https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-third-party-app-charge_n_648cf590e4b025003ee4711f
Thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest over the company's plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data.
Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting...
The fact that we're communicating from so many different websites blows my mind! Just a little extra thing that makes this platform even more fun for me :)
Yes. We could make our own little shitty website on a free server like angelfire, with a traffic ticker so we knew if anyone had been there. Mine was a stupid little parody website my friends and I set up for keeping track of acronyms and abbreviations we saw online. Didn't realize we had something there, and could have been Urban Dictionary lol.
Echoing this, it's a very similar feeling! We also had guestbooks for people to leave comments and these things called webrings that would let you explore more similar sites. I remember running a small fansite and forum. It was an interesting time.
Ah yes guestbooks. My first foray into actual programming (rather than just HTML) was when I wanted to add a guestbook to my silly little website, followed a tutorial, found out tutorial was borked and went looking for advice on what was going wrong (multiple things). By the time my guestbook worked properly I knew PHP(4 or 5) reasonably well.
Yeah I gotta say, "Webrings are back!" was not on my 2023 bingo card. But I'm not hating it by a longshot! It feels like a nice hybrid of the lil Angelfire/Geocities sites and yahoogroups/onelist. Usually fandom communities were hand in hand with those two platform elements, and I've missed that tight-knit community feeling.
Kid from 90s that grew up with the advent of the internet. It’s somewhat similar, but still very managed and controlled. Internet in the 90s was absolutely wild. Obscure corners, all sorts of content, free, open and you could spend days and days exploring it and still couldn’t enough of it. All of it was unique, driven by passions, curiosities, desires, people wanting to express themselves.
I sort of dislike what it has become and how everything is monetized. But I suppose, this is the cost of progress and innovation in the rest of the areas of our lives.
Late night internet chats, dropping the A/S/L and expecting the person to reply honestly. Those were the days.
I think I have felt that way for one thing or another since 98.
Internet itself blew my mind, playing age of empires with my buddy with just one phone call, then finding about mIRC, peer 2 peer, torrents, stuff i cant remember, and video games getting better graphics at ever increasing steps. I still get a little shocked when I see PS2 games listed as retro games.
And now they are making advances way more often in quantum computing.
I just remembered the first time I heard about a terabyte and the story that "the only place that can hold that ammount of massive storage are the vatican servers" (whatever those may be) lol.
Non-internet Bulletin Boards would each host message forums but would exchange packages of messages (such as QWK files) via modem so that you could communicate with others connecting to different BBSs around the world.
Such a magical experience back then.
Then usenet newsgroup servers did much the same, (but probably updated more frequently). The peer-to-peer aspect was transparent to the users, so it was good to have just one "place", a newsgroup, where everyone could discuss a subject. But numbers were low enough that it wasn't flooded with messages.
I completely forgot how cool the internet was outside of corporate silos. And yes, the '90s internet was slow as hell, but there were so much of it to explore.
This project has legs. I've been on Lemmy this past week but now I'm commenting from kbin. Once you start to figure everything out you really see the potential.
I started out on lemmy.world but I tried kbin and I like it’s UI way more. When I realized I could just follow all of those communities on kbin I was sold!
I created this account earlier today a first step to move away from reddit. I've heard kbin mentioned and will; have to check that out too.
I'm trying to help the Lemmy.world chat community take off. Come introduce yourself!
Honestly, it might not be a great thing just yet. I feel like Lemmy is struggling under the influx, it's just not ready usability wise. When I tapped on the link to this comment section, I got a weird Latter Day Saints post until I reloaded. There's so, so many things like that and I'm deeply worried it's going to give people a bad impression.
Then again...it's not like they have anywhere else to go...
This was always going to be a mess at first, no question, but I'm worried it will get messy to the point Lemmy starts cracking.
It just further drives home the point that people got way to comfortable using one or two sites. We need to get into the habit of having multiple sites and alternatives again, or this is going to happen every time the "new big thing" goes to shit.
Yep the UI is excellent for my needs. It looks great and is easy to interact with. There are a few nooks and crannies for settings which I imagine will throw a few new users off but it appeals to my 'learn by clicking random buttons' nature.
