there will be less traffic on the site, which ostensibly would put pressure on the ad revenue. How long would this have to go on before it was a noticeable effect on read its balance sheet?

I can't imagine it will have any noticeable effect on their ad revenue. We are talking about a handful of subs out of thousands.

Ehh, subs aren't equal, and there are a notable amount of top 1% subs here that will have much bigger effect than others.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#156

Post by judge2020 »

anaganisk wrote: post #113
judge2020 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Wouldn't you leave the API key, in the server and proxy thru? That's what I was taught to do, and you give your own tokens to clients to track which client is making that request and block that client if needed. It seems very dangerous to pass on the reddit API key to the client.

with Oauth2, the API credentials don't give you access to other users' accounts or data or anything of that sort - so the only problem with the client id/secret being in the client is malicious people pulling it and abusing the service while using those API credentials. In general this hasn't been a problem, but once it costs (for example) Apollo $x per million API calls, it could be a money drain, and it could cause headache for the service that now has to try to do abuse prevention via IP reputation / other tracking techniques.

And proxying api calls isn't an end-all solution. This introduces a large burden for the developer to not just run a scalable proxy for the API calls, but also must introduce and manage some abuse prevention system, maybe with their own user account system with reputation ratings based on number of times they've hit a rate limit or how many different subreddits they try to access every day.

It also is generally not good for users to have to deal with a proxy like this, since it means the app developer has the ability to log all of their users' usage, and could be compelled by law enforcement / courts to hand over user PII or activity logs.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#157

Post by rsynnott »

digging wrote: post #70
miroljub wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is not badly managed. It managed to grow to the point of being indispensable, and drama is just one of the reasons why it keeps being popular.

Twitter is badly managed by almost any metric - are you referring to its management pre-acquisition?

I mean, even before acquisition it’d be hard to credibly claim it was well-run. In comparison to now, sure, but that’s the lowest of bars.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#158

Post by BeFlatXIII »

zamadatix wrote: post #114
CamelCaseName wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Depends what you're training it on, I suppose. If you're just wanting to train something to generically talk then sure, a slightly outdated data set is fine. If you're wanting it to be able to talk about recent things then it'll, naturally, not be fine. It's not so much a problem right now, only being a couple of months out of date, but once that turns into years it'd become more apparent. But sure, there are plenty…

I'm now envisioning a sci-fi future where the AIs are an embodiment of xkcd #606. Far better than humans at mundane tasks but with significantly outdated cultural knowledge.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#159

Post by rootusrootus »

Eisenstein wrote: post #134
rootusrootus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems inevitable that Reddit is going to need to start hiring professional moderators. But given the difficulties in making that work economically, it would only be for the very largest subreddits. And perhaps even then, it would just be a professional lead moderator, with some volunteer help. As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reaso…

> As it is, the only people who really want to be moderators, especially of a large subreddit, tend to be motivated by reasons other than "build a thriving community of diverse, good faith discussion." People say this, but I find it completely untrue. Many people do a lot of things for good reasons, or else we wouldn't have charities. This cynical outlook is toxic and it is a reason why a lot of the people with 'good…

For an easy example -- how many of the largest [non-political] subreddits are openly political? By that I mean they either have participation rules or auto-moderators that explicitly tell you that you will be banned for non-conformance? You think only moderators are getting burned out?

I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another. On neither side do normal, sane people want to participate.

Re: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

#160

Post by rsynnott »

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #3

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)

Previous Reddit controversies have mostly been about Reddit banning abhorrent content. This lead to clones which were, more or less from the start, just full of the worst people you can imagine. This limited their general attractiveness; normal people probably won’t want to use a Reddit clone which is populated mostly by Nazis, or by people who are creepily fixated on moaning about fat people, or by the upskirt people, or what have you.

This would potentially be rather different, in that the group being driven away is more _normal_.

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