Tldr They started charging 3rd party apps to use their API. The API that they had been using for ages and ages. They were shady about the timeline and their communication to devs was awful. So most 3rd party apps decided to end support as opposed to paying reddit.
Basically they wanted to make sure all users were seeing ads before their IPO.
I was a relay for reddit guy for ~10 years. Once the subscription update hit I uninstalled and moved to boost for lemmy.
Not quite correct. They didn’t start charging for API usage. They banned it and pretended it could be paid for with completely absurd prices nobody could reasonably afford.
Yeah, the prices were around +20€ for normal usage, for each user a month. It was a per call cost and the devs would have to eat it if they didn’t charge the users, so many rightfully jumped ship. Who in their right minds would pay more than 20 euros to fucking access reddit on their phone, per month? Yeah right, fk you too.
I really miss a good Lemmy mobile client though…I was using liftoff which reminded a lot of RIF, but that seems to have been abandoned completely. A lot have ads, so that’s a hard pass for me. I’m currently using Thunder, but it’s a pretty buggy mess TBH with a lot of UI oddities and bugs.
In the same boat, I miss it still, other ones have a worse UI for me and hate the ad slots in the app although I have DNS ad blocking but its still annoying. Do update me if you find a good replacement as we’re looking for the same thing
A key thing about the API is that moderating gets harder when the apps that moderators use to streamline/facilitate their work suddenly stopped working. Those apps relied on the Reddit API. These were created by and for the moderator community out of necessity.
Moderators had asked Reddit for tools and when Reddit didn’t provide they built their own. Then Reddit switched off the API without offering replacement tools.
That’s likely the primary reason that Reddit’s mods left and its content took a nosedive.
There was some magic internet data thing where third party apps (like various reddit apps not owned by reddit) access and use reddit to power their apps, free of charge. That’s API. Pretty much all voluntary reddit mods use third party apps to mod. Reddit started charging for the API, making third party apps useless, forcing everyone into the Official Reddit App. A lot of people boycotted or quit.
It wasn’t just mods using 3rd party apps. Anyone that experienced the switch from old.reddit or that used mobile had to be using 3rd party or only half their brain.
Reddit used to have a free and open API. This allowed 3rd parties to develop apps / interfaces for the site. These apps helped everything from making the site usable for some with accessibility issues to blocking ads to providing a customized interface to tons of other things.
Generally this was done by taking the API feed and re-engineering it to allow the desired presentation.
In a move to make the company more attractive to investors before going public, Reddit changed that API to a paid model. This meant any developer of those 3rd party apps would now have to pay a not insignificant in most cases fee to continue their access to Reddit. As such, most apps closed down and a very small portion of us long time Redditors migrated to Lemmy/ the fediverse.
Reddit used to have an open API. A lot of mobile apps sprung up to access reddit over the years, with different features. Reddit gained a lot of loyal members through users of these apps, but couldn’t make ad revenue off them. Reddit decided last summer to start charging a lot of money to these app developers to continue using the API. A few of the apps started a for-pay subscription model to continue operating, but many just shut down their apps. Many redditors and Reddit mods revolted, because these apps made the site usable (some of them offered advanced mod tools, etc). We protested, shut down subreddits temporarily or permanently, deleted our accounts, moved to new platforms (like lemmy/kbin), etc. This was basically a move to maximize their ad revenue while Reddit positions itself for an IPO. It was really not cool.
Mods used third party tools to help them with their unpaid work. These tools relied on access to the reddit api.
Then reddit charged ridiculous prices for api access, which would mean the apps would need money, so mods would need to pay to do their unpaid work or use the inferior reddit interface.
Given these choices, some mods decided to leave instead.
Reddit enhancement suite still works on old Reddit, so if you need decent tools, you can still mod from your computer. But no more moderating from the toilet at work. No more moderating on the bus.