I’ve actually been really enjoying the mobile site. I hope we’ll get an Apollo-style app one day, but the mobile site is pretty damn good for how new kbin is
Funny you should say that I actually literally just started a magazine which I'm beginning to fill with basic mobile UI tips for those who just want to get going: m/quickstart
When I first started using reddit over a decade ago it was pretty great. I didn't really stop to think what would happen if reddit started to act more like a corporation because I was having too much fun.
Now that time has come, and it's time to move on to a more free (as in freedom) and open system. It's immoral that all those years worth of human interaction (the howto's, cat videos, porn, niche topics etc) is "owned" by a corporation.
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Protest is important, just not against us.
They have the right to do what they like.
Redditors should delete that label, and simply set up shop in their garden shed instead.
Someone may tell this guy that making (bad) business decisions is probably the #1 reason why businesses fail
Can I just say thank you to all of the journalists protesting against reddit with the tools they have available? Most articles I've seen are pro reddit community or barely neutral. Dozens of news sites are involved, from left and right news sites, to finance magazines, to explainers like Reuters and NPR. Multiple articles a day are keeping this at the forefront of everyone's mind - especially spez and potential investors - as well as ensuring the whole thing stays transparent. I've seen a few articles that link directly to lemmy and kbin signups too 😊
I agree. Honestly, I think these types of (front page!) articles are the only thing that CEOs pay attention to these days. I have no skin in the game anymore, since I deleted my (long-standing) account on Reddit and completely switched to Lemmy. However, it's nice to see people take a stand against greed and, from what I'm seeing in the last day or so, hypocrisy...
to me lemmy has taken a big dip in activity the last couple days, particularly in the more niche communities. hopefully it grows back over time, but I'm not that optimistic.
I would expect the big jump to come when people who are barely engaged with this whole thing try to open Apollo or Sync or whatever in a few weeks, seeing it doesn't work, then spending 5 minutes trying to use the official app before getting frustrated and googling "reddit alternative"
then they'll come to Lemmy and be just as frustrated with a confusing new architecture, buggy website, and apps in their infancy.
Maybe, but I think people overstate this. Reddit's desktop UI and official app still confuse and upset me. Frankly the on-boarding to Lemmy is easier if anything
I found it as an alternative and haven't had any issues on a mobile chromium browser. Sign up was fairly easy too. Maybe that's because I was directed to a federated offshoot with less logins.
To me both lemmy and kbin got a very important push, it showed the potential of the fediverse to sustain communities.
The dip in activity is something expected, the platform is still in its infancy and will get more refined with time, eventually being able to retain non tech-savvy users.
Yeah I don't understand why people are complaining so much. I really wouldn't describe myself as tech savvy at all, I can only Google my way out of tech issues sometimes. But I went here, picked an instance I liked, signed up, downloaded Jerboa and I'm here and done.
I honestly couldn't even tell you how I made my account, which tells me it was super easy, because if it frustrated me I would remember it, lol. I needed my husband's help with a printer issue, and literally all I needed to do was open the settings and select "fit to paper" 😂 and I couldn't figure out how to change the paper thickness on the printer at work to use cardstock. But I've been on Jerboa for a few days now, and while I'm still discovering some features, it's not hard or frustrating, and most everyone in the community is friendly and helpful.
It boils down to the fact people generally don't want change, but they don't want Reddit.
Some people complaining about Lemmy want it to be "Reddit 2.0" where Reddit 2.0 is the same and better than Reddit without realising that work has to be put in to make it better, and that better inherently means it cannot be the same. They want their cake and to eat too.
As for me, I'd prefer to think of Lemmy/kbin/fediverse as the next step, not the same as Reddit, but serving a similar purpose. And because we're just getting started, as a developer I know there's going to be more kinks that need to be worked out, so I stick with them.
