Yeah, what was unthinkable a few months ago is now an ever growing reality.
If ever reddit had a crisis management division, the people there didn’t understand what reddit really was.
Even spez forgot what made reddit special. Or a very big possibility is he never knew it from the beginning at all. It can be argued that reddit was the vision of aaron.
My theory is a bit more of an Illuminati conspiracy. I really don’t care what people think of my thoughts or of me.
I think the powers that be want anything like Reddit to either die or degenerate. They (as in our wealthy owners) don’t want a happy healthy stable platform of free thinking, free talking individuals sharing ideas and openly and freely discussing the world’s problems so easily.
They want Reddit to die or at least degrade.
They’ll put up with the fediverse for the time being because it isn’t that big … but once it hits critical mass, there will be a slow corporate takeover and eventually another slow death and the process will repeat itself
The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.
Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but... Not by anywhere close to the same degree.
Alright, we're sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.
First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it's going to cost $x.
Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.
Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.
And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.
By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.
There. That's really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.
You'd probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don't get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.
Again... This shouldn't be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!
Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)
Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients... But I for one would have been... Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn't suck.
Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.
Yep, the whole thing had ordinary and third party app users pitted against each other, only because blaming the mods would've reopened the subs faster than going against reddit itself. And the fact that 90% of reddit don't use third party app makes it that much worse. Goddammit spez you cunning mf.
Among higher than average users it seemingly was. Given that reddit was saying the third party apps were using above average amounts of API calls per user. They said it's because of the 3PAs baing unoptimized but it was likely that more engaged users used 3PAs.
Wow so they've prioritised the casual users over the power users... You know, the ones who actually post the content... This should go well /s
Anecdotal, but I've been talking about this whole thing to my partner. She doesn't really care though because, in her own words: "I tried to use Reddit a little while ago, but I didn't like the app"
It is. I was just using it because I thought I would support Reddit with it. But the recent changes showed what you get for that. Now I'm not using Reddit anymore.
i think it's cuz a lot of us were redditors who used it before they even had an official reddit app, and so it wasn't pushed on us as the default option. the older, more dedicated reddit accounts disproportionately made up the active userbase
I think you're correct. The older accounts definitely were more likely to use 3rd party apps I believe. I know I tried the mobile site and then several 3rd party apps before they developed the official Android app. I remember really hoping for "Alien Blue Android." I tried the official app when they gave a week? of gold for trying it and concluding my app, probably Sync, was much better.
I think if they'd made the official app really competitive from the start, a lot of daily users would have switched to it. They could have done things a lot differently and been profitable by now.
I knew I always used what looked like old reddit, but I could never remember changing the URL everytime, after that I used my mobile browser and then the official app.
God that was a battery, storage, and data intensive app.
Data plans back then were beaucoup bucks.
It was the damn notifications that made me almost quit Reddit and then I finally said "Fuck it let me try what all these reddit power nerds are always going on about.", and then I understood.
The interface for Sync, as an example, made it much easier and more efficient to use. I would argue that 3P users use more calls because using those apps allow you to browse and interact far more effectively without cutting through the swaths of "He Gets Us" ads that Sync users never even had to see. Ultimately, I suspect that tha was the true reason for the API changes. Lost ad revenue. Judging by what I saw just today being stuck briefly on the official Reddit app and the website taking care of last minute issues after Sync went down, it's bad. Wall of ads.
If they would just charge you reasonable price, or fix their own app, none of this would be an issue.
But it's about the data, not the money, because the data is where the real money is at.
If you had everyone who used Reddit, had all their browsing and tracking data, how long they scrolled and looked at whatever, how long they stayed on the page after, what they looked at next, so on and so on, you could sell it in multiple times to multiple people for multiple things and each data set be unique
Jesus.....why would he even bother adjusting the business model if part of the agreement was he makes zero money??....Am I missing understanding something? Seems like a waste of time on developers part...
