[HN Gopher] Reddit's plan to kill third-party apps sparks widesp...
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Reddit's plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests
Author : thunderbong
Score : 863 points
Date : 2023-06-06 10:52 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| dom96 wrote:
| Can Reddit really stop alternative APIs (which are free, or near-
| free) from taking hold when they impose pricing on their API?
|
| I created one such API[1] and hope that at the very least it puts
| pressure on Reddit to reconsider their pricing strategy. If not
| it should enable third party apps to save a majority of their
| cost.
|
| 1 - https://api.reddiw.com
| quadral wrote:
| Visiting your link on Microsoft Edge triggers the phishing
| warning:
|
| You might have misspelt reddit.com Microsoft Edge recommends
| that you double-check the spelling of the site you're trying to
| access. Misspelt sites - with similar spellings to popular ones
| - are known to redirect users to sites that steal and scam your
| personal information.
|
| Should probably change your domain.
| dom96 wrote:
| I doubt developers will have a problem understanding these
| warnings.
| 58x14 wrote:
| I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly
| responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to
| restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think
| these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than
| a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
|
| Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms
| and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests,
| and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive
| per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is
| cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC
| platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party
| applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high
| baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM
| clients.
|
| Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be
| developing its own first-party language model, and any other
| model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially
| existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it
| economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to
| arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay
| these much higher rates.
|
| Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the
| open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear
| who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are
| losing.
|
| (my comment on this topic from another thread)
| fluoridation wrote:
| If that was the case, it would just be a matter of properly
| segmenting the users into the right price brackets. When I
| looked into Twitter's pricing I could either pay $100/month for
| fewer tweets than I can get using the free API, or $42000/month
| (hilarious number by the way, Elon).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I can see reddit resolving this by giving certain apps heavily
| discounted API access. Right now at least all the backlash is
| coming from 3rd party app users, while ML guys are sitting
| quietly in the back with their fingers crossed.
| nameless912 wrote:
| Doesn't this give reddit an easy way to censor specific apps?
| It would be better to have a batch API and an "app access"
| API that rate limits based on user accounts rather than based
| on API keys. I could see having tiered costs for different
| usage patterns, but it's hard to design correctly.
| taurath wrote:
| > I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party
| clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their
| userbase.
|
| Is it not the fraction that uses and posts on reddit the most
| though? The first party mobile apps are well known as garbage
| ad-ridden messes of UI. Aren't they killing the golden goose
| here?
| chaosphere2112 wrote:
| I just killed Reddit off my home screen after a decade of usage
| because of a totally different bullshit growth hacking thing -
| they have started injecting their "recommended" subreddits into
| my swipe stream.
|
| I have thumbs downed every single recommendation they've ever put
| in my scrolling feed, and now am being forced to consume
| absolutely random subreddits that their models have decided I'm
| super interested in because at some point in the last ten years I
| clicked through an r/bestof link.
|
| Sigh. Now I need to actually figure out Mastodon.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Start here: https://mastodon.help/
|
| The key to Mastodon isn't to follow other people but to follow
| hashtags so they are in your news feed, and to use hashtags
| everywhere in your posts and comments so other people can find
| them.
| maeln wrote:
| Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to
| generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible
| virtually. Aside from this move that is an obvious way to steer
| user toward the official app and have tighter control, the r/de
| and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior
| by Reddit [1].
|
| Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit
| admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular
| subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them
| if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is
| wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of
| activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google
| translated popular post from the original english sub or just
| plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly
| google translated).
|
| Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand
| new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are
| basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities
| already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is
| a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try
| to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since
| it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is
| very dodgy.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to
| generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible
| virtually._
|
| If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out
| how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-
| hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
|
| Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community".
| IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe
| above.
| batmenace wrote:
| IPO doesn't have to mean ads, though. There are other ways to
| monetize a user base and to generate money based off of a
| 'community'. They're just ways that require more time, more
| concerted effort and planning to execute.
| lkrubner wrote:
| "More time" would equal "lower ROI" unless there is some
| magic inflection point that would cause a dramatic upward
| leap in gross margins. Gross margins, in this case, is
| mostly cost-per-user-acquisition. But "this new social
| network is amazing, I love it, and you should join" mostly
| happens when social networks are new, young, and small. It
| would be difficult to bring back the days of triple digit
| growth for a network the size of Reddit.
| Xelbair wrote:
| so they give lower ROI.
|
| therefore they don't exist after IPO.
| [deleted]
| CivBase wrote:
| Many platforms have recently shown how you can monitize an
| audience without ads. It's weird to me that Reddit hasn't
| pursued something like that.
|
| Discord and Twitch have a funding model that would probably
| work great for Reddit. Allow users to pay a small fee to
| upgrade their subscription to a subreddit - maybe $1.50/mo
| per sub or $15/mo for all subs. The upgrade includes access
| to special emojis for the sub, a special flair or re-
| colored username, and no ads on the upgraded sub. A portion
| of the money would go towards funding moderation for the
| sub, and Reddit could pocket the rest.
| makestuff wrote:
| Do discord and twitch actually make money though?
| Consumers are tired of subscriptions so I bet that would
| be a hard sell. They tried premium features with the gold
| and stuff but I don't think it every really caught on.
| Zak wrote:
| Reddit has offered a premium subscription for years,
| though it's not specific to subreddits. It gives the user
| a customizable avatar, removes ads, and enhances a couple
| UI features.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/premium
| moneywoes wrote:
| Discord doesn't charge for per sub access does it?
| fuzzzerd wrote:
| No. They charge a yearly fee for their "nitro" product
| which offers some perks in any server you're in. Each
| server can setup their own perks (emoji, reactions l,
| user name color, etc) for nitro users that join.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| You also get sitewide access to emojis/stickers from
| other servers, for the $2.99/mo Basic plan. For $9.99/mo
| you get profile customization, HD video streaming, and
| 500MB uploads.
|
| Decent perks for an eye-watering price, and you don't
| even get encrypted messages to boot.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Twitch is ad driven though.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| Not sure if you're joking, because that is hilarious, but
| they do offer that sort of thing. Reddit Premium (nee
| Reddit Gold iirc).
|
| https://www.reddit.com/premium
|
| They don't revenue share with moderators though, because
| as far as Reddit is concerned, fuck moderators.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Twitch have a funding model that would probably work
| great for Reddit._
|
| Twitch's model works great for creators but not for
| Twitch and as a result Twitch has been working hard to
| force their creators to run more ads.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| They had this!! It was called PowerUps.
|
| Then they killed it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > A portion of the money would go towards funding
| moderation for the sub
|
| That creates bad incentives, though. A streamer I mod for
| once suggested something similar, I told them I'd quit
| modding in that case. If it's a job, it stops being a
| hobby.
| mwexler wrote:
| Cognitive dissonance in action.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
| gota wrote:
| I think you are confusing OPs point. If he is a volunteer
| moderator he gets to set his own expectations and
| efforts. By introducing a financial component it could
| disrupt his incentives, make him feel like he has to put
| X hours, and change the spirit/community of the people
| that now volunteer (but would then "work") with him
|
| There is a name for this effect (it's no cognitive
| dissonance) I think - I recall reading about it in
| Freakonomics, wherein they discuss it in the scope of
| parents being "fined" for picking up their children late.
| The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a
| business transaction - instead of being a social
| imposition - and actually led to _more_ delays, not fewer
| MandieD wrote:
| Name of the effect: categorical change.
|
| The most (in)famous example in the US is the American Red
| Cross following the US forces in Europe during WW2
| beginning to charge a few cents for donuts that they had
| been giving away for free. While they were still
| inexpensive compared to their usual price at US donut
| shops, it was a huge change in the relationship that
| ended up souring a lot of soldiers towards the Red Cross.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| > There is a name for this effect
|
| Are you referring to incentives? Specifically turning a
| social incentive to a market incentive?
|
| > The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a
| business transaction
|
| It should also be noted the parent's monthly bill was
| around $380, and the fine was only around $3. So even
| being late every workday in a month was only an
| additional $60. And I'm sure some of those parents would
| happily spend that to be rid of their children for a
| little bit longer.
|
| I do wish it was recorded whether the length of tardiness
| increased as well, and what the mean and mode were.
| Whether parents started to abuse the time or not, in
| effect milking the daycare for care, is an important data
| point as well.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Looks like you pasted the wrong reply in this thread ;)
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| No, though you may wish to check over the 2nd paragraph
| in the post I replied to ;D
|
| Admittedly without quoting it does look out of place. I
| just edited it to fix that. Thank you!
| Semaphor wrote:
| Oh, yeah, without actually having read freakonomics, that
| looked very out of place ;)
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Milking the daycare would look the same as people feeling
| less obligated to pick up on time, now that they are
| compensating the provider for the extra time spent.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I disagree
| ufmace wrote:
| I think I see the point - that people have very different
| beliefs and expectations about paid jobs versus volunteer
| work.
|
| If I pay you just a little bit for something you were
| doing, it may not really register much because it isn't
| enough money to really do anything with besides buy a
| meal or a new toy here and there or something.
|
| If I pay you enough for it to be considered a job, that
| brings in a whole bunch of new expectations on both
| sides. You may expect to be paid a fair wage compared to
| what you previously did, to have a good career path, to
| do something that looks good on a resume, to have a good
| work-life balance, etc. And they may expect a certain
| stable and reliable productivity level, advanced notice
| for any time off, etc.
| PhoenixReborn wrote:
| The irony is that Reddit already has this feature, but
| that goes to show how poorly they market it. They also
| sell NFT avatars (though cleverly, not describing them as
| NFTs in the UI)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| As a shareholder I don't want "instead of ads we have", I
| want "On top of ads we have"
| ulucs wrote:
| On top of ads, you can have a dead website :^)
| djbusby wrote:
| So, impossible.
| Anon4Now wrote:
| Meanwhile, their valuation has gotten worse. In 2021 Fidelity
| invested $28.2M in Reddit and now values that investment at
| $16.6M - a 41% drop [1].