I'm not expecting Reddit to fully disappear either - many people just won't care, they want to be where the people are, and currently Reddit is where the people are. They won't move untill there's enough people, and by then the platform should have already stabilised. You'll know when Lemmy hits the mainstream when it's mentioned regularly in passing in news articles as a source, not like this "what is Lemmy or what is the fediverse" article barrage were getting currently.
Everyone knows, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, is that spez is a moron, and is doomed as CEO.
I might be a little bit cynical but I suspect at least some of them are only writing about it because Reddit was the source of all of their stories and they don't want to have to do actual journalism again...
I really appreciate The Verge's coverage on this. I guess someone there really have an axe to grind on Spez or Reddit lol.
Traditional media outlets are not exactly in the friendliest of terms with social media platforms in the realm of disputing ad revenue.
That's an institutional attack from content producers against a platform. In the limit publishers could host their own lemmy instances.
Interesting and rare thing to see...
Traditional media outlets are not exactly in the friendliest of terms with social media platforms in the realm of disputing ad revenue.
Ehh. I don't think that this is some elaborate strategic move coordinated from on-high at media companies in the space of a day or two. It's just a big, high-profile event to write a story about.
I agree it's a big high profile event to write a story about.
But it wouldn't be put upfront covers with that level of screen real estate if each of the individual publications didn't have vested interests on it. Maybe with a few exceptions.
Not necessarily coordinated, but like a discoordinated lynch mob, just... Not holding back?
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Honestly, my reply to this particular statement is that maybe Reddit should die!
I'm not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don't have control over them, friendo.
You can't just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there's no overcoming business decisions.
Bro has the personality of a turd and the charisma to match.
A good play might have been to buy it off Selig for a few million. But he's so fucking unlikable and put his foot in his mouth dozens of times at this point that the power users are unlikely to back down. Reddit will limp along and lose another 40%+ valuation over the next few months as spez plows through his community to try and squeeze as much money as he can from the corpse not realizing he's doing the opposite of what he needs to do.
"Alright boys, you heard him. He said the magic word. Let's pack our things and get out of here."
That quote is fucking wild. spez, a man of the people, all for protesting except for this time because he's nOt NeGoTiAtInG. Lol k, same bud.
That's really the only thing left at this point.
If there's no negotiating, fuck it, burn it down. We built it, we can unmake it, and that bastard can build it back up himself if he's so damn set on making a profit of it.
He seems to think that the people want the shit that he and his dev team created. They don't. People want the content of the site. And all he is succeeding in doing here is shoving away a good deal of it
Oh well, here I am, glad to join this ship. I just want a reliable place I can further geek out on mechanical keyboards, memes and news. I hope we migrate somewhere cause reddit does not look like it has a bright future.
Welcome! I'm super stoked to be here, too. And each day this community seems to grow stronger.
I agree that reddit's future looks weak. The API change was horrible. Spez's approach to the whole thing was even worse: condescending, disingenuous, and hostile.
And the more I think about it, the less I see any hope for reddit as a place I want to spend time. This isn't just one bad episode. Once the company goes public, there's going to be more shit like this. The site will slowly gut itself for perceived short-term gains, over and over again.
No thanks.
the problem with shareholders is that they always and forever need to see a chart that's in a growing trend. That line is getting kind of stagnant there mate how you gonna please us? What makes this problematic is that there will be a finite number of users for this infinitely growing service, sooner or later growth will have to slow and this does NOT please the shareholder. Where are the gains bro? I was promised gains.
Not always, but it is when you go public. I work a lot at small businesses, lots of them have shareholders who are mostly hands-off, or would prefer a more conservative approach to protect their investment.
People who invest in non-public businesses are usually in for the long haul, and come with much greater risk.
But when you go public, your business just comes a commodity, nothing but a vehicle for a fund manager to use to try and get a higher return for their clients so they get more business and commission.
In theory, it's a really democratic system, but the reality is that we've lost track of what an investment is meant to be, and the number of private individuals actually holding shares in a company directly is very low, it's mostly fund managers who literally just want to pump their numbers for a few years, because long term, they never really beat the market.
Agreed. I have seen time and time again companies going public and turning I to a steaming pile of crap. I have no doubt the ads are going to get worse and they are going to continue to make bad decisions. It's all about exponential profit now.