IIUC Narwhal 1 will be free but will drop its ads in return for being free (so a non-commercial app). Rather than a special deal I figure that this passed under the same rule that other noncommercial apps like RedReader did.
Narwhal 2 will charge a subscription to cover the API fees, including top up fees if you go over some limit, suggesting this is the normal reddit API pricing. I think developers of like Apollo couldn't do this because they had preexisting annual subscriptions. I guess Narwhal didn't have anything like this.
I guess I thought the whole issue was even if the app was not commercial, in order for users to actually make it work they need to use reddit API and that's unsustainable since it cost money regardless. Maybe that's where my misunderstanding stems from. I'm not the most tech savvy with all this API stuff.
Your understanding is correct, but reddit did announce exemptions for noncommercial apps and accessibility apps (without defining the latter term). IIUC reddit said something along the lines of "we shouldn't be lunprofitable while third party apps are profitable."
Ah possible. Maybe Narwhal 1 was still able to get an exemption under this rule (because reddit never defined what an accessibility app was) and is just keeping mum about or downplaying the accessibility angle.
IIUC reddit said something along the lines of "we shouldn't be unprofitable while third party apps are profitable."
They did, ignoring the fact that the scales are completely different and the fact that the 3PAs helped mods and engaged, contributing members provide content and services that Reddit didn't have to pay for, thereby mitigating or maybe even completely counterbalancing the costs of supporting them.
Agreed. I just tried to state what they said - in my defense i never said that what they said made sense because as you just said it doesn't really make sense.
The saddest part of all this is the countless hours of work unpaid people have poured into the site, moderating, developing, and content creating only to see it end the manner it has.
I'm okay leaving it behind. I didn't contribute much over the 12 years I was there. I mostly lurked. I'm just sorry for all the people that worked hard to make the community better.
True, but the communities are built around people not the platform. We are once again learning that no platform will be around forever, older people have seen it plenty of times already.
Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad's PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren't even aware of it yet.
At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.
Shit, I used to run a WWIV 4.23 BBS back in the day. First modem was 9600 baud. Then 14.4k, 28.8k, and lastly 56k - screaming fast! Nothing like watching boobie pics loading one line at a time…
Edit: I remember signing up with Prodigy and participating in my very first AMA, with Quark and Dax from DS9. Good times.
I remember how excited I was to download the trailer for The Phantom Menace in 1999. Took almost an hour on a 56k modem. Or how it took under 10 minutes to download a 8 megabyte song off Napster on DSL.
Lol, man I remember in ‘99 having a stack of 100Mb Zip disks, using the college’s computer lab to do all my downloading on their T1 then walking my goods back to my dorm room. I’d load up a queue in the morning, then swing back by in the afternoon after classes. Such simpler times.
i just shut down a worlgroup server a few years ago... mostly up for majormud.
i with those asshats at the majorbbs restoration project would just release all the source code. they clutch those pearls like theyre valuable in some way
Man, the nostalgia is real. It was Gopher and Usenet via CIX and Compuserve for me from around '88, and eventually "proper" dial-up via Demon Internet (in the UK) in '92. 9600 baud, 14k4, 28k8, 56k and eventually dual ISDN. I still have a 28k8 modem in a drawer in my PC parts graveyard.
Lol I remember trying to get my parents to get an ISDN line installed back in ‘95 or ‘96 - the price was ridiculous. I was stuck on 56k until 2001 when I went to work for an ISP and was able to get a 1.5M SDSL line and was fucking ecstatic. Used it to run a CS1.6 server from my closet.
Edit: actually I did have a 1.5/128 ADSL line somewhere in there for a little bit.
I did interact with a BBS site or two, but then got caught up in the AOL wave. I used their platform, Geocities, and a few other chat sites. Once ditching AOL around 1999 I ended up on a local forum we used for electronic music, and then in 2003 made my way to a Star Wars fansite forum called BlueHarvest (I moderated there the last couple of years before the admin shut it down in 2008 or 2009). A couple friends and I then communicated via a forum we made for ourselves. Then Facebook, then Reddit...now here.