One subreddit I still occasionally visit is now only moderated on the weekend. You can imagine how the quality has dropped
It was a thing last… summer? Where reddit announced they were going to start charging for every call a third party program made using the API. This was done with the intent of shutting down 3rd party reddit apps and to get users on the official one so reddit could make more money. However, it also destroyed a bunch of 3rd party tools that mods more or less needed, and which reddit had been promising to implement themselves for years with no progress. There was a brief protest where mods of many subs shut them down (mostly for less than a week, though some are still down IIRC). A bunch of users and moderators left reddit and went to other sites.
Exactly, I didn’t have a tantrum. I used a third party app because of the accessibility features it offered that the official app doesn’t. I can’t use reddit now, so I don’t use reddit.
I’m using Memmy on iPhone which has some good text size accessibility settings. But there’s some buggy stuff and I don’t think they’ve released any fixes or updates in a few months.
I tried Eternity but uninstalled it when I realized that it would just go back to my homepage if I switched away from the app for any reason. I’m using Liftoff at the moment but it’s got its own problems. I might try Voyager some time.
Never encountered that bug on Eternity but I would suggest making a bug report for that issue on the page for Eternity so they might be able to fix it.
Liftoff is on it’s last legs, once the last 0.18.5 instances make the upgrade to 0.19 it’ll almost certainly be unusable. Dev isn’t active anymore so I wouldn’t count on an update to fix it either, at least not any time soon. He also said he doesn’t have much experience with auth so even if he does get back to it it could take him a while to re-implement login.
Hey! I was using Memmy as well, but stopped a couple weeks ago since the developers aren’t doing much on there (no shade to them - it’s a free project so I appreciate what they did at all!). I recently switched to Voyager and it’s been seamless and appears to be better supported.
Voyager still has some slight bugs but it’s pretty good
I’m using sync at the moment, I don’t dislike it but there is room for improvement. I have very low accessibility needs. I have palsies in my hands so for me it’s about having nice big icons to tap, because I don’t have the dexterity to push tiny text links or really cramped hit boxes.
My phone GUI is enlarged and sync is just the first third party app I found that scaled well with my phone, most third party apps work for me, it’s just the reddit official app that really, really doesn’t. It’s unreadable with my GUI settings.
A popular theory is that a lot of bots were deployed to make the exodus seem less impactful. So, officially the numbers might be similar, but I’m sure there’s less real content and people…
I thought blocking nsfw posts on mobile was bad enough until I tried viewing a totally SFW subreddit that was small enough to not be “verified”. Straight up didn’t let me view a subreddit that wasn’t essentially approved without logging in or using the app.
Me too, I did most of my redditing on the phone. So the only redditing I do these days is when on desktop looking for various hardware recommendations, cause unfortunately I don’t know how to search lemmy that well
Lenny is also just missing the decade of pcmasterrace and other pc hardware sub content. It might get there in time but for now Reddit is still a font of information and advice from knowledgeable people.
Exactly. It’s like hey… If the corpos take a dump in your mouth you can either leave or you can stick around and complain about the taste. And yet the people who left are the whiners?
I’m glad I figgered it oot. All I miss are the video subs. I can live without them.
YouTube can’t get it right, I watched one video about police brutality 15 years ago and now they think I just want to watch people get pummeled by cops all day and be mad about it. I can’t just go subscribing to a community with content I like on there, gotta subscribe to individuals and hope the right stuff rolls in. I just don’t watch many videos these days.!
The only mature and adult course of action is to sigh and resign yourself to getting fucked at every turn, as wise and responsible adults throughout history have done. Any action beyond innefectual snark is a childish tantrum. This axiom somehow does not apply to the actions of the already powerful and those doing the fucking on their behalf. That is simply the natural way of things. Do not ask how they became powerful in the first place.
People have gotten fucking insane with this “Everybody should do exactly what I think they should do at all times full stop and if they don’t they’re literal fucking garbage, and if you disagree or care about a different thing than me you’re just a whiny baby whining about baby stuff” mentality.