One good thing about the blackout is it brought this place to my attention. Made quitting reddit so much easier.
Do you know if old.reddit is going to be vanquished as well?
When I talked to my Discord group, they asked for a source. Ironically, I can't access the threads with all the logistical explanations of why old.reddit would be eliminated (because... they've gone private), and while yes, an official source/confirmation would actually give them cause to be angry (I totally get it - no one wants to think they can't use old.reddit any longer), it's frustrating to see they're not accepting it.
I can imagine one reason being no support for in-line video ads, when scrolling down a subreddit or the homepage
Right now the ads are limited to a tiny image and a title on old.reddit. There was also a traditional squarish ad space on the right hand side IIRC but I've never seen an ad in there...
I really don't know. I definitely recall Spez saying it's safe. But it seems like we'd be wise to not trust a word he says.
Ooh is there a mechanical keyboards lemmy yet??
Just fyi, when posting links to communities, you should just use the "/c/" without the link to the instance. Like this: /c/mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml
This is similar to how those links were done on reddit (/r/). The problem with your link is that it is instance specific, which is really helpful for anyone in your instance, but anyone in a different instance will be thrown out of their instance if they click it (they'll be unable to subscribe).
me too, but still helpful advice for web users
just remember that jerboa is very much in alpha and needs more developers to implement the finer stuff like this. the guy currently working on it is also a developer of lemmy itself, so he doesnt have much time for the app. if you happen to have some android dev knowledge, please see if you could contribute!
oh shoot, I'm not familiar with it at all myself and didn't know it needed you to have decent specs.
out of curiosity, what sort of specs are required at bare minimum and why? I'm guessing maybe for the android emulator to work properly, though in this age of insane, bloated electron software, anything could be the culprit, even the IDE :')
One on lemmy.ml and one on kbin.social. But Lemmy's moderator labeled as "deleted by user" even though community is more active compared to one over kbin
I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
But Huffman says the “pure infrastructure costs” of supporting these apps costs Reddit about $10 million each year.
Eh, so although, according to him, the third party apps cost Reddit 10 million per year, he still decided that 20 million a year from a single third party app developer is reasonable? I think he needs to learn some basic math...
I don't think they seriously expected any third party apps to agree to the costs. They just wanted a plausible excuse to funnel everyone into their own app for data collection and advertising revenue. That's my best guess anyway, another business decision for the IPO.
No. $10mm/year for cloud spend is totally reasonable for a website the size of reddit. Honestly it's lower then I would expect.
I'll admit I'm not entirely well versed in this, but what development? Is the API being continually worked on? I'd imagined it was relatively stable, especially given how awful Reddit has traditionally been with any kind of feature development.
Hell, they couldn't even make their own app, they had to buy Alien Blue and then drive it into the ground for $$$
So bad the article did not put that number into context.
They're just presenting one-dimensional claims by the CEO. The overall infrastructure cost tells you nothing about gains or cost or losses due to API users.
Yeah. Shit is really going down on reddit right now. Spez is trying to paint this as "power hungry mods are closing down your favourite subs. Let admins control reddit more and we'll stop the power mods". Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people. Classic tactic of the ruling class turning people against one another to distract while they fuck people over. Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
That'll happen when the oldest part of the userbase emigrates.
Tons of shills and astroturfers too in every community, basically repeating the same talking points over and over. And then they've got doomgloomers who are trying to convince people that it's pointless. And now lately you have the most insidious assholes, the ones that tell moderators to "protest" by not moderating. That last one is hilarious because if you stop moderating a community, Reddit WILL give it to someone else or ban it.
Either way, this place is nice a cozy compared to Reddit, it's like in the old days. I'm loving it.
Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people.
Most of those people will realize in a few months.... the people posting content of value left, and came here.
And, reddit will become a cesspool like never seen before.
What good will outrage/protest do? It's time to migrate. Reddit was built by volunteers who can build it again. Lemmy seems like a good choice, but time will tell if it can be the next front page of the internet.