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-
| valuation/
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Most tech companies are down 40% from their peak still
| unless they are part of this ai hype train.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Big difference between tech giants making software used
| by businesses and a glorified message board
| afavour wrote:
| Not really, all comes down to "are they making money?"
| nemo44x wrote:
| To be fair most every growth tech company took a pretty big
| haircut. Some value has returned to the stronger players
| recently. However, weaker ones are still well off ATHs.
| Will be interesting to see how Reddit looks.
| paulddraper wrote:
| That's not far off tech in general though
| intrasight wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they try to stop this protest by
| allocating a large block of IPO shares to moderators. As they
| should given how much moderators contribute to their success.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Far more likely they'll just remove all the "offending" mods
| and replace them with puppets
| Ralfp wrote:
| How many mods are there on Reddit that run big communities?
| For all we know it may result in mods getting $100 each.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Actually paying the moderators for their time and effort to
| manage and build your product? I mean - it would be the right
| thing to do, for sure, but to suggest that Reddit Inc. under
| its current direction would have such foresight is a fantasy.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| There is 0% chance of this happening. Moderators are too
| fungible
| w-m wrote:
| Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out,
| so that's very on brand?
|
| On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how
| high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English
| is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that
| most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also
| members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's
| because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all
| these niche communities of your interests that you could join.
| But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you
| end up with communities that are too small to be interesting.
| E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content,
| compared to r/electricvehicles/
| biztos wrote:
| Reddit is hiring and some of the job descriptions talk
| specifically about international expansion, so I guess at
| least Reddit thinks it is or will be significant.
|
| Although I'd be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn't
| done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-
| speaking part of the German market.
| m4jor wrote:
| Reddit actually just fired 90 people and put on a hiring
| freeze for the rest of the year.
|
| https://archive.ph/3wR5j
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think people who speak no english don't end on Reddit in
| the first place. It had very few traction in France as a far
| as I know, and facebook groups would be the go to places for
| most people.
|
| So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably
| participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of
| /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to
| have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.
|
| Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime
| an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese
| only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have
| a less filtered bubble.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'd say most, but certainly not (almost) all. There are quite
| a few (real) German subreddits, and most of my countrypeople
| prefer their native language over English, and are often not
| even that comfortable with it. Forum culture is also still
| relatively big in Germany, so for niche hobbies there are
| probably several forums, I know that for ecigs, the German
| reddit community can't hold a candle to the _several_ ecig
| forums.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > the r/de and r/France community have find some really
| concerning behavior by Reddit
|
| For anyone who doesn't want to translate the French post and
| German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with
| _local_ content by machine-translating successful posts of the
| original subs, and then spammed every user from that country
| with an admin message about those subs.
| activiation wrote:
| Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Funny enough i've been getting multiple daily notifications
| of people following me on reddit.. Never used that
| feature.. nor does anyone I know use it. All the names are
| clearly generated too. Is it a 3rd party? Is it Reddit
| trying to create user metrics as a social platform? It's
| all suspect at this point.
| w0m wrote:
| I assumed this is simply spammers as they accounts are
| ~always deleted quickly.
| danudey wrote:
| In my experience it's all OnlyFans porn spam, which I
| doubt are bots created by Reddit.
| devsegal wrote:
| Maybe for you. Those girls were genuinely interested in
| my thoughts on philosophy.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Just share your credit card and they'll share even
| more... thoughts.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| careful you're putting descartes before the wh...
| nevermind
| missblit wrote:
| I know I have accidentally followed like half a dozen
| people. Looks like the UI is a bit different now but it
| used to be way too easy to click that button.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Doesn't this potentially open them to serious securities
| fraud? They're making financial statements about the
| revenue they receive per user. By flooding with fake users,
| their trying to make their top-line numbers seem high while
| pretending like the revenue / user is staying constant.
| It's one thing if it's the initial seed to a two-sided
| marketplace, but if this gambit doesn't pan out that seems
| like a problem. The SEC failing to enforce securities fraud
| like this is a separate matter.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The don't have to include those fake users in the active
| users count. They could exclude them.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Generating content is not the same as falsely counting
| users.
|
| Sure, they could be dumb enough to do that, but no
| evidence of it.
| dmux wrote:
| >Generating content is not the same as falsely counting
| users.
|
| I agree, but all content _is_ generated by users.
| miroljub wrote:
| Since those users are their own, it's easy to just write
| "select count(*) from usres where fake = 1" and report
| it.
|
| It's not like they need first to detect those users are
| bots.
| kjeetgill wrote:
| I assume you meant "fake != 1"?
| [deleted]
| baby wrote:
| and it's hard to blame them no? As much as I hate Reddit
| and their ways to force me to login or use their app, if
| they want to get more users from some countries why not
| fake it til you make it?
| Semaphor wrote:
| Uh, yes? It looks dumb and low quality. And it's not as
| if Germans are a tiny minority, the German sub has over 1
| millions subs, and at least on samplesize, they are the
| largest group after the 3 big English countries (US, UK,
| CA)
| baby wrote:
| Have you looked at nextdoor or fb groups lately? They
| look the same
| the_doctah wrote:
| Just copying the playbook of every social media platform
| using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump
| their perceived value.
| activiation wrote:
| Should be illegal for the purpose of pumping your value
| for becoming a public company
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I'm curious about what a better metric would be.
|
| Social media sites are usually valued by how many active
| users they have, so what's a better measure of that?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| DAU/MAU ratio tells a lot more. It's often called
| "stickiness." It's a good metric of who continues to come
| back to your platform.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Those numbers would still be juiced in the same way with
| artificial traffic. Revenue / user or revenue / request
| is less easily gamed as the more artificial traffic you
| add the larger that drops. Of course that's a lagging
| indicator but at least that forces Reddit into a position
| where they'd have to be defrauding their advertisers (or
| overcharging them on impressions which they'll push back
| on).
| the_doctah wrote:
| I'm not sure. But the answer should not be, for example,
| Instagram doing literally nothing about the sea of bots.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| They gotta read more Dante
| jug wrote:
| Who even wants to moderate all that?
| nanidin wrote:
| Elimination of the API's used by pushshift will make it
| harder to observe and quantify this behavior across Reddit by
| outside parties.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Oh boy, I'm sure that will work out fine (I mean, it does for
| the tiktok-minded people)
| pjc50 wrote:
| What do you mean about tiktok here? I've not noticed
| machine-translated tiktok being a thing.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I mean the "average tiktok user" who just mindless
| consumes content and is very uncritical about what shows
| up in their timeline
|
| (this is more a user persona rather than meaning an
| actual tiktok user but it seems that's the way Reddit
| wants to go)
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| The creepy algo of TikTok is giving me way better content
| than Reddit. It actually caters to my interests, not
| ragebait. I guess the bar to beat reddit is not high in
| the end and mindlessly scrolling TikTok is a problem.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find
| the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins
| back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to
| make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins
| not do it now if it worked then.
| grt_thr wrote:
| [dead]
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| Reddit Founders Made Hundreds of Fake Profiles So Site Looked
| Popular https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2012/06/reddi...
| shrikant wrote:
| I guess you just needed the right search terms? I searched
| for "history of reddit fake user activity" and got this:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2012/06/reddi...
|
| ..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as
| well:
|
| > Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman
| coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian
| launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an
| empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake
| users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an
| example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
| jstarfish wrote:
| "Hundreds" of fake users doesn't register in the grand
| scale of things.
|
| Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip
| jar with a few dollars.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I guess at the end of the day scale matters. When Reddit
| was doing this that percentage of fake posts was huge per
| capita of total users.
|
| Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the
| valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of
| fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could
| investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would
| be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that
| time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when
| committing said fraud would bring said investigation
| because it increased the value of its investment.
| roflyear wrote:
| This is essentially how reddit was founded - fake users, fake
| organic content. We shouldn't be surprised.
| Bystander22 wrote:
| That's part of a whole program; while reddit lets many mods
| work for free they are paying these "mods" $20/hour to
| "organically" drum up subscribers on non-US subs. I shared some
| links about this a few months ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Yikes that DM in the first comment from a Reddit admin
| basically asking the community member to perform free labour.
| yung_steezy wrote:
| Reddit is built on free mod labour. I remember seeing a
| relationship advice thread from a woman who was concerned her
| partner thought being a reddit mod equated to having a second
| job. https://teddit.net/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_h
| usba...
| KomoD wrote:
| Proper link: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/commen
| ts/r2w9qb/my_h...
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Isn't faking use activity....fraud?
|
| When you're trying to gain traction on a new and free website
| it's one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)...but if
| you're trying to sell the company to investors this should be a
| crime.
| tyingq wrote:
| It sounds a lot like a version of "pump and dump", which the
| SEC puts in the securities fraud category.
| kevstev wrote:
| Its fine (well to be more specific- legal) to have fake
| users/content on your privately owned website, but it will
| be fraud if they include those users and posts in their
| metrics provided to investors. In the US anyway.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| If the owner of the site was in on it (adding fake
| users/content) and passed it off to investors as natural,
| I can see that as being fraudulent, but what if the owner
| legitimately wasn't in on it, as could easily be the case
| if the "fake" users/content were created by third parties
| for unrelated reasons and not detected by the owner?
| Indeed, the concept of using a throwaway per submission
| in certain circumstances is a well-known part of the
| culture, which is why I put "fake" in quotation marks --
| accounts are only fake if someone erroneously assumes the
| ratio of humans:accounts would be anywhere near 1:1.
|
| And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of
| the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray
| area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply
| using the site the same way that anyone else could
| (albeit with a streamlined interface).
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Faking activity to bootstrap real activity is probably fine.
| To expand into international markets, they need to present
| existing activity to draw and retain users. But I don't see a
| problem with this.
| TheCapn wrote:
| I don't think many people have much of an issue with it at
| the base level. Creating threads to drive engagement on
| hypothetical issues, made up humor/ragebait stories, etc.
| are pretty harmless in itself.
|
| But when the actions are done in an attempt to trick
| individuals weighing financial incentives? That becomes
| much more murky. Had they bootstrapped these communities
| prior to the IPO filing? Fine. After the spotlight is on
| them to prove organic growth for the IPO? Murky.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Fair point. I didn't realize they already filed for IPO.
| George83728 wrote:
| > made up [...] ragebait stories [...] are pretty
| harmless in itself.
|
| Strong disagree, reading such things habitually is
| corrosive to the mind and turns people bitter. For reddit
| to recommend and promote ragebait subreddits to their
| user is deeply unethical. And to create fraudulent
| ragebait content, to make people vicariously mad about
| something that didn't even happen, is evil on par with
| being a tobacco advertiser.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| I find it funny that...
|
| Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are
| training on Reddit data via the API.
|
| So far...
|
| - PaLM
|
| - GPT3
|
| - Falcon
|
| Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it's not a non-
| profit.
|
| But that doesn't mean they should be forced to provide a low
| cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire
| investor community backing LLM startups.
|
| Source:
|
| https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon
| oldandboring wrote:
| I find it funny also. This fact seemed to have its moment in
| the sun for about 15 minutes a few months ago when everyone
| was first talking about ChatGPT and then everyone forgot?
