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Reddit Strike Has Started

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#651

Post by isaacremuant »

jrnichols wrote: post #646
altonas wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this. I'm active in some video game subreddits and I even mod a video game related sub with about 25k subscribers. And on multiple occasions I've had terrible interactions with those big multi-sub moderators. A particularly infamous multi-sub mod (whom you can probably figure out) has threatened me for my subreddit on multiple occasions, making statements like "I'll have…

This problem became much worse when Covid-19 came around too. Still to this day, there is a mod that will auto ban you from like 30 different subs including /r/pics and others if you so much as make a comment in a sub that they consider "covid minimizing" at all. How on earth reddit continues to allow such actions like that are beyond me.

Reddit was behind those actions, dude. It's not about mods. That's tech companies controlling narratives and, specially in the case of covid, happened well beyond Reddit.

Instagram, to name one, was using these "media mods" to basically ban or tag news that they claimed were misinformation. Those media outlets were absolutely pro government in every country and any criticism of covid gov policies was "misinformation".

Don't let the fact that reddit mods can be assholes distract from anti user policies made by reddit pre Ipo

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#652

Post by wpietri »

shagie wrote: post #478
wpietri wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could have a free version of the API that includes the inline ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a share of that revenue to client makers. As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated content in an attempt to extract maximum dol…

What guarantee is there that those inline ads would be rendered by the 3rd party client? What incentive is there for the API users to add in ads that reddit serves for the 3rd party client users? Can reddit be guaranteed get a share of the revenue for the IAP of "block all ads?" Is it worth it for reddit to do it when they can't control the price of said IAP ($0.49 for "block all of Reddit's ads")

Sorry, why do you think this is a hard question? They look around at the big clients, see anybody who has violated the API's TOS by removing ads without special permission, and kill their API keys.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#653

Post by codeslave13 »

microtonal wrote: post #153
joecot wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial plan was 2 days. Then Spez did his AMA where it was clear they were not interested in compromising, not planning to change anything, even seeing the enormous protest forming. So while some subreddits are still planning on 2 days, a growing number of them are going dark indefinitely until reddit rolls back this plan.

Also, quite some people seem to be removing their accounts along with all their post history. Maybe not in numbers that are significant to make it a ghost town, but in some subreddits you already see gaps appearing in prior discussions. For some niches, Reddit's comment history is basically like a knowledge base and it's slowly being torn apart. If the group of signal-noise contributors that nukes their whole history…

I nuked 12 years of content. Yes i know its archived and like still available. But at least on the public site i withdrew my consent (my thought process/reason) for them to have my content that i can now only provide with thier completely shitty apps

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#654

Post by the_doctah »

wpietri wrote: post #366
tomcam wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Twitter rapidly decaying? I am a daily, but very light user so I may not be observing the trends as well as you.

Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically, outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have departed, and the value of the company has fallen by something between half and two thirds. One of its core assets, the blue checkmark for verified notable accounts, has been permanently destroyed. I no longer use it, but word from my friends who still do is that is has become grimmer, less fun. Musk has…

[flagged]

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#655

Post by thefourthchime »

cm2012 wrote: post #58

Usually I am anti-internet stunts like this. The vast majority of boycotts are dumb wastes of time. That said, Reddit should have built better mod tools before making their api change. I think people complaining about not having 3rd party apps to browse reddit is "meh". But moderators need to be able to do their jobs.

If they hadn't blatantly tried to slander him personally and had given a reasonable price or timeline for the price changes, people wouldn't be nearly as upset.

All of this has left a sour taste in their mouths. They also see the writing on the wall; they'll shut down old.reddit.com, push more ads via the official app, and continue to milk as much money as possible.

The claim that it's not profitable seems kind of crazy to me. They have a huge amount of data on their users to target ads. It's mostly text content so the bandwidth shouldn't be horrible. Maybe I'm naive, but how can Facebook make so much money and yet they can't make a profit? It smells like poor management to me.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#656

Post by treyd »

eksapsy wrote: post #361

Strike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life". Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do you know what message that sends? What would you think if your customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm coming for the r…

That Louis Rossman quote is really great actually. I feels to me like a lot of people see very popular platform services "suddenly and unexpectedly" turning around and start changing things in ways that are very unpopular, but I don't see it very common for people (on reddit at least) to point out the common characteristic between them, that they're almost always startups with investors to answer to, is the reason that they end up making unpopular changes. It really does feel a little bit like an abusive relationship that it keeps happening and yet people keep using these investor-backed startup platforms that initially offer deals that are too good to be true.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#657

Post by isaacremuant »

yanderekko wrote: post #566
OldManRyan wrote: post #314

There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong. Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a powe…

>Engagement is a power curve Sure, but the degradation of the UX based on these changes seems to be pretty exaggerated in my view. How many of these powerusers are only using Reddit through a 3rd party client and would quit the site over having it closed? My guess is that the answer is "not many", and Reddit is clearly banking on this... and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own internal analysis? More…

> and why would I trust angry activists over Reddit's own internal analysis?

This is literally authortiarianism and the problem is that you can use it to justify any change by any company ever.

They're the owners so they know better because they're the owners.

No move can be criticized.

It turns out that you end, like many that defend this and is irrationally against others protesting, with a comment about how it doesn't affect "you".

Ok. So you don't get it. Good for you. Keep on doing whatever it is you're doing. Some people will absolutely quit using it with different UXs or decrease over time until they move elsewhere.

It's a risk and a decision and we will see what happens down the line.

But it'll be fun if other sites get much of the traffic and they likes of you come out with "it was obvious this would happen".

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#659

Post by wpietri »

rjh29 wrote: post #614
dasil003 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, Twitter and Reddit monetize just fine with ads. The problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die. These are not bad businesses, they're just small compared to Facebook or Google. What's needed is mature leadership that recognizes the value comes from the community, and following the private equity playbook of strip-mining the value is short-sighted.

According to the spez AMA, Reddit is not profitable.

Profit is a balance between income and expenses. He's hired a ton of people in hopes that they could radically increase their revenues. So it's a little rich for him to complain that Reddit isn't profitable when he's the one who made the choices making that way. In contrast, they could have taken the path of Wikipedia or Craigslist or Whatsapp, keeping the costs very low as a way of achieving profitability.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#660

Post by thefourthchime »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #202
WXLCKNO wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees. I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible

Normally I'm the one saying "well there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you know". But in this case: yeah it's bizarre. How the hell are their official apps and mobile site and new desktop website so fucking awful, when solo/small team app developers can actually provide a good experience working on the outside with a fraction of the resources? I've tried to switch from old.reddit to new.reddit a handful…

I think people dramatically underestimate the importance of having a small team of passionate, highly skilled, dare I say, 10x developers, creating the actual product. When venture capitalists come in, they just hire someone somebody they know, then get lost in architectural complexity, even outsourcing some coding. The whole thing turns into a mess.

At my company, my small team ends up doing about 80% of the work, while four other teams, each with 10-plus members, seem to do absolutely nothing.

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