Yes. We need to somehow convince reddit mods to create their community here and redirect the users here.
I don't agree that communities need to migrate entirely. New platforms need time to naturally grow. If the user experience isn't good, then moving too many people too early will be bad in the long run.
Regardless, Reddit will continue to exist in some form for the forseeable future. It's not going to collapse in a matter of days. It might not ever collapse.
If places like Newgrounds, 4chan, 9gag, funnyjunk, etc. are still going then Reddit will keep chugging along for now. People will find there way here eventually.
I think they should migrate and that it should have happened a long time ago. We have been depending on corporations and their proprietary platforms for way too long. We also need to leave YouTube and other centralized platforms.
Unfortunately you are right that Reddit will continue to exist. Its users have the power to change that though if they only wanted to.
I’m definitely not going to download the official reddit app, I’m done with it for good. Lemmy’s mobile website is good enough for now, hoping that the Apollo developer decides to make a Lemmy client eventually
I also will never install the official reddit app. I'm trying to move away from reddit altogether for various reasons.
I created this account this morning and am writing this message on Jerboa (got it off fdroid). So far so good!
Fellow Jerboa user here - it's basic but it has everything needed. Currently I'm in a remote French Polynesian island and it's perfectly responsive.
Bonjour! En tant qu'Américain non francophone, être ici me donne envie de ne pas avoir appris le latin au lycée.
J'ai appris le français au lycée. Je ne me souviens pas de grand-chose par contre. Google a traduit cela pour moi, mais ça a l'air correct.
Oui, il semble que je me sois fait un ami qui utilise également Google Traduction pour communiquer en français. C'est l'essence de ce qu'on appelle la lingua Franka. Quelle chance j'ai rencontré celui qui est connu sous le nom de SkullRot. Bonne journée à vous et bonne chance dans vos efforts.
In case you missed it: if you have Lemmy open in the browser, use the share button and Add to Home Screen. Feels and looks like an app that way.
Haha yeah it’s supposed to but in my experience it feels and looks like a buggy webpage without a refresh button. I still have the shortcut on my home screen, I figure once server issues have been worked out then I won’t need the refresh button as often.
Why not jerboa? Works decently well.. EDIT: nevermind, forgot it's not on iOS and mlem isn't great yet
Shit, let's go back to digg, why not? Is it still there?
checks digg.com
Oh shit, nevermind, here is good!
"...we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on."
Great, then I'm not negotiating when I say you're a shite CEO and I'm done with your crappy website.
This whole debacle will end up being a MBA case study in a few years on how not to work with your user community.
Exactly. The effects are not going to be instant though. I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks. Hopefully Lemmy ends up being the answer. If it does, then my use of Reddit will drop sharply in the next month or two. Who knows, maybe then reddits board of directors will realize that Spez just killed their golden goose.
I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks.
Same here. My reddit account is now only for a select few communities that haven't made much of a foothold in federated space yet here on Lemmy. But my reddit interaction is down, and I'm honestly considering deleting my account there given the total shitshow going on.
I don't think it's a place I want to go back to, especially given how hostile the place can be overall. Arguing is engagement. Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air in terms of civil and engaging discussion. It's actually like what reddit used to be over a decade ago.
I still make about one post a day on reddit in communities I like, in a reply that says "there's nowhere else to turn to" and make sure to mention the fediverse every time. Which is far less than I post on here, where it's about 50/50 circlejerk about reddit, and the other half is actually engaging with (or even creating) content.
This is my new home. It's small, but I like it that way. I mean, you can actually find out all communities on an instance, so I actually find a lot more relevant communities here than on reddit. They still gotta grow though.
Arguing is engagement. Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air in terms of civil and engaging discussion. It’s actually like what reddit used to be over a decade ago.
I remember that and miss that. Being a Redditor used to mean something- generally a Redditor would be liberal or libertarian, but always open-minded and accepting, with a strong sense of fairness. There were really GOOD discussions on the site, frequently- respectful debates on subjects of all kinds and people coming together to help one another.