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents
| companies from using it while leaving the API free.
|
| In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal.
| Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their
| license doesn't change, nothing about LLMs using their
| content will either
| pierat wrote:
| > Reddit is able to license its content in a way that
| prevents companies from using it while leaving the API
| free.
|
| And there's the scam laid bare.
|
| It's *NOT* Reddit's content. Sure, by posting you're
| granting them a whole slew of rights. But you dont transfer
| ownership to them.
|
| And when your content creators leave, blammo, you have no
| more new content. And I'm already seeing some subreddits
| drop dramatically in terms of comments and posts. Tech
| ones, naturally. Turns out Lemmy is actually pretty cool
| for a fediverse version of reddit.
|
| We're already seeing the start of death of Imgur as "reddit
| image host", oh wait "imgur social network", oh wait "no
| porn Imgur". We all know how this works out. Same game,
| just a bit ahead of reddit.
| tensor wrote:
| While it seems that some people feel reddit is "owed"
| something when its data is used by machine learning
| companies, the reality is that reddit themselves claims that
| posts are owned by users and so really they are not in any
| position to be owed anything.
|
| They can fully dictate the terms of their API sure, but
| unless they want to drop off all search indexes there is
| nothing they can do about people scraping the data the old
| fashioned way.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| I disagree entirely.
|
| There's a real non-negligible cost to Reddit hosting the
| content.
|
| The bottom line is there's solutions here.
|
| - High volume API users pay up and subsidize the cost of
| everyone else
|
| OR
|
| - All Reddit users pay a monthly 9.99 subscription and the
| API stays the same.
|
| OR
|
| - A not-for-profit let's say Internet Archive takes
| ownership and begs the Reddit community for donations (ie.
| Wikipedia)
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| If it was that expensive to host the API, they wouldn't
| have done it for over a decade. Reddit's popularity was
| at least partially built on the labor of 3rd party devs
| building mobile apps, moderation tools, useful bots, all
| types of stuff.
|
| The bottom line is they'll happily pull the rug from
| under those 3rd party devs if it means they can pump
| their numbers for their IPO.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Multiple LLMs scraping all of reddit is a far different
| deal than how the APIs were used in the past.
|
| Small cost x moderate usage = moderate cost Small cost x
| overthetop usage = overthetop cost
|
| What they should do is really hammer the LLMs.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| They could just block them if they want. Can't be that
| hard.
|
| I think this is more about the IPO and inflating figures.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| OR
|
| - Everyone will just run web scrapers increasing the load
| on reddit's servers even more
|
| An API actually REDUCES load and lets you manage it.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Your solution isn't a solution.
|
| Please answer the question:
|
| How is Reddit supposed to make money with increased load
| and demand for its content?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The framing in the question is wrong. Reddit gets ~80
| comments per second on average. An API to get comments
| with ids starting after n would let you reasonably scrape
| all new comments with 1 request per second (or one every
| 10 seconds if the API returned up to 1000 results, which
| would be entirely reasonable). They get ~10 posts per
| second, so add another 1 request for that. The load is
| trivial. Storing the content is also trivial; the entire
| history of reddit fits very comfortably on a single
| consumer-tier SSD.
|
| The infrastructure they provide is easily replicable at
| almost no cost (really it's just the bandwidth that costs
| any money at all). The community curation and moderation
| is done by volunteers. The content is all from the users.
| Reddit Inc is providing almost none of the value, and is
| just benefiting from network effects. People go there
| because people go there.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Your question isn't the question you should be asking.
|
| Please answer the question:
|
| How is reddit supposed to prevent scraping when it is
| legal to do so, and they have incentive to appear in
| search engines? Considering that scraping is legal and
| WILL happen, why not opt to reduce the load by offering
| an API?
| brabel wrote:
| If consuming their content by scraping was easy, nobody
| would be complaining about the APIs being taken away...
| it's very easy to make web scraping impractical if they
| want. Don't be deluded.
| krageon wrote:
| This content is text, it is extremely cheap to host. The
| site itself is not particularly resilient, so there is
| not a lot of overhead there. 10 euros a month is an
| absolutely ridiculous price for what probably doesn't
| even cost them 20 cents per user, per month.
| grumple wrote:
| Reddit data? It's entirely user generated data, merely hosted
| by reddit, regardless of what the terms and conditions say.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Isn't this mostly closing the barn door after the horse left?
| The AI companies already have their data. It may grow stale,
| but the bulk of the corpus has already been ingested. Either
| that or they do old-fashioned scraping.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Depends on the model but that HuggingFace blog post on
| Falcon was just released in the last couple of days where
| they mention which models are using Reddit.
|
| Reddit content is actively being pillaged by LLMs.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| The web is open, the site is available to anyone with a
| computer and internet connection. LLMs aren't pillaging
| anything, they're using it as intended. By this
| definition Google has pillaged the internet far longer
| and made a lot more money.
| nkozyra wrote:
| It's not "Reddit content" it's content posted on Reddit.
| It's an important distinction as hosting the content is
| the reason the business exists at all.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Perhaps because killing third-party apps is completely
| unrelated to LLMs? While they're both related to the API
| lockdown, the core problem is not LLM-related. It's Reddit's
| own short-sighted incompetence.
|
| They can EASILY provide high prices to LLMs and low prices to
| app devs. They just won't. It's in their best interests to
| remove third parties and force everyone on the inferior, ad-
| ridden official app. They could even make premium-based
| account tokens to allow them to use third party apps, but
| that's too long-term oriented. They have to pump'n'dump NOW.
| [deleted]
| ericmcer wrote:
| It's behaving like a VC funded unicorn that is trying to get
| their IPO payday but it really isn't that at all.
|
| Sucks.
| anlaw wrote:
| Do you think humans would do that? Intentionally instigate
| online engagement for profit?
| nfriedly wrote:
| I wonder if this will lead to the ReVanced patches for the
| official Reddit app getting better?
|
| (ReVanced is the evolution of YouTube Vanced a modified YouTube
| app. But since they made it a generic patcher, it can now improve
| Reddit and other apps.)
|
| There's a patch to remove ads, and a couple of other minor
| things[1], but not much. I requested a feature to automatically
| minimize the Automod comments that are stickied to the top of
| every thread in many subreddits, and the request was closed with
| the reasoning that I could do that manually. That's true, but
| somewhat beside the point.
|
| [1]: https://revanced.app/patches?s=reddit
| carnewal wrote:
| Following the revanced link ...
|
| > This page received a cease and desist letter from a multi-
| billion dollar tech company.
|
| I guess you have your answer.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Damn, that was fast.
|
| Edit: nevermind, their website is just broken, and that's the
| default 404 page. I changed the original link to a working
| one and filed an issue at
| https://github.com/revanced/revanced-website/issues/106
| [deleted]
| quaffapint wrote:
| I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the tracking in
| the official app vs third party apps.
|
| I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It
| wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a
| co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching
| online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I
| uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity
| app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more
| tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if
| Infinity goes away.
| colordrops wrote:
| If Infinity no longer works I'm done with Reddit.
| jkubicek wrote:
| Do you know what those tracking queries were tracking or who
| they were talking to?
|
| I use Apollo, and Reddit already knows everything I subscribe
| to and read, what more would they get from forcing me to use
| the official app?
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| It's probably easier for them to pipe all of that information
| to 3rd parties by embedding their tracking client-side.
| conductr wrote:
| They get your eyeballs for their ads. They want you in their
| engagement stats too.
| shostack wrote:
| From their privacy policy it looks like they may partner with
| data aggregators and onboard hashed identifiers (email, MAID
| etc) to join against and enrich their data. It should be very
| obvious to people why Reddit was pushing for an email on
| signup, using dark patterns, to get people off a much less
| identifiable method of authentication.
|
| It seems it would enable them to connect it to various ad
| industry controls cookieless targeting solutions.
| ddellacosta wrote:
| Yeah, this is what gets me--and at least on IOS you can get a
| sense of this simply at looking at the difference in what data
| the app requests access to compared to e.g. Apollo.
| bigthymer wrote:
| > I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the tracking
| in the official app vs third party apps
|
| I don't think many engineers use the official app.
| buu709 wrote:
| > I don't think many engineers use the official app.
|
| I get what you're saying... but you don't have to be an
| engineer to have a clue.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The demographic of Hacker News is primarily
| tinkerers/engineers. So it is relevant.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Meanwhile reddit is allowing their advertisers to break site-wide
| rules by doxxing users:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/141zt84/tifu_by_compl...
| srvmshr wrote:
| I moderate a reasonably sized community (50k - 100k users).
| Without using an external app like Sync or Apollo, it is insanely
| hard. Their own app is so clunky: sometimes it just fails to load
| posts or the feed. At times the video doesn't load - instead
| showing a screengrab. The worst offender is that sometimes the UI
| shows moderator controls for even some communities one doesn't
| moderate (This is a known bug going on for several months in the
| official Reddit app and the admins/devs acknowledge it). You have
| to go about closing the app and clearing the cache. For e.g.,
| here's a screenshot, which shows a warplane subreddit that I
| don't manage (having mod controls):
|
| https://imgur.io/a/4yOY4Vo
|
| Keeping third party apps open for Premium users is one way out.
| Another alternative would be to keep API costs low enough that
| developers can reasonably pass that cost to subscription users.
| But the current state would just lead to massive disruption. They
| will end up killing the golden goose.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I wonder why they don't just buy one of the highest rated apps
| (boost/sync/apollo), and go with it?
| Solvency wrote:
| I'm confused. I used to use and absolutely love Alien Blue. I
| love gestural swiping. It makes collapsing comments and
| moving rapidly between posts easy.