EDIT
I also had accounts with MySpace and Friendster too...Twitter for a few years around Arab Spring, but I didn't like it. Even back then The Bird was a toxic mess with rare moments of humanity. I think my avatar is still shaded green...if my account still exists.
Does anyone remember Plastic.com? I believe it used the Slashdot engine but was more focused on news and interesting internet stuff. I never see it listed when someone waxes nostalgic but I lived on that site until one day it just died.
Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I've been around since the earliest days of the web. It's kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student's pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.
The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.
I've noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That's probably the smart way to do it.
In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn't remember what a lot of them were.
Yeah, but people move on too. Do you expect every single person who ever contributed to repost their content when a migration happens? Of course not. It's just not realistic. But actual info gets lost. Old game faqs vanish. Answers to niche questions poof out of existence. Yes, the world isn't over and things will move on. But actual, tangible value was lost with the death of reddit. A large portion of the internets "How To" guide just went up in flames. And a lot of that won't ever get rebuilt. Many of us who have been around long enough have also seen that dark side to these things.
It's a shame, is all. But time keeps moving and so will we.
Honestly, spez and the Reddit C-suite and board are in the process of finding out that a lot of what made their platform so good and popular was run almost entirely by community power users, enthusiasts, and developers, in addition to all the obvious utility and value that mods provided.
kbin lacks an API with an equivalent feature set. Ernest is aware of this and it's on the bug tracker. Any working apps for kbin are using site scraping as a temporary workaround. In layman's terms it means the app developer is doing a lot of extra work that will mostly get thrown away when the API rework is complete. Artemis is the only one currently doing this off the top of my head.
I read somewhere on here that Kbin doesn't have an API available right now and that Artemis is making their own API through scraping. That'd play a big role if it's true. I also wouldn't be surprised if migration numbers were skewed towards Lemmy either.
Scraping is hard on a server though. You gotta download the entire page and all its data instead of just the info/action you requested. That's one of the reasons other websites bother to make APIs, so bots and others DON'T start just scraping them.
Tbf you can see some kbin stuff from lemmy either through desktop or a mobile app, but Sync for Lemmy is planned to have kbin support too, but we'll see.
I wonder when buying these 3rd party apps as acquisitions, if Reddit brought along their dev(s) in the process. It sounds like they didn't, which would be so shortsighted. Because what it seems is that once Reddit had these programs in their possession, they didn't know what to do with them, or how to integrate them into their own source code...at least with Spell this seems to be the case. I have no idea about Alien Blue, which I had used at one point prior to using Reddit's own mobile app. All they had to do with Alien Blue is rebrand...why didn't they?
How do you employ nearly 2,000 people. an army of unpaid moderators, and not come up with proper tools to navigate your own program, or find profitability off its user data? I think that Huffman has had no plan, leads a top-heavy organization, has been coasting along the company putting out day-to-day fires, and now he's scrambling to quickly find something profitable to show his investors.
There are a lot of things that don't make sense at the core of Reddit, because Google, Chat AI, and ad revenue are the places to make a profit...not API usage from 3rd party apps. I watched a really great video of the history of D&D last night on Nebula, and wow talk about lessons that Reddit could learn about 3rd party contributors.
(I'm going to link the video, but you need a subscription to Nebula and/or Curiosity Stream to view it). TL;DW summary: D&D works best as a business when it collaborates with 3rd party contributors and its fans.
Why do I suspect that, even if one were to spend 8 hours a day on Reddit, making comments that all were gilded, you'd still earn less than minimum wage?
If you look at the distribution of earnings for other platforms like Twitch or YouTube, there'll be a top 1% of people making decent money and everyone else will make jack shit.
So they’re getting rid of coins and awards, but don’t have any kind of replacement actually planned yet?