That's less common now. In a quest to grow the userbase the app gets advertised to a lot of idiots. The 'new reddit' site and mobile app push passive consumption and scrolling over in depth discussion. The really good conversations are fewer and farther between.
If the result of this is that the 'reddit old guard' and other intelligent folks like them moves to Lemmy and the TikTok scrollers stay on Reddit, that'd be sad for Reddit but I think we'd be better off...
Now Spez is sucking off Musk in the media talking about how Twitter's "cost cutting measures" were genius, firing most of your staff is never a genius move.
Makes me wonder what morale is like for the employees at Reddit. Working for a CEO that admires Musk's takeover of Twitter would have me running for the door.
"... not going to change anything"
Yet look what happened to the fediverse. I wouldn't be here without his boneheaded move. So it already changed things for me and thousands more like me. I don't plan on going back.
Huffman totally doesn't get that the conflict isn't about Reddit wanting to charge for API access. That in and of itself is fine.
It's how they're going about it, starting with "We're going to start charging you in a month, and just five months ago we said we weren't going to be charging anything for the foreseeable future," followed immediately by Huffman being a human-shaped turd very loudly at every chance.
Even if they just came out and said "we don't want third party apps like Apollo anymore, we want one Reddit experience" it would have been at least honest. There would still be an uproar but not ugly like this.
Instead everything Steve has done has been duplicitous and in bad faith. Then he drops that memo and pokes the bear, does a couple rounds of interviews going "I'm so strong, mods are spoiled, I'm like daddy Elon, make me rich".
I genuinely don't know what he thinks he's going to get out of this. He should have just sat this out quietly and let subs go dark until they got bored and alternatives formed and the system fixed itself.
Side note: I've been disgusted watching redditors lick his boots and hate on the mods. In 13 years of using Reddit I only ever got banned from /r/conservative, so I don't get all these people complaining about power tripping mods. That got me to delete all my accounts.
The part of the memo where Steve talks about wearing Reddit swag out on town really hit. Like, we love Reddit, but hate you, not your employees. Why would users want to harm Reddit employees?
I mean, it's not unfathomable, but it wasn't imperative to mention it as it only serves to stoke fear among his employees and tries to frame this as an "us against them" thing.
Why would users want to harm Reddit employees?
Realistically, because some people are dumb. It's the same reason people harass actors for playing characters they don't like.
I'm still bitter about a great post I made, which had a great discussion going, being removed on r/fitness for some obscure BS, just inane illogical reason. The mods in that sub were notoriously terrible, and is why there were a bunch of spinoff subs.
@soft_frog I was a mod on Reddit for a bit. As far as bans go, permabans were rare. There were a few people, however, that I or another mod banned that would play this "I was just joking" or "all I said was x and they banned me" game, but we would use a mod tag on these people so we quickly remember why we banned them. And it's like dude, you told the dev who's promoting their game to kill themselves.
There are some shitty people out there, and mods have to clean up their shit (hopefully before anyone else sees) so the users have a good experience in our community.
Yeah, there are some bad mods out there too, but it's the ones that care that are going to have to work double time without these third party tools, and the site is going to lose some of those with this change.
Explanation for the bootlicking: -some astroturfing accounts -lot of critical ppl already left reddit, and the compliant remained
Only outright corrupt mods I ever experienced wad Amos on the conspiracy sub, and the mod of r/pitbullhate.
They totally exist, but the community tends to build around them when it's bad.
Someone posted https://subredditstats.com/ and it became so clear how reddit had changed in the last 3 years. All my subs have expanded 3-5x in size, and over that same period the quality declined a lot.
Oh there are plenty of shitty mods on certain subreddits, but the biggest issue is that often the community doesn't realize it. Some person gets banned for some stupid reason, the community doesn't know. That's one of the biggest issues with community moderation especially on Reddit: it is entirely too easy for moderators to act invisibly and absolutely no one would be any the wiser because the only person that could point out the abuse of power can no longer post.
Seems to me a simple fix for that would be, he more the mods abuse the ban hammer, the shorter he bans are. Problem solves itself.
Yeah I mean it was pretty much the whole community but the mods existed to shield their worst members.