|
| Reddit bought Alien Blue. Sure, it's got ads and other
| bullshit, but the core UX is the same. I've never had it
| crash or cause any problems. I've always been confused by
| what people mean when they utterly trash on the "official
| reddit app". Is there another one I'm not aware of?
| ynx wrote:
| That's what they did with Alien Blue, before killing it
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Because it would not work.
|
| See Apollo as an example. You have a single dev, with very
| fine apple ios ecosystem knowledge, who always adds the
| latest apple api's and listens to community feedback and
| makes the best app, he alone can make in whatever way serves
| him to learn new coding skills and community requested
| features.
|
| On the other hand on Reddit official app, you have tons of
| product managers forcing developers to work on many features
| that are outright against community feedback. See things like
| reducing information load, or making ads indistinguishable
| from content. Those features benefit reddit but many users
| hate them,
|
| Apollo has dense vs wide posts and no ads. Official reddit
| app doesn't.
|
| The value proposition and the audience they are catering too
| is very different. Buying the app is not gonna fix the
| fundamentally opposite goals of both apps. Reddit has
| fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that. it also wasted
| months of their time making some fake reddit nft side proyect
| that was dead on arrival.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| > Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that
|
| Did you miss the part where it took them years to get a
| functional video player and it's still the worst one you'll
| likely ever use?
| verall wrote:
| It's not functional most of the time, still
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Again, I am pretty sure that is an issue of priorities.
|
| If reddit puts two juniors working on the video player
| and then has half the team working on making the stupid
| profile pictures for users that is not an issue of
| developer talent.
|
| I have 0 doubt that there are really good devs at reddit,
| and I am also sure they are being made to work on
| monetisation shit and not on fixing mod tools, video
| player, bot detection and power user options which would
| make the app 1000% times better
| IgorPartola wrote:
| So it doesn't matter if they have any good developers or
| not. By your logic they will never put out a good
| product. I guess you just found a way for Reddit to save
| a ton off payroll: let go of all senior developers and
| hire a bunch of cheap code monkeys as the result will be
| exactly the same.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > By your logic they will never put out a good product.
|
| For their Customers they will. Their customers are ad
| agencies.
|
| What they will never make a good product is for its users
| because the goals of reddit the company and the userbase
| are opposed.
| lawn wrote:
| Or the horrid mobile client? Or the horrid web redesign?
|
| Maybe they do have fantastic devs, but it sure don't show
| in what users interact with.
| doxeddaily wrote:
| Also not to mention the site regularly fails to even
| serve a page! Like it's a bunch of text guys, this isn't
| that hard in 2023. No reason reddit should be going down
| as often as it does.
| baby wrote:
| The Apollo guy should create a reddit alternative, for
| realz.
| doxeddaily wrote:
| This doesn't sound crazy to me.
| sahila wrote:
| It's absolutely crazy and akin to asking a bootcamp dev
| to make Twitter after they created a "twitter-clone"
| client.
|
| Just on the tech side, the mobile client is not Reddit's
| bread-and-butter, it's their servers handling traffic,
| resiliency, recommendation algorithm, spam filtering
| among many others.
| adamc wrote:
| I find this fascinating (in part because I see that tension
| -- features that, at least initially, help the company but
| make the product less usable to the actual users -- in
| other products). The long-term fate of apps filled with
| features that users dislike is surely not a good one...
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Users are not the customers. They are the product.
|
| The customers, ad agencies, are being listened to and
| their feature requests are implemented.
|
| Imagine a user like a cow, the person deciding is the
| human who eats the burger, the cow does not decide how
| big its house is. Similarly users on reddit do not choose
| the app layout for their convenience, ad suppliers do.
| adamc wrote:
| Yeah, that narrative works for lots of products. But
| humans aren't cows and can walk away, and it has happened
| before. Arguably, it's happening now on Facebook and
| Twitter. Reddit will just be another dying product idea.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Most redditors use the official app and don't care about
| the ads and bad experience. Most PEOPLE don't care enough
| about ads to install free ad blocking software, even when
| they know about it.
| [deleted]
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I don't know about your last point. Their devs can't seem
| to get their website to be usable on mobile at all.
| Safari/latest iOS and the site has issues with zoom (it's
| not desktop level of zoom but it's way too small but only
| after you log in and make a comment or a post). Images and
| videos load about half the time. The site cannot for the
| life of it remember that I don't want to download the app.
| Half the user settings are still tied to the old desktop
| site. Reddit chat does not work on mobile. DM inbox is a
| mess. Search UI is clunky as hell.
|
| I understand their focus is on users downloading the app,
| but this is just sloppy poor craftsmanship.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Reddit has had a mobile website that worked very well for
| years (Since the beginning?) They disabled it about a
| month ago to funnel everybody to the "new" mobile site,
| which barely works and serves only to funnel users into
| the app.
|
| It's not sloppy or poor craftsmanship, it's intentional.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I have noticed no change for years and for years now it's
| been broken for me. Different devices, all standard
| configuration, all up to date OSes. Once you log in and
| interact with it, it goes wonky.
|
| I'm effect, I guess what you and others are saying is
| that it doesn't matter if Reddit has good devs or bad,
| they are going to put out a terrible product.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| Were you using i.reddit / compact mode, or the default
| mobile layout?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Default. This is what it looks like for me when I load
| the page: https://i.imgur.com/ed1ETWK.jpg
|
| This is what it looks like when I click on a post:
| https://i.imgur.com/wqNAofO.png
|
| This is on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.
| robotnikman wrote:
| iirc there was a post from a former reddit developer over
| a year ago who said this was intentional. The changes
| made to the site increased certain metrics, and that's
| all that mattered despite being slower.
| n6h6 wrote:
| This is almost certainly intentional. It's been a trend
| for a while for companies to make their websites as
| shitty as possible so you're basically forced to use
| their app.
| niij wrote:
| Facebook is doing this. Their website is not only lacking
| features but it's also glitchy to the point of being
| dysfunctional. The scrolling jumps multiple posts at a
| time with no user input, posts missing like/comment
| buttons, CSS messed up where some posts are cut in half.
| I'll delete my account before installing their Spyware
| app though.
|
| Firefox on Android with no extensions.
| avgDev wrote:
| Facebook is doing this on mobile, they want users to
| install the app.
|
| I refuse to, and I will abandon reddit when 3rd party
| apps stop working.
| dymk wrote:
| Facebook moweb works really well, in my experience
| the_duke wrote:
| Interestingly, Instagram web has been going in the
| opposite direction - it is getting more features
| previously only available in the apps.
|
| Still buggy as hell, but they are improving it.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| And full of unwanted 'reels'
|
| Only when that crap can be turned off it will be as good
| or better than a year ago.
| meowzero wrote:
| It is. I've worked at a huge website that relies on ads.
| Ads trump any good UX.
| offa wrote:
| This has happened in the past:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| The goal isn't usability, Reddit wants engagement and to be
| as addictive as TikTok.
| hmry wrote:
| They bought Alien Blue and turned it into the official app.
| I'm sure if they bought Apollo they would find a way to
| introduce all sorts of bugs (and worse, anti-features like
| ads and microtransactions) in no time
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| yes, but this is just the ebb and flow of a corporate
| application ecosystem. times are tough, pressure
| increasing, who knows, reddit might be hoping for a bargain
| basement price for buying a competitor to reboot their
| mobile ux.
|
| a new competitor will arise to fill that void. some jaded
| user writes something better, at no cost to the company,
| inspired by what once was and what could be - the virtuous
| cycle of growth begins anew.
|
| ...oh right, that would require non-cost-prohibitive third
| party access.
|
| welp...
| cowsup wrote:
| They bought Alien Blue, made it official, and then
| completely re-wrote the app from the ground-up into what we
| have today. I don't even understand why they bought Alien
| Blue; it seems as though nothing from that app made it into
| the eventual standalone Reddit app we have today.
|
| If you downloaded Alien Blue on an old device, you can
| still use it today, because the standalone Reddit app is a
| separate application in the app store altogether.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _I don 't even understand why they bought Alien Blue;_
|
| I'm pretty sure they bought the audience. Reddit did not
| have an app before this, and Alien Blue was by far the
| most popular one. It was subsequently abandoned and
| that's how Apollo was born. Even Apollo doesn't have some
| of the features that Alien Blue had.
| gh02t wrote:
| They did this before already. They bought Alien Blue back in
| the day and replaced it with the official app. You can judge
| how that went for yourself.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Honestly, hearing that killing off third party apps will make
| moderators have to work harder to do the damage that they do to
| reddit is the first positive thing I've heard about this API
| change.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > I moderate a reasonably sized community (50k - 100k users).
| Without using an external app like Sync or Apollo, it is
| insanely hard.
|
| Very doable on desktop with RES though, which so far isn't
| going to be affected by the API pricing changes.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think a major problem is the conclusion that moderators are
| hobbled at moderating unless they use a laptop/desktop.
| nicce wrote:
| It is just a matter of time when they choose to close
| old.reddit.com which also ends RES
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| If that happens I'll probably give up. If nothing else the
| reddit redesign consistently logs me out and redirects me
| back to login after logging in.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Here's hoping that a real viable reddit replacement will
| come out of all of this.
| srvmshr wrote:
| Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) is going to be discontinued.
| Its a third party tool too. You probably missed the
| announcement a year ago where they announce to be only in
| maintenance mode and eventually sunsetted
|
| As for desktop: Going by last week stats, in my community,
| there are about 83 posts/day and 969 comments/day on average
| with 6 posts getting reported for breaking ToS, and numerous
| other flagged comments. If I am constrained to using a
| desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a
| sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with
| their tools.
|
| My tool of choice should be able to highlight new answers
| quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't
| do this by reddit mobile and their new desktop UI. Reddit's
| old interface won't allow all mod tools (such as assigning
| removal reasons) and the new UI is half baked. The mobile
| third party interfaces have been at least reasonably
| consistent.
| spinach wrote:
| You probably missed the announcement a day ago where they
| mention how things might change with the API update.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/141hyv3/
| a...
| srvmshr wrote:
| I saw it. But they are not 100% sure either. They _think_
| that it _should be fine_ until old.reddit.com remains up
| - and we hope too. This is basically the last hope at
| getting something done reliably.
