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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

#161

Post by Gareth321 »

shmatt wrote: post #27
paxys wrote: post #5

I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly. I'm no Harvard MBA, but here's an easier way out – instead of asking small-time app developers to pay millions, put API access contingent on the account subscribing to Reddit Premium. That way users get to keep the experience they enjoy, independent developers can keep doing their thing, Reddit gets to make up for the lost ad revenue in the form of subscriptio…

That small time developer who discussed paying millions also said it came out to $2.5/month on average[1]. Which actually isn't that bad for the service Reddit is providing One of the problems mentioned in the many Reddit threads discussing the issue about Apollo, is that its creator was selling ULTRA LIFETIME MEMBERSHIPS[2]. Yes, they were charging people money, taking it, then using a free API to deliver paying mem…

> I think Reddit charging $2.5/month for API access is more than fair

I don't. I agree with you on the lifetime Apollo access. That was dumb. But $2.5/user/month is crazy for Reddit. Facebook incurs around $2/user/month in costs. I'm sorry, but there's just no comparison in terms of the platform features, stability, performance, and infrastructure. With 430 million monthly active users, either Reddit is valuing their cost at $12.9 billion annually (pro rata), or they're adding a very healthy profit margin to that charge. It's clearly the latter.

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

#162

Post by BeFlatXIII »

AlbertCory wrote: post #66
mmiliauskas wrote: post #6

Reddit is garbage these days anyways. Even communities that are scientific/technical seem to be toxic these days. If you want to get to a comment that has any substance regarding some topic or article, you have to scroll all the way down.

I'm a casual user and it's fine. The specific subs I'm on have very few toxic people, and I either ignore them or block them. It seems heavily made up of very young people, which means a reliable trope is "I'm just getting into -- what are some good artists I should check out?" But that's pretty harmless; you can just ignore them.

> a reliable trope is "I'm just getting into -- what are some good artists I should check out?"

I enjoy trolling those users by posting circlejerk answers in the unironic subreddits.

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

#163

Post by BeFlatXIII »

kodt wrote: post #119
judge2020 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think most of those threats are hollow though as there are not really any good alternatives to reddit. Users will complain and threaten to leave, but in the end most will likely stick around and just adjust.

You forgot the alternatives of "going outside" and "advancing in your career"

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

#164

Post by nbar1 »

TheChaplain wrote: post #57
mmiliauskas wrote: post #6

Reddit is garbage these days anyways. Even communities that are scientific/technical seem to be toxic these days. If you want to get to a comment that has any substance regarding some topic or article, you have to scroll all the way down.

> Reddit is garbage these days anyways. Not really, there are a bunch of small reddits that really is a good source of information and community. E.g. r/leathercraft, r/learnmath, r/godot and so on...

Yes really, for 99% of reddit users who don't subscribe to niche communities about leathercraft and math.

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

#165

Post by nbar1 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #124
idlewords wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a great deal of diversity in thought on Reddit that is just banned outright by moderators. To pick a non-inflammatory example, a lot of dog subreddits will not allow any references to aversive training methods, which in their eyes include things like snapping your fingers or saying "no" in a sharp voice. What this means is you get a bunch of rival subreddits with different dogmatic beliefs, and people are ba…

Telling a dog "no" is controversial? Wow.

Welcome to Reddit.

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

#166

Post by BeFlatXIII »

mschuster91 wrote: post #120
EGreg wrote: post #59

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…

> We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market 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 wa…

Perhaps not being able to run trending topic campaigns is a _draw_ for Masto users. Not being able to create your own means you don't have to be spammed with attempts from others.

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

#167

Post by deelly »

nbar1 wrote: post #164
TheChaplain wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is garbage these days anyways. Not really, there are a bunch of small reddits that really is a good source of information and community. E.g. r/leathercraft, r/learnmath, r/godot and so on...

Yes really, for 99% of reddit users who don't subscribe to niche communities about leathercraft and math.

There nothing wrong with it.

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

#168

Post by nbar1 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #154
jacooper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A lot of people use third-party apps.

Where do you get this information from? And what is "a lot"?

I'd wager 99% of Reddit users (therefor, income) use the official reddit app and new website.

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

#169

Post by ralfn »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #158
zamadatix wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are humans today that refer to Africa as the 'third world' even though it's a continent with countries more developed than some US states or European countries.

Significant outdated cultural knowledge seems the norm for humans too.

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

#170

Post by graypegg »

paxys wrote: post #5

I will never understand how Reddit bungled this so badly. I'm no Harvard MBA, but here's an easier way out – instead of asking small-time app developers to pay millions, put API access contingent on the account subscribing to Reddit Premium. That way users get to keep the experience they enjoy, independent developers can keep doing their thing, Reddit gets to make up for the lost ad revenue in the form of subscriptio…

I mean, I think even still charging (a reasonable amount) for the public API, and in return bringing it up to near the standards of the Reddit-built app’s private API, and possibly allowing some ad revenue split with the large apps where by showing Reddit ads (currently impossible with the current API!) is compensated with some minute fraction off the API bill/paid to dev if no outstanding balance.

Reddit won because it was the Digg-alternative, they’ve always been on shaky ground if people just start posting less. What ever per-impression value they get now on their own apps/website will plummet if people just start using it less, regardless if they’re making ad revenue off every user or only some users.

Plus, yeah it’s an awesome LLM training resource. Make it cheap, why not? Your competitors are expensive, and your data is well indexed by topic and conversational in tone.

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