And frankly, reddit shielded the_donald when they were openly breaking the rules about vote manipulation in such a huge way that they dominated /r/all.
The mods for r/guitar were (are?) pretty bad. The guys at r/guitarcirclejerk made a sport of seeing how stupid a post they could post on r/guitar without getting banned. Of course, actual noobs with stupid noob questions sometimes ended up getting banned for trolling, so they'd end up at r/guitars asking wtf.
It was kinda funny, kinda tragic. Dunno if it's still there.
The rise of circlejerk communities was the beginning of the end, their only purpose was to harass members of a community and create a gathering place for trolls.
I disagree. I keep seeing people saying this, but it is giving them far too much credit. It doesn't matter if the pricing was reasonable or if they had a good long time to prepare for it.
All of this talk about the pricing is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is the impetus behind it. This is just a weapon Reddit is using to kill 3rd party apps. That's it. That is what they want to do, that is what they are doing. Don't let that get confused in a bunch of talk about pricing and deadlines, it doesn't really have anything to do with what's happening here
I remember reading a comment that said they half expected this to be a 'Door in the Face' technique (or a different one with a different name, can't recall) wherein Reddit was being a clever sales person by starting high and then going low, because the true goal was to just introduce a pricing plan to begin with. If they had just started with a pricing plan, there'd be pushback and they might have to rescind it, but if they started with something ridiculous and then walked it back/lowered it to something reasonable (their goal the entire time), they could save face and say "hey Reddit we heard you loud and clear and you're right!" and Reddit could go "We did it Reddit!" - I thought that seemed very plausible at the time.
Then I thought maybe it was just Hanlon's Razor. They were just being stupid. Turns out it was a little of both malice and stupidity.
I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I'm about 50/50 now on whether they're just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they've maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it's just a training model, who cares if the community isn't happy, that doesn't matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.
I've said elsewhere: Huffman is a turd, was a turd, and will be a turd. The fact that he's CEO tells you what reddit as a company wants: turds.
I doubt they have the talent to make an LLM. But just in case, instead of deleting your comments before deleting your user, replace them with some choice words about Huffman ruining the value of the site via poor leadership.
Perturb each comment with random one letter errors. This way any LLM will learn to tell everyone about Huffmans poor performance. Even better, it’ll be harder to bulk remove the comments with the errors in them. Especially if there are many rephrasings on top.
Anchoring Effect is the term you're looking for. Now we just wish it was actually that.
He comes across like an entitled child who has made up his mind and is too stubborn to admit when he's wrong. Add onto that the fact that he bullies people with his lies and manipulation. Very much not an adult, let alone a CEO.
it would have been SO easy for them to make their API changes the way that it's typically done - with ample warning time and semi-reasonable prices. the only obvious explanation is that they really don't want third party apps and this was their way to shut them down without saying it explicitly.
When you start to talk about share holders more than your users, then you know you are lost.
“I think every business has a duty to become profitable eventually — for our employees shareholders, for our investors shareholders and, one day as a public company, hopefully our user shareholders as well,” - quote from the article
I wouldn't say "lost" per se, as they are a company in business to make money.
But when your site exists because of user input, because of user moderation (done for free), you're damn well not looking at the "big picture" when all you talk about is shareholders.
Not every company has to exist to make money for somebody. Reddit didn't start that way. Remember when there was a little bar of "reddit gold paid this much for server hosting" - people wanted to give Reddit money.
I feel like the reddit mods should come up with a "letter to the shareholders" and sticky it to the top of every major sub.
The blackout probably won't result in Reddit failing, but he has to realize that if he keeps this up, it's only going to take some aspiring programmers/designers some time to develop more Reddit alternatives, and when one of them becomes viable, down goes Reddit.
That's the thing. Reddit will live on for quite some time, but enough damage has been done to position alternatives as the better choice.
I personally think it will be a combination of all these fediverse sites.
Imagine having your own personal site connected to Lemmy, Kbin, and everyone else's personal sites.
It's pretty incredible.
I honestly don't think people need to sell Lemmy like this.