|
| If its too hard I'd probably throw in the towel. I cannot
| invest my time & energy in futility when the parent
| company itself isn't interested to solve that problem
| space.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > You probably missed the announcement a year ago where
| they announce to be only in maintenance mode and eventually
| sunsetted
|
| I did, but maintenance mode doesn't have to mean
| discontinued, it just means the software is stable and will
| be patched as issues arise.
|
| > Its a third party tool too
|
| Yup, but explicitly not affected by the API changes.
|
| > If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it
| is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I
| simply cannot keep up with their tools.
|
| The two largest subs I mod are about 500k and 300k
| respectively. I cover a LOT of the modding by configuring
| automod which is more capable than people realize, and
| allowing for self-moderation (if users report X amount of
| times it gets autoremoved).
|
| > My tool of choice should be able to highlight answers
| quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't
| do this by reddit mobile and the new desktop UI.
|
| This is exactly how I use RES.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I am not sure how you deal with opinionated debates with
| the Automod. I cannot speak for your community. It also
| depends on daily active members (we get about 5.6k DAU on
| weekly average i.e these people are upvoting/commenting
| at least. I hope these numbers scale linearly for you).
|
| We have automod set up but given how strong opinions can
| be on heuristic driven scientific areas, I'd be careful
| not to make it rule based. People will be kicking each
| other's comments out. That defeats the idea of
| moderation: civil, well reasoned conversations &
| productive posts.
|
| But then it depends from community to community. Maybe
| the conversations in your community are more linear. Mine
| has to deal with multipolarity & we simply can't do it
| with how flammable it gets.
|
| (FWIW, this is a screenshot of our efforts to run it
| according to the rules: https://imgur.com/a/RuU0NKA
|
| The top row is mine as others are dormant moderation
| members who step up on need basis. 1.3k actions are
| reasonably high which we can't solve only by automod)
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > I am not sure how you deal with opinionated debates
| with the Automod.
|
| Have firm rules about what is and is not allowed. Match
| comments for keywords and set rules for how you want such
| comments to be dealt with. Doing it this way eases
| moderation by having to review the mod log more often
| than the mod queue and approve false positives, which as
| you refine your automod rules, there will be less of.
|
| > It also depends on daily active members (we get about
| 5.6k DAU on weekly average i.e these people are
| upvoting/commenting at least. I hope these numbers scale
| linearly for you
|
| One of the subs I mod is for a very active and polarizing
| TV show, so it's much mroe active when the show is on,
| but yes, easily that amount of DAU.I take the view that
| voting doesn't matter at all, _only_ rule breaking
| content. I prefer to have a police of minimal
| interference and suggest users block people they disagree
| with. Only rule breaking content need be dealt with.
|
| > We have automod set up but given how strong opinions
| can be on heuristic driven scientific areas, I'd be
| careful not to make it rule based. People will be kicking
| each other's comments out.
|
| You can use it irrespective of users, just have it match
| patterns and take action based on that. It's very very
| capable honestly. Reviewing the mod log for false
| positives is much easier in many ways.
|
| > we simply can't do it with how flammable it gets.
|
| Can you honestly say you understand the full extent of
| what automod can do before you say that? It's not just a
| simple tool, it allows for complex pattern matching and
| actions based on that. I mod the subs pretty much myself
| due to being 'always online', and I keep rejecting other
| people asking to be mod because I managed to do
| everything needed with automod and supervision. FWIW the
| community also says they are impressed with how well the
| sub is run.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Yup, but explicitly not affected by the API changes.
|
| Until they kill the old UI, which has similar issues to
| third party clients, and basically only gets by because
| they forgot about it for a decade.
| moneywoes wrote:
| What benefits do you get from moderation?
| srvmshr wrote:
| No benefit. I am just passionate about some topics & I try to
| maintain a good discussion with scientific temper around it.
|
| I do the same work as @dang would here, without the pay and
| with a little more unreasonable users. (Its not hard to
| believe HN is the most behaved discussion platform on
| internet)
| jwie wrote:
| There will always be tension with an interface for a freemium
| product since it's bad on purpose. The Apollo interface is better
| for the consumer, but worse for Reddit. Their interests are not
| aligned. Even if Reddit were to purchase Apollo they'd never
| reskin Reddit since the UX does what it needs to do.
| cm2012 wrote:
| In the end - 95% of people use new reddit or the app. It's not
| possible to fight this tide. I still use old Reddit but I
| understand my time will come to an end.
| pacetherace wrote:
| This! I tried using third-party apps and for some reason didn't
| like them. The official app is clunky but it is not like we
| haven't seen similar experiences with Facebook, Instagram,
| Twitter, etc.
|
| I mean look at Twitter, since going private, the whole thing
| has been so clunky, but the parameters governing how well
| Twitter is doing are still hinging policies related free
| speech, user-abuse and content moderation.
| djhworld wrote:
| I've been using old.reddit.com for years, nice and snappy
| (enough) website and easy to navigate.
|
| Similarly I use Baconreader on my phone which is also pretty
| great.
|
| I've never seen a compelling reason to use "new" reddit or the
| official reddit app. If they want to kill third party apps then
| they need to make their own offering much better, which I highly
| doubt will ever happen.
| [deleted]
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Same (except I use RIF)
|
| I'll go a bit further and say that new.reddit is actively
| hostile to the user experience and is worse than old.reddit in
| nearly every way. It gets less content on the page and what's
| there is harder to navigate.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Largest 3rd party apps need to cooperate and build their own
| backend. They have a perfect frontend, and the users. It could be
| a seamless transition.
| goda90 wrote:
| Or they could cooperate to make an open scraping engine to
| replace the APIs. A large enough group of volunteer devs could
| have a short turnaround from when Reddit messes up the front
| end to having the scraper working again.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's a few projects underway to do just that; I've seen
| Lemmy [0] being mentioned a lot.
|
| [0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm wondering if communities like Lemmy will be any more open
| to other ways of thinking than reddit is. My politics align
| fairly well with the reddit political stances, but when it
| doesn't line up exactly it's like I'm a far-right actual nazi
| or something. I'm hoping other communities will be more open
| to people actually thinking somewhat differently from
| themselves. I'm not holding my breath, though.
|
| I'm going to give Lemmy a shot and keep my head down and see
| how it works out. Realistically, I won't be leaving reddit
| until old.reddit.com goes away or my ad-blocker stops
| working.
| riku_iki wrote:
| 3rd party apps have 5% of reddit userbase according to
| appstores download stats.
|
| Also, they likely will find out that backend is also not an
| easy part very soon.
| baby wrote:
| I'm just waiting for an alternative to reddit to pop. It'll go
| the way digg did then. I was hopping that Facebook would go this
| way, but groups on Facebook haven't really evolved and aren't
| really ergonomics for discussions like Reddit is. It's really a
| shame because they have a massive userbase but haven't managed to
| spin off new successful apps from that besides Marketplace...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I'm sure we have our fair share of reddit mods here on HN, so
| apologies for rehashing what I'm sure plenty already know. But
| I've been chatting a lot with other mods on discord as we get
| this effort organized, and the general consensus is "reddit has
| definitely been very generous with their API up to this point and
| it's totally reasonable of them to charge now, but the price is
| wildly out of line with everyone else."
|
| I say this because the reddit admins keeps trying to hyper focus
| on things like "Apollo is inefficient" (it is) or "bots will
| still work" and other secondary concerns in an effort to avoid
| the very simple issue: their cost is exhorbitant and no amount of
| vague "we will adjust based on usage" and "non-commercial tools
| will be fine" comments are going to assuage our fears.
|
| A quick story: a mod from /r/blind told us all about how heavily
| they depend on 3rd party tools just to be able to do basic
| moderation. Despite reddit having an app for seven years they
| _still_ do not even remotely adequately cover the needs of the
| visually impaired /blind/etc. The mod said several members who
| are completely VI will have to step down under the new changes
| because the app is unusable for them in its current state. Why
| should they trust reddit will suddenly fix it if they've largely
| ignored their tickets for 7 years? Why should any of us believe
| any of their vague promises when this has occurred over and over
| again? Mods/users get angry, reddit says "we hear you," and
| everyone calms down.
|
| They're panicking at this point because frankly they know we're
| too cynical/skeptical for their "trust us" spiel and we actually
| care about this. I know I am probably coming off as over-dramatic
| here - reddit is not the center of the universe - but this stuff
| _does_ matter in my opinion. And I am for one am glad to be
| participating in this blackout.
| paxys wrote:
| There's one "widespread protest" on the site every month, and
| nothing has ever come out of any of them. Reddit users love to
| think they are on some mission to stick it to "the man", but they
| are more akin to children throwing tantrums because they don't
| want to go do bed.
|
| The only effective form of protest is to quit and use something
| else. How many are willing to do that?
| eterm wrote:
| That's not quite true, it has previously been effective:
| https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired...
