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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

#181

Post by Gareth321 »

duped wrote: post #152

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 slaug…

I agree. The Apollo dev arguably owns the user last-mile. It wouldn't be a stretch to offer users an alternative. Reddit was open source until 2017 (https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit) so most of the heavy dev lifting is already done. The major cost would be in infrastructure.

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

#182

Post by Eisenstein »

rootusrootus wrote: post #159
Eisenstein wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anoth…

> how many of the largest [non-political] subreddits are openly political?

No idea.

> I'd suggest that Reddit is devolving into a place where the users and moderators willing to stick around completely deserve one another.

The specialist interest subs are mostly still worth it.

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

#183

Post by anonred »

Eisenstein wrote: post #98
anonred wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for “a large portion of reddit contributors use 3rd party apps”? And what percent are we talking about here?

Here is a shot from a subreddit I moderate: * https://imgur.com/a/Tg3IXNf No idea how many of those apps are third party, but I would be willing to bet 'most' of them.

I’d be willing to be the opposite given how hard Reddit is pushing this. But like you said, it’s impossible to tell without a separate category for third party apps.

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

#184

Post by miroljub »

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?

Both. I can't imagine a company being so successful and so influential being badly run.

Of course, if someone uses a moral, ethics, or personal political and societal view to judge if a company is well run, then I agree it may appear to many people that Twitter is badly run. But if we take a company valuation and consider the time it took it to achieve it, it's certainly one of the best run companies.

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

#185

Post by dandrew5 »

Has anyone heard if the changes will affect the current JSON API available by appending `.json` to the end of web URLs (i.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/all.json)? I can't find any documentation about it so hopefully not. If anyone is looking for an extension to replace their third-party app, Reddit Theme Studio[1] might be of interest.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-theme-studi...

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

#186

Post by digging »

miroljub wrote: post #184
digging wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Both. I can't imagine a company being so successful and so influential being badly run. Of course, if someone uses a moral, ethics, or personal political and societal view to judge if a company is well run, then I agree it may appear to many people that Twitter is badly run. But if we take a company valuation and consider the time it took it to achieve it, it's certainly one of the best run companies.

> I can't imagine a company being so successful and so influential being badly run.

I'd argue this is a failure of imagination more than an endorsement of Twitter. Twitter has inertia - it's going to keep going until it literally can't, and that doesn't mean it's been run well.

It's been chaotic there since acquisition, with major policies being changed on a whim and then retracted and whole functions of the company disappearing entirely or almost entirely. Major news outlets are dropping their twitter presence, and stocks have dropped - if you define that as "good" management, what would bad management even look like?

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

#187

Post by exac »

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…

It may be the case that they have foreseen the backlash, and they plan to publicly compromise with this as a solution.

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

#188

Post by George83728 »

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.

> there are not really any good alternatives to reddit.

Sure there is, you can simply stop using reddit. You don't have to replace it with something new. Take whatever other hobbies and activities you already have and extend the time you devote to them into the time-slot formerly occupied by reddit.

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

#189

Post by Eisenstein »

Semaphor wrote: post #129
paxys wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an option, considering Reddit is charging third party developers the equivalent of ~$2.5/mo per user for API access, so the tracking argument already goes out of the window. They are already giving up control, for a very low price too, but just implementing it in the most brain dead way possible.

That is what the 3rd party dev has to implement, Reddit already has a premium feature, but there is no api-unlock, there is just dev payments. That’s a big part of the issue. If people paying Reddit would unlock api access, most issues would disappear.

Every reddit account gets API access with OAth. No payment needed.

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

#190

Post by Eisenstein »

idlewords wrote: post #102
newaccount74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Reddit is that you can scroll down. Even if the top voted comments are garbage, you can just continue reading, and read answers from a very diverse audience, even if they are downvoted. It's a lot more diverse than Twitter, where it seems that only right wing bullshit is shown any more, or HN, where 90% of posters are men aged 20-40.

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…

Honestly how is that different from anything else? If you get a large enough group of people together they turn into cliques. It is human nature.
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