The vast majority of users are not going to care at all about the fediverse. They just want a site that works like Reddit, and lemmy will give that to them. Personally, I think that within the next year or so, one or two instances are going to become the predominant ones and eventually close themselves off from the rest to better control the content.
I don't think they will close themselves off. I think we will see three 'levels' of instance. The big core instances (a handful) which have dedicated teams running everything (might be volunteer, might be staff), a fairly large smattering of small instances ran by corps (the fedverse is a social media platform after all), as well smaller groups of like-minded people (eg beehaw or lemmygrad), and lastly the hobbyist who want to self host.
I don't think 99.9% of people care about the extra depth of Lemmy, or anything else like this. In fact the extra layer of complexity makes me think nothing like Lemmy will replace Reddit because people don't want to put in the extra effort to learn about instances and federation.
I'll be shocked if any instance hits a million people in the next few years
Any instance hitting one million is unlikely, on the mere grounds of trying to make one super instance is kind of the opposite of the goal of federation. The winning would be reaching a million members between all instances.
To a "normal" user, a Lemmy (or any federated) instance is just another Reddit-like site.
If a user signs up and see content in their feed, why do they need to care about federation?
The federated system gives "normal" users the content they want, and "technical" users the ability to self-host and connect to other federated servers.
I think a handful of popular federated instances will see the majority of Reddit emigrants who don't need/care to know about how federation works.
undefined> I personally think it will be a combination of all these fediverse sites.
Good point. I think that It'll be the combination of these things that'll hurt them the most...
Just put a > before the text to quote it, just like reddit. I dunno why it sticks "undefined" in there like that.
This situation won't kill reddit, but it is quite capable of killing reddit's supremacy.
I think we're talking on it right now. The nerds and early adopters are already here. The community and open source technology will grow organically until we start drawing the attention of the masses because the experience is better. It's just going to take a few more years of enshitification, just like Digg.
Oh, reddit's still going to be around for a long time, and I don't think reddit clones were and are any real threat to reddit (See Voat, or any of the crypto based reddit clones). However, Lemmy is different in that federation is a revolutionary change to the reddit format just as nested comments on reddit is a revolutionary change to traditional internet forums.
So, a likely scenario is that high effort content creators are going away first, leaving the average user who only notice the content getting worse and worse until they leave too, and the dreg will get more and more concentrated as more regular people leave, which lead to worse content, turning it into a death spiral.
just as nested comments on reddit is a revolutionary change to traditional internet forums.
Uh, Reddit hardly created the idea of nested comments. You can go back to usenet or Prodigy/Compuserve in the 90s and find nested conversations. Slashdot did it, Daily Kos did it, shit, even the old school VN Boards did it.
Unless I misunderstand your point?
I do think reddit was the one that popularized it though, maybe it would be more accurate to say "combination of nested comments and vote based instead of time based sorting"?
I mean, here's a Slashdot thread from 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20020923232012/http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/10/0517248.shtml?tid=134) from archive.org showing not only voting, but nested comments.
Slashdot's "voting" was a little less direct and focused on using what it called "moderation" to keep content on the site relevant. I found the write-up, still pretty much unchanged, here.
Here's a 2004 thread article from kos with straight up reddit-like voting, not only showing the cumulative score but the # of votes, too.
Reddit was founded in 2005.
One could make the argument that Reddit successfully leveraged it to attract the traffic away from Fark and Digg at the time. They weren't just a place to get away from Diggs changes, they were a better place.
Threaded forums go back to the late 90's.
Reddit will go on, as Digg also did, this is not a fairy tale. But it will definitely suffer, I’m doubtful if even the IPO will happen (or what kind of valuation they could get)
This, combined with some other news stories explicitly mentioning Lemmy as an alternative, is a very positive thing for the community here.
Exactly. Lot of ppl are complaining, but I think this is going great, much better than I expected. Lemmy is great, scratches my reddit itch perfectly.
And let’s not forget that July 1st is still 2 weeks away, usage will further explode then, when ppl are actually forced to look for alternatives (instead of just doing it out of curiosity or principle)