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Didn't Twitter do this back in like 2012? I remember there being
| a lot of anger about it back then. I don't think it was as
| crippling as the most recent Twitter API changes (where Reddit
| seems to be taking inspiration from).
|
| > And in 2012, Twitter introduced stricter usage limits for its
| API, "completely crippling" some developers. While these moves
| successfully increased the stability and security of the service,
| they were broadly perceived as hostile to developers, causing
| them to lose trust in the platform.
|
| src:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#API_and_developer_plat...
|
| Some discussions on HN about it back then:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1356825600&dateRange=custom&...
|
| I've been worried Reddit was going to head down this path since
| Twitter did that in 2012.
|
| I feel like old.reddit.com is next and that'll really seal the
| deal for me.
| TheFattestNinja wrote:
| Seconding that. The moment the old ux is not available anymore
| is the moment I stop using it. There was enough pushback at the
| redesign in the first place that they were forced to make it
| default on demand in your profile. I hope people at reddit read
| this and heed the prophecy.
| ggm wrote:
| It's extremely unlikely given the nature of the systems and
| n-squared effects here, and the absence of channels, and
| moderators (dang+ aside) -But I find myself wondering what we'd
| do, as HN participants, if we discovered there was an IPO over
| the shared experience here.
|
| It becomes clearer as "HN is down?" gets more frequent that
| there's a real-world cost to some DB lookup and ASCII
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Inspired by this whole upfuckery by Reddit, I checked out a lemmy
| instance sopuli.xyz. It looks quite good actually, and I'm
| interested in starting to contribute to the discussion there
| rather than staying in Reddit. For more instances check out
| https://join-lemmy.org/instances.
| gstrike wrote:
| [dead]
| eterm wrote:
| One of those "Recommended instances" advertises it is "loli
| friendly".
|
| Yikes.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I looked into Lemmy, but sadly it has a worse interface than
| even new Reddit, because at least new has a compact view.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| That has been a bit disappointing to me as well, but I think
| it's still a work in progress, so I'll forgive it. At least
| there are no ads.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I want to be interested in things like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc,
| but they seem to have the same issue (or non-issue) as
| traditional forums; there's many of them, and finding the ones
| you want takes extra headspace and effort.
|
| Reddit (and its predecessors, and other social media) became
| popular because it's an all-in-one. You can just browse /all or
| comments sections and passively discover new communities to
| follow, instead of having to trawl the internet and actively
| vet everything.
|
| It being centralized also means it's centrally vetted; who
| knows what kind of shit there's to be found on various lemmy or
| mastodon instances. It sounds off, but I'd rather go to a
| platform with a large company behind it than something ran from
| someone's proverbial basement.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Until yesterday I had very similar thoughts. Now after
| checking it out I actually like it this way. The fact that
| there's less posters means you can post something you like,
| and it won't be downvoted just because it's competition or it
| rubs the hivemind the wrong way. I can't say if this becomes
| my new go-to forum, but for the moment there is excitement
| there that I haven't felt about anything online for a long
| time.
|
| Oh, and there definitely are some insane places there. Check
| out lemmygrad if you want to make your head spin.
| tester457 wrote:
| > Check out lemmygrad if you want to make your head spin.
|
| You weren't kidding.
|
| > we would like you to know before you request an account
| that Lemmygrad is a Marxist instance, principally Marxist-
| Leninist. We like Stalin and we uphold the DPRK's
| sovereignty and legitimacy over the whole of Korea. We love
| China's Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
| pookah wrote:
| [dead]
| ZenMasterThis wrote:
| I'd be happy to use reddit's app if they would put a few bucks
| into it to make it not total crap.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| I've seen the suggestion "why not let Reddit Premium subscribers
| access Reddit through third party apps" which seems like a fair
| compromise - Reddit gets cash in exchange for not being able to
| serve ads at that particular user.
| politelemon wrote:
| It isn't about ads exclusively, that's a common
| misunderstanding though. A lot of issues are down to moderation
| tools as well as accessibility.
| teeray wrote:
| Because some MBAs always want to double-dip: collect the
| premium fee and serve ads at that user.
| jedberg wrote:
| Premium users get the option to turn ads off. It's one of the
| main features of premium.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Make it a triple dip. Third party apps don't provide any
| analytics back to Reddit which is what Reddit really wants -
| they're A/B experimenting all the goddamn time and to be
| honest it's annoying that stuff always shifts around or gets
| shipped in a half broken state.
|
| Also, clearly defined APIs take a lot of flexibility away
| from them, which is yet another thing that beancounters don't
| want.
| Terretta wrote:
| Third party apps are just a client. _My_ web browser doesn
| 't provide them analytics back either, nor do I see their
| ads.
|
| I dislike Reddit's narrative -- the Apollo dev himself is
| visibly gaslit by this one -- that the apps are
| "generating" API calls.
|
| Nonsense.
|
| Users generate API calls over client(s) of choice.
|
| As soon as you understand that, you can apply first
| principles to the rest.
| DownGoat wrote:
| The users that pay for premium is probably also the most
| profitable ad viewers
| blantonl wrote:
| This is the exact model that I use on RadioReference.com. We
| have an API that exposes our entire radio database to end
| users, but they must be premium subscribers to access the data
| through the API. This spurred the development of tons of radio
| programming and other apps in the ecosystem. It's literally a
| win-win for all of us.
|
| It's easy to detect "abuse" or "commercial use" and we contact
| those users and license them accordingly for such use cases.
|
| We also went one step further and completely eliminated
| advertising on RadioReference.com. Given the user base is very
| niche and highly technical, the goodwill alone we got from that
| move gave us a sizable increase in premium subscription
| revenue. Plus, the quality, of Internet advertising has become
| so poor it's barely worth opening the space up to advertisers.
| olivierestsage wrote:
| I've often wished for this (a system where some users pay to
| circumvent tracking/ads, others get the "general experience").
| One theory I've heard as to why companies don't go for this
| idea is that the paying users are the ones that that are
| valuable to advertisers, because they are actually willing to
| pay money, vs. the free users who would be endlessly mined for
| little gain.
| goda90 wrote:
| Taking something free and putting it behind a paywall of any
| size is going to anger users.
| devsda wrote:
| You can create a reddit account without giving out email but
| when payments come into picture you are not anonymous
| anymore.This will limit anonymous or throwaway accounts to
| official apps which again have tons of tracking.
|
| I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving
| the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's very reasonable actually. Pay for the product or be the
| product, whatever suits you.
|
| I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this
| though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same
| as using the product on VCs dime.
|
| The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on
| VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs
| are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative
| people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
|
| I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have
| good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra
| steps(advertisement) or paying through political power
| transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the
| society.
| adrianN wrote:
| Most of the content on the good old Internet is made by
| people who don't expect any money for it. This comment for
| example.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's true but it wasn't a static situation.
|
| As it evolved, new cool things came because VCs poured
| money in it.
|
| With Web 1.0 people were sponsored by their parents or
| institutions and they created the early tools and content.
| They were not personally looking to profit from it. However
| early VCs were pouring money into infrastructure or bets,
| so the thing was getting professional and serious, so can
| evolve. The most demanded content was content created
| prior-web, and that content was shared freely(the mp3 and
| divx era) on platforms created by people who were looking
| for clout and not necessarily monetary compensation.
|
| With Web 2.0 the content was created by people for free but
| the platforms were completely VC paid. In this stage
| everything become professional and as it matured we ended
| up in this horrible state.
|
| Arguably, HN is a reminiscent of the early stages of Web
| 2.0 and the place has good quality because it's paid by VC
| who expect to have reach(to the talent and market). IMHO HN
| is possible because it's not optimised to it's full
| monetary potential.
| rightbyte wrote:
| HN could easily be run as a classic forum. The VC money
| just makes it possible to have one (?) FTE which makes it
| alot simpler to not mess up concessions when admins get
| tired. But ye it is suprising that Ycomb don't want to
| mess it up. Someone somewhere has good judgement against
| short term profits for long term?
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| > HN is possible because it's not optimised to it's full
| monetary potential.
|
| This sounds eerily similar to congestion-based breakdown
| in data networks, or the impossibility of a 100%
| efficient windmill. If you squeeze too hard, you end up
| with ~nothing.
| maxsilver wrote:
| I pay for a Reddit subscription. But I pay to support Reddit,
| for the greater community. (99% of the people I talk to on
| Reddit, don't subscribe). If they slap pricetags on their
| APIs and kill third-party apps (which is identical to killing
| all apps and all mobile support -- literally no one uses
| Reddit's app/website), the community engagement will drop, so
| there will be no reason for me to keep paying them a
| subscription.
|
| I pay Reddit _so that others don 't have to_, to keep the
| forums open for the community. Reddit does not seem to
| understand this, instead spending subscription money on like,
| avatars, or fake currency, or minting freaking NFTs, or
| whatever other junk they're spending all their budget on.
|
| > The good old internet that we all love and adore was built
| on VC money.
|
| Nah, the good old internet was built on reasonable product
| goals and simple ad revenue. (See every major forum that
| existed in every little niche, most of which went away when
| Reddit got popular). In fact, that is what built the original
| Reddit too. They didn't need any more VC money, they didn't
| need any of their last round. Reddit literally has a $350+
| million yearly revenue. Reddit _won_ , they have a perfectly
| fine medium-sized business, and one of the few stable/mostly-
| functional social media experiences still left on the
| internet. They should be riding off into the sunset.
|
| Instead, they're chasing a stupid IPO. Taking VC money is
| going to be the thing that kills Reddit.
|
| > I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have
| good quality paid platforms as standard.
|
| If my experience is anything to go by, this will never work.
| Everything I pay for a subscribtion to, eventually takes VC
| money anyway, and eventually kills their product trying to
| chase impossible infinite returns. "Just pay for service"
| only works if the founders/owners can resist the temptation
| to gamble with VC's, and so far, none of them seem to.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Yea, this is the sad part. They literally already won and
| now they're stopping right before the finish line to fuck
| with the other people in the race.
|
| What are the costs to run what is essentially a big text
| based site? They already offloaded all of the image hosting
| to third parties. Desktop ads would be more than enough to
| support the site indefinitely. Heck, maybe you can build in
| something to convert Amazon links to referrals or
| something. Fine, whatever, it's your website.
|
| I'm sad to say it, but I don't think Reddit will be the
| same powerhouse in ten years. Just like Facebook, people
| will slowly start to migrate somewhere else. If they had
| focused on taking care of the community they already have,
| it didn't need to end like this.
| zerocrates wrote:
| They've increasingly on-loaded image/video hosting into
| Reddit, presumably to make the pathway to sharing that
| stuff simpler, and have it integrate better with their
| app. They also probably correctly just realized that
| having huge amounts of their content depend on Imgur
| existing and being reasonable was not a good situation.
| [deleted]
| rightbyte wrote:
| Not being able to profit from "internet money" was probably a
| good thing. Remember the South Park episode where the Numa
| Numa guy together with among others Canada demanded the UN
| giving them their internet money?
|
| That episode is hillarously outdated.
| nixass wrote:
| > Pay for the product or be the product, whatever suits you.
|
| The thing is you'd still be the product even though you'd be
| paying for premium. Analytics on you would still be collected
| and sold to third parties
| mrtksn wrote:
| Not necessarily, when the price isn't "free" there's a
| margin to compete on price and quality.
|
| For example, when the thing is not free the onboarding of
| new users would be much smoother for the non-tracking
| platform because they won't have to show GDPR and Cooke
| banners.