They should have held off until they knew what the replacement would be. As it is, they’re yanking something that made Reddit unique for…what, exactly?
Applying gold and awards will hold posts on the frontpage even if they're downvoted to oblivion. They're likely getting rid of them as a way of manipulating the narrative.
Reddit really is done. This will drive spam and discourage people posting original content as they will see it stolen and reposted by the karma farming parts of reddit. They already flood communities with crap; reddit seems to just be taking another giant crap on the moderators who will have to deal with the tide of people trying to manipulate the new system for financial gain.
The best content on Reddit is not by "top contributors" whoever they may be. It's the random helpful posts that you stumble across or find on Internet seaches, or the thought provoking posts and comments that push back against the hive mind. Generally I find most (not all but most) of the up voted and awarded content to be trash or low value. Moving to financially incentivise that show Reddit really don't understand their own site.
I actually improved my reddit experience back in the day by blocking the top creators and checking that top list every few months to make sure it was current. Instantly better!
Quora is an impeccable font of online knowledge and we should be grateful for bwahaha no I can't even...
Basically the amount of karma farming that already happens on Reddit is going to quadruple. And yeah it's going to be a) on the more 'serious' questions like Quora and b) on the more AITA or Confessions posts 'oh you guys have helped me so much, of you can upvote me and give me some awards it'll really help get my life on track'
Part of me couldn't believe they'd actually introduce this but in light of everything this year, whatever. Because what else could benefit Reddit ....oh yeah - grifters!
If they want to add fuel to the fire that's burning down the house fine. I'm over at Kbin. I'm staying.
My only regret is there's some really great health support communities there and I hope they can be allowed to live in peace because I don't think they'll feasibly migrate.
I’m only on reddit for a few select, very specific communities. If I ever find a replacement it’s over. Help with Immigration laws, teach practices, language learning ECT. I’m thinking maybe I’d like to start the teachers group over here.
They're willing to pay idiots to ramble on but they aren't willing to pay international lawyers to straighten out all the paperwork so they can do this outside the US.
It's certainly worth paying to hear American views over the rest of the worlds I would say. Reddit is on to a winner with that one for sure. American Reddit users like u/spez are so wise while we are so stupid.
A company headquartered in the US but it's a website that has a presence in many countries, including the EU.
Maybe not surprising, but they are probably shortchanging themselves by not allowing folks from abroad to contribute into the program. USians aren't the only content creators.
Last I checked, there were at least 3 subreddits where cryptocurrency is being handed out regularly to active participants.
They’re called “Community Points”, and get a custom name for each sub (“moons” in /r/cryptocurrency, “donuts” in /r/ethtrader, and “bricks” in /r/fortniteBR.)
I don’t know how the other subs fared, but /r/cryptocurrency became noticeably gamed by actors attempting to maximize their financial gains.
Karma is all about gamification. Made up points to make you feel like your contribution was worth something. You can see it in pretty much all social media platforms.
You never really care about checking others, but I bet you'd probably take a peak from time to time at your own.
I never cared, but I would be lieing if when I post blew up I wouldn't notice all those upvotes.
While I agree with everything you said, it did also serve a tangible purpose on some subreddits as a barrier-of-entry to prevent bots from posting OF spam or whatever or stop new troll accounts from being able to post.
I'll go and look at how my recent comments and submissions are doing, but that's more to get a sense of how my outlook aligns with the outlook of the general readership. And when the alignment is off, I'll look at other comments to see what is getting traction.
By this process, its become clear to me that the outlook of Reddit The Userbase (as opposed to Reddit The Company) has become much younger in recent years. All too often, when my positions are heavily downvoted, neighboring comments expressing more popular (populist?) positions make me think, "Yeah, I used to think that ... thirty plus years ago."
I didnt like to check the karma on my comments bc what if i got downvoted or worse... what if someone replied to me and id have to engage in conversation?! :0
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