To all the folks saying that reddit couldn't replace the mods, that it was too big an effort, that they couldn't run a big sub all by themselves, I have only one thing to say to you.
TIHI was a fairly large sub, with almost multimilion level of subscribers. If reddit wanted to increase traffic and get more eyes on ads, they're doing quite a terrible job of it so far.
Brilliant work by that team! Either reddit has to violate its own rules (which sadly they can, by deleting all NSFW content and removing the flag), or let the mods go.
And if they let the mods go, other giant subs can do the same thing in order to safely go NSFW.
"the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13" - what does that mean?
In the article, the full sentence is,
That "blackout" movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7% and the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13, according to the data shared by web traffic analysis firm Similarweb.
So basically the amount of time people spent on reddit dropped 16% between June 12 and June 13.
"Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million" - 52 million ?
Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
Again, the full sentence is,
Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million on June 13, compared with averaging nearly 56 million in the days prior.
Exactly this. Looking at the top response it details it's hard due to a ton of costs like operating costs and hosting costs and stuff, but with federation these costs can be spread around so that it's more manageable for each individual instance (as content doesn't need to be viewed from the original instance but gets spread around).
In my view this means the protests worked. reddit was forced to delay and stagger the API changes rollout over the "coming weeks" (so they don't say exactly how many weeks, but if it's more than four then the rollout as a whole may even be delayed by over a month). Presumably the worst of it won't take effect until after they feel like the protests have lost steam and folks have lost interest in it.
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.
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."