| seydor wrote:
| Out of the things that reddit has done before, this is the least
| objectionable one i can think of. They were actually late to
| increase the cost of scraping their content. Google has made
| billions out of them.
| bogwog wrote:
| I wonder: what if all the major third-party apps come together to
| form a reddit competitor? It doesn't have to be any kind of fancy
| decentralized mastodon type thing, just a straight up clone of
| reddit that users of existing reddit apps can seamlessly begin
| using, maybe even with a way to transfer your account
| name/posts/friends/subs/etc.
|
| It seems to me like this would be the only way for these apps to
| survive long term, because even if reddit backpedals a bit on
| this fumbled policy change, it's clear that third party apps are
| doomed. New attempts to kill them will be more subtle.
| [deleted]
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I hate that it seems every community seems to start on Discord
| nowadays. That being said, is this not just a huge gift for
| Discord to eat Reddit up? A huge portion of Reddit users are
| millenial gamers and likely have Discord installed already.
|
| Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to
| get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For
| seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more
| helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that
| topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For
| anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way
| better.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| Discord is king if you need information that is only available
| by word of mouth.
|
| I've found that even trying to search for things I know exist
| on a Discord server can be very hard to find. One example of
| this is how statements are split up like text messages. If
| someone explained something in text over five separate side-by-
| side posts, then searching for something that appears in two
| posts but never appears in one will not return the result you
| want.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Discord really should invest in making their "posts" feature
| web-searchable if the server opts in.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| Why would Discord want to do that? I get why we, as people,
| want that; I do not get why Discord, as a company, would want
| their platform less sticky. "You have to have an account we
| can track before we let you get an answer" is all but a
| literal goal for them.
| dymk wrote:
| Because you don't even know the discord server exists. So
| how is what they're currently doing attracting the users
| searching for communities and answers?
| [deleted]
| grayfaced wrote:
| Discord could replace reddit for interactive feeds/discussion.
| But I don't think it could replace it as a repository of past
| discussions. It's quite common for me to add site:reddit.com on
| google searches.
|
| Also reddits use of threads/upvotes can trend discussion
| towards a general consensus. If I want a recommendation for
| something that consensus is useful (eg r/televisions weekly
| recommendations). Discord is kind of a crapshoot of whoever is
| active at the time.
|
| Am I missing something with discord? I'm a user but I generally
| don't engage in large communities. And there is so much
| "filler" discussion, that is hard to lurk.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > Am I missing something with discord
|
| Not necessarily. But whenever I post on Reddit for a language
| or programming sub, I eventually get directed to slack
| because the reddit answers "won't be that good." Discord can
| fill that niche as well
| input_sh wrote:
| Discord introduced forum channels some months ago:
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/6208479917079-...
|
| Creating new topics looks similarly to creating a
| StackOverflow question, where it will recommend an existing
| topic if it exists, meaning that the search is separate from
| the dumpster fire that is server-wide search. It also
| supports pinning posts on top, so weekly discussions like the
| one you've mentioned are a possibility.
|
| A couple of servers I'm a part of that have it enabled are
| much more usable than those that don't and use text channels,
| but that's not a particularly high bar. I wouldn't say it's
| necessarily better than reddit / GitHub discussions /
| Discourse. If they made them indexable by search engines and
| in some sort of read-only mode, it could make an impact.
| worble wrote:
| Ok, but how does that help me if I'm trying to google
| something and don't even know this discord server exists?
| input_sh wrote:
| One option would be to google "$tech discord", and
| another option would be to not put words in my mouth.
| scrollaway wrote:
| But they're still not indexed by Google, aren't they?
|
| If there's no out-of-app discovery, it's still ephemeral
| content. It cannot be archived, cannot be searched, cannot
| be found without a discord account, etc.
|
| Edit - Misread you, it sounds like we agree.
| mathieuh wrote:
| I don't use Discord but does it even offer similar features?
|
| Last time I used it it just seemed like a nicer Skype, does it
| now offer posts in the same way reddit does or is it something
| tacked on?
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| It doesn't no. No easily searchable information, can't be
| indexed to the web, and nearly impossible to find the proper
| server to even ask in.
| evandena wrote:
| It's more akin to Slack, with text channels and voice rooms.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah it has a forum system now, but it still kind of sucks
| since nothing gets indexed by a regular search engine and
| discord's search is kind of terrible.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Reddit should be free to implement whatever policy it wants to do
| as long as it is legal.
|
| If people can make full fledged client apps that rake in millions
| of dollars that need corporate structures around it, they can
| certainly take that pull and build communities that offer Reddit
| like experience (I mean, you have the UI built already right?)
| without the Reddit like bullshit.
|
| So what if reddit decides its data is valuable to itself and it
| doesn't want to share it on your terms?
|
| Maybe you can capitalize on your position as it is right now and
| strategize your way around it.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| MS had an anti-trust suit against them for just bundling IE
| with Windows. I would love to see a general rule that it is
| against anti trust rules to favour your own client.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Bundling IE and custom clients seem quite different right?
|
| I feel like getting an API access is a nice to have.
| moojd wrote:
| > Reddit should be free to implement whatever policy it wants
| to do as long as it is legal
|
| Yeah but that isn't the argument. Just because someone has the
| right to do something doesn't mean you can't criticize it or,
| in your own words, capitalize on your position as it is right
| now to hopefully persuade a change of direction. I don't have a
| dog in this fight but I dislike when the legality of something
| is used to dismiss criticism.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Criticize it, sure. But when you have millions of people
| potentially riled up, the cards are in your hand. Or at
| least, you have a decent hand.
|
| Nobody really "likes" reddit. They tolerate it. I don't care
| about reddit the corporation. I like the user generated
| content there. Since reddit sucks and does things like
| gatekeep people from viewing their site without mobile app,
| and other annoying things like that, these app developers
| should just try to turn those users onto a new reddit-like
| platform.
|
| I would love to see reddit shaken up from its position as a
| place for people to have discussions on topics where the
| comments can be on a wide spectrum. It used to be fun, and it
| can be again.
|
| But it needs a Napoleon.
| George83728 wrote:
| _" He cleared the subreddits with a whiff of grapeshot."_
| neilv wrote:
| Would any of the following measures help with Reddit growth and
| retention of users?
|
| 1. Make an official Web UI (responsive to desktop/tablet/phone)
| that users like, plus iOS and Android apps that people like?
| (Maybe make a responsive Web UI that's closer in spirit to
| old.reddit but with polish, and appeals first to smart power-
| users, while still quite usable by others? And then make the iOS
| and Android app store apps that appeal first to the more casual
| doomscrolling demographic that's still not even comfortable with
| nested comments and just wants to engage with their reactions to
| content?) _But don 't kill third-party apps before then, when
| Reddit isn't known for good UI after old.reddit._
|
| 2. Improve their image and video hosting, and then nudge people
| to use it (rather than leaning on bandwidth of third parties who
| sell ads that Reddit could be selling, who eventually try to
| poach users, or who eventually disappear and take down Reddit-
| initiated content with them)?
|
| 3. Discourage other poaching by third-party services, like
| subreddit mods of recent years stickying posts advertising the
| "official" Discord for that subreddit, and try to supply whatever
| genuine appeal that third-party has as part of the Reddit
| monolith? (If there is any appeal, and the fragmentation/poaching
| is not just driven by the mod's self-interest.)
|
| 4. Make sure Reddit is getting their share of all the LLM
| training epic goldmine value of the Reddit corpus? (Maybe this is
| part of what's behind the API lockdown, but that cash cow
| might've already left the barn, and maybe there are other angles
| to also be pursuing urgently?)
|
| These questions have come to mind, but I don't have data or
| internal business info to answer them.
| rationalfaith wrote:
| [dead]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's interesting to watch Reddit lose control of the narrative on
| this. If you read the relevant threads Reddit admins swear up and
| down that the new API pricing is reasonable and not intended to
| kill third party apps.
|
| Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
| tjpnz wrote:
| That might be true for the admins but for people further up the
| chain things are going exactly to plan. Third party apps
| absolutely aren't going to be part of Reddit's future, as
| evidenced by their ridiculous pricing model. My only criticism
| is that they didn't announce the sunsetting of the API,
| although the two are functionally equivalent.
| masklinn wrote:
| > the new API pricing is reasonable and not intended to kill
| third party apps.
|
| It's quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved,
| but it's _completely_ implausible when you add that NSFW
| content will be removed from the API entirely, and that third
| party client will not be allowed to be ad-supported.
| burntsushi wrote:
| > NSFW content will be removed from the API entirely
|
| Wow. I didn't know about that. That would prevent browsing
| /r/cigars via API calls. Because every post in /r/cigars is
| marked as NSFW. Why? I'll give you one guess. https://old.red
| dit.com/r/cigars/comments/ubu6b2/why_is_rciga...
| masklinn wrote:
| > Wow. I didn't know about that.
|
| According to the Apollo dev's recounting of the call this
| is "sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked
| NSFW for non-sexual reasons".
|
| I assume there's a flag at the subreddit level or
| something, because Narwhal doesn't show the "cheeky
| narwhal" on /r/cigars (something it does on NSFW subs). I
| don't know how they'll handle SFW subreddits where NSFW is
| used for both spoilers and dodgy content though. That's
| assuming they even care.
| elil17 wrote:
| It is really strange which drug-related subs are NSFW and
| which aren't. Like why not alcohol related subs?
|
| I think they probably all should be marked NSFW but it is
| weird.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| I think some people are mixing age control with what is
| "not safe for work".
|
| Everyone I work with is old enough to drink or smoke, so
| posting about cigars or beers could be appropriate but
| also could not be.
|
| Tldr NSFW != age controls
| burntsushi wrote:
| None of them should be IMO. It's dumb. "I smoked a lovely
| cigar over the weekend" is fine safe-for-work chit chat.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| In a general office context people can talk about going
| wine tasting the previous weekend.
| Genbox wrote:
| I've done my best to research this and I'm unable to find any
| numbers on the matter besides one app developers
| miscalculation of 20 mio. for billions of requests.
|
| I can however find official documentation that backs up what
| the admins are saying. The new Data API terms says they no
| long allow commercial use of their APIs and might implement a
| cost pr. request. It links to the Data API docs that says 60
| req. pr. minute are free as long as it is non-commercial. I
| would think unofficial reddit apps goes under the non-
| commercial clause.