I’m a lefty, and it’s an election year which means I get to deal with this for 10 months straight from the dems.
God you’re telling me. I’m a right winger, and I am not looking for to voting for the 77 year old orange just because the GOP can’t figure out how to do a primary.
Still going to do it because of the issues at hand, but I’m not happy about it. I just hope he doesn’t pull a 2nd round of bump stocks.
I’m a motherfuckin user. I log onto this website sometimes. That means I dictate when you shit and for how long. Just be glad your breathing is out of my control. For now.
I used to be a mod at /r/soccer, and it was a great way for you to lose faith in humanity.
We saw it all, racism, death threats, insults, even an instance where one user found a mod’s place of work and stalked them. We also had one guy that was obsessed with a footballer spam the sub with bots for several days, because he wasn’t allowed to post whatever he liked. It took the admin’s three days to fix…
More often than not, it was people that didn’t read the rules, and got upset that all subs didn’t run on the idea that “if people upvote it, it’s allowed”.
Yeah that sounds about right. I used to moderate trans and lesbian subreddits. It was …not good for my mental health. Leniency in rules allowed for people to post bigoted shit that sat right on the border or sounded like it might. Strict wording in rules meant that people would toe the line. Us having to explain why we removed things (it was an experiment one sub I moderated tried for like a year) resulted in an absolute shit show because there are more people who want to be assholes than mods and the more stressful moderating is the higher the turnover. I distinctly remember one night being out at a bar with my now ex and her friends and trying to write up my reasonings for someone who was obviously breaking a rule because she disagreed with the rule but she was challenging every decision and we had to give so many chances and allow appeals and she was ruining my night, and I was acutely aware that she could just hop to a new account when she was done. Also we had mod drama.
The “legal eagles” are best ignored. Just ignore them. Most of the time they’ll just stop if you ignore them, because they want you to argue with them.
Absolutely but my attitude eventually shifted to “this is a small Internet forum, you want to be a jackass do so elsewhere.” I always tried to find a form of balance because I did care about the users. But the balance did rely on gut feelings, perception, and how willing to put up with your shit I was. I spent most of my 20s doing this shit and yeah it feels wrong to say “if you’re a rude asshole in response to a mod decision you don’t like you’re less likely to get a favorable response” but also yeah the time it took to read an essay berating me was time I could spend on literally anything other than helping the person who wrote it and I did the thing of giving even those people the benefit of the doubt every time and turns out it was a waste of time because further investigation tended to reveal that the person was either a troll, an asshole who had a net negative impact on the community and a tenuous grasp on the rules, or someone unstable enough that they didn’t need a forum, they needed a support group with professional oversight.
But yeah when someone messaged me that one of the mods had been saying things that were inappropriate for a moderator of that community to say I spent months helping oust them and she and I are now actual friends.
I’ll also add that good moderation was a challenge because in my experience there’s four kinds of people who moderate: people who recognize it as a volunteer hobby and maintain an external life, people on a crusade, people who do their best but aren’t doing good mentally and probably need to be making major life changes, and bright eyed idealists. The first are what you want and the rarest, the second are a problem that you have to weed out because they become petty tyrants, the third can be ok or can be petty tyrants, and the fourth are the most common and they burn out in a month to three or rarely become one of the others. It’s hard to tell who will be which.
I’ve moderated many online forums going waaaay back (farther than I’d like to admit actually). I agree with you, and I want to explain decisions to the users too, so I’ll generally try to talk them as well. And sometimes we get a connection, and sometimes I realize I made a mistake. But in my experience, when they start playing lawyer, you’re not going to please them.
I never thought about the four categories of mods before, but what you wrote feels pretty accurate. I think I’m in that first group, and I try to avoid issues by moderating as lightly as possible.
When I’m in other groups or communities, sometimes I think, “If someone did that in my group, they’d get one warning, then I’d just ban them the second time it happened. Boom. End of discussion.” But I know that’s likely not how it would go in reality. LOL
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