|
| To me it looks to be a complete overreaction by the Reddit
| community because of a miscommunication on parts of a single
| developer and the Reddit orgs too slow reaction to stop it
| from spreading.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| > 60 req. pr. minute are free
|
| I don't think that will get a moderately used app very far.
| These limits would most likely be per API key and not per
| user
| LawnGnome wrote:
| It's going up to 100 req/m, but the new limit is indeed
| per key, not per user. (See https://old.reddit.com/r/redd
| itdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... for more detail.)
| proamdev123 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on where the miscalculation was in the
| Apollo dev's math?
|
| The numbers he posted seem to add up.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Why would third party reddit apps all under non-commercial?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean I'm sure the number crunchers have Declared that it's
| reasonable, but if the effect is that it will kill third party
| apps, then the net result is the same.
|
| "I didn't mean to" is a very weak defense.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > I'm sure the number crunchers have Declared that it's
| reasonable
|
| They would have to come up with a very hard to understand
| reason behind it though.
|
| Even napkin math shows their numbers to be undefensible and
| malicious. The very obvious reason behind them is to kill 3rd
| parties and force people into the official app.
|
| The apollo dev for iOS said 50 million queries was 166$ on
| imgur which is owned by the same company as reddit and has
| higher server costs due to images being more expensive to
| host. Reddit is asking for 12,000 for that many queries.
|
| 166 < 12000 and that 2 orders of magnitude are
| incomprehensible in terms of any technical reason to serve
| some comments and text posts...
| riku_iki wrote:
| > The apollo dev for iOS said 50 million queries was 166$
| on imgur which is owned by the same company as reddit and
| has higher server costs due to images being more expensive
| to host. Reddit is asking for 12,000 for that many queries.
|
| imgur costs $3k per 50m requests:
| https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
| causi wrote:
| Imgur is also highly anti-user and went through its own
| "if you don't use our app we will strangle you to death"
| process a few years ago where they slowly stripped
| features one by one from the mobile site.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| From the Apollo creaator himself
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a
| _ca...
|
| Citing the specific piece of text
|
| > For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in
| user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API
| calls.
| riku_iki wrote:
| He may have some negotiated heavy discounted plan for now
| from whatever reason, it doesn't mean all internet owes
| him discounted plans too.
|
| Or he is just not truthful, we can't check.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| He also presents his math, related to cost per user in
| terms of revenue and reddits proposed API cost is 20x
| average reveneue per user in any similar business model
| plan.
|
| Now I get not every platform users spend the same, and
| notoriously Apple users can be charged more (see doordash
| and uber being caught with charging more to those users).
| I however doubt that reddit users, notoriously hard to
| monetise, are somehow 20x more valuable than any other
| user in any other social media that is ad revenue
| based...
|
| Whether you believe the apollo cretaor on his imgur
| pricing, or you beieve him or not on any other part of
| his post. The numbers very much point towards malicious
| pricing. And they are, in so far as they are presented,
| indefensible.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > He also presents his math, related to cost per user in
| terms of revenue and reddits proposed API cost is 20x
| average reveneue per user in any similar business model
| plan.
|
| he gets traffic and potential Ads views from reddit, and
| can't monetize it well enough. Sounds also not like
| reddit's problem.
|
| > The numbers very much point towards malicious pricing.
| And they are, in so far as they are presented,
| indefensible.
|
| this is pure handwaving without any supporting evidence.
| Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges similar
| price on standard plans.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Reddit makes 12c per user per month and are asking for
| about 2.5$ per user per month for 3rd parties.
|
| > Counter-example has been provided: imgur charges
| similar price on standard plans.
|
| Imgur presents 1/4 of the price for a more expensive
| hosting option. Even if you refuse to ignore his own
| quoted price, Reddit still comes off insanely overpriced.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Reddit makes 12c per user per month and are asking for
| about 2.5$ per user per month for 3rd parties.
|
| How did you arrive to 12c and $2.5? Also, is it
| expensive? Okta for example charges $2 just for sign in:
| https://www.okta.com/pricing/
|
| > more expensive hosting option.
|
| this is again your speculations without any evidence.
| Reddit is much more complicated product with img and
| video hosting.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > How did you arrive to 12c and $2.5?
|
| You could just read the link of what was sent to you, idk
| might help with having an actual conversation.
|
| here is the relevant text.
|
| > the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day,
| which would cost $2.50 per month
|
| > https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-
| least-v...
|
| > So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly
| active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12
| monthly. These own numbers they've given are also
| seemingly inline with industry estimates as well
|
| In other words the expected price for reddit per user is
| 12 cents but their pricing model for APIs is retaliatory
| at 20x that price.
|
| > Also, is it expensive?
|
| Charging 20x what you make yourself, and again 4 times
| more than a similar offering?
|
| > Reddit is much more complicated product with img and
| video hosting.
|
| No it fucking isn't. 90% of reddit is text by volume and
| most of it is super short tokens too. Reddit is so
| uncomplicated you can make it a 1st year uni proyect to
| make a backend and front end with nested comments and a
| text post saved in a db.
|
| it is so uncomplicated most of its work behind the scenes
| for the apst 6 years has been on monetisation, such as
| the new ads, the nfts, the reddit premium, the reddit
| awards etc. thats where all dev time has gone, because
| the actual website itself is uncomplicated
| riku_iki wrote:
| > the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day,
| which would cost $2.50 per month
|
| I think you comparing very different users: power users
| with 344 reqs per day, many of who are moderator, and
| some monthly user who visited reddit once a month.
|
| Internet says reddit has 50m daily users, I think you
| should compare that number.
|
| Also, for 344 reqs we would need to trust apollo dev
| words, which I don't from obvious reasons.
|
| > No it fucking isn't.
|
| sorry, dont want to comment your unsupported claims
| anymore.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Also, for 344 reqs we would need to trust apollo dev
| words, which I don 't from obvious reasons._
|
| That number was corroborated by Reddit themselves.[1]
| There is no reason to assume malice on the side of
| Apollo. Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for
| a social media site. That is $24/year/user. If you divide
| Facebook's entire expenditure for 2022 (where they pissed
| away billions on metaverse), and divide that by their
| MAU, you get a cost of $21/year/user. You really think
| Reddit's cost per user is higher than
| Facebook+Instagram+Whatsapp+Metaverse combined? The
| number just isn't realistic.
|
| [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api
| _update...
| riku_iki wrote:
| > That number was corroborated by Reddit themselves
|
| Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.
|
| > There is no reason to assume malice on the side of
| Apollo.
|
| There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect
| his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis
| and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is
| working hard to distort facts.
|
| > Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a
| social media site
|
| Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just
| your regular user with few monthly visits.
|
| For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c per click will give
| you $10 of monthly Ads revenue if you put one Ad on each
| page.
| sputter_token wrote:
| I believe he mentioned elsewhere that he is grandfathered
| into an older price but even the non-grandfathered price
| is much lower than what Reddit is going to charge.
| Another issue he mentioned in an interview is that the
| price changes are going into effect in 30 days and he
| can't pass the cost onto annual subscribers for another
| year. Other companies have given longer time frames when
| making changes to API pricing.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > price is much lower
|
| 4x is not much lower given difference in capital
| investments and complexity of product
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| Not that it's really relevant to your point, but imgur is
| not owned by the same company as reddit.
|
| Reddit is owned by advanced publications which is a huge
| media conglomerate. Sort of. They have the largest stake in
| reddit. Reddit spun off of conde nast a few years ago.
|
| imgur is owned by medialab who also own things like kik and
| worldstar.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh maybe they are giving us insight into how out of
| control their operating costs are.
| krageon wrote:
| Such corporations don't price things based on operating
| cost. They price them based on what they want to have.
| The two are only tangentially related (though you can bet
| that if the costs go up, the price will too. It's just
| that the price also rises if a middle manager was annoyed
| with their toilet paper that morning).
| sorenjan wrote:
| Reddit's messaging is focusing a lot on how moderators aren't
| going to be affected. Reddit derives value from the unpaid
| moderators' work, but they doesn't seem to care about the user
| experience for the regular users, so it still feels a bit self
| serving whenever they swear mods will still be able to use
| certain tools.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > control of the narrative
|
| This also kills off apps like 'removeddit' that sheds light on
| rampant moderator abuse - it will be even _harder_ to see what
| the moderators have been up to behind the scenes after this,
| which is an aspect of the narrative that reddit has been trying
| to get a handle on for quite a while now.
| moffkalast wrote:
| And also kills all bots working through the API in a
| legitimate way. I hope reddit likes being spammed by
| puppeteer.
| ariym wrote:
| it's fascinates me how social platforms are never able to
| control their own narrative, most YouTuber's hate YouTube, most
| Redditors complain about Reddit. the volume of negative
| sentiment must be enormous for them not to have configured
| their recommendation algorithms to suppress content that is
| anti-them
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There's just no need. Negative sentiment doesn't hurt the
| balance sheet, and users will be back to get their fix
| tomorrow, every time. Youtube keeps making ads more intrusive
| and people keep watching. What people say they care about,
| and what they are actually willing to take action to change,
| are extremely disconnected.
| guidedlight wrote:
| The timing is interesting. I'm convinced their API's are either
| being abused, or will be imminently abused by LLM training.
|
| I wonder how much third party apps are being caught up in this
| other issue.
| plagiarist wrote:
| LLM trainers can just scrape the content. It would only slow
| them down. I wonder if reddit imagines they would pay for the
| data.
| dageshi wrote:
| There's maybe a handful of sites that people explicitly
| append to their google search results in order to cut out
| the SEO spam, reddit is probably the one that covers the
| most subjects.
|
| So I think they are thinking that and I don't think they're
| wrong.
| tensor wrote:
| I think they're wrong. I was building a product search
| app using the reddit api, but with their API pricing it
| isn't remotely feasible financially so I shuttered it.
| They may see $$$$ but I suspect they'll find very few
| takers.
|
| Yes, the data is valuable for product recommendations,
| but not at the price they are asking. And if they ever
| block traditional scraping then all those "append reddit
| to google" searches will be gone too. Google is not going
| to pay them either.
| saynay wrote:
| Unless they are entirely delusional (which is possible),
| they have to had priced it with a specific few customers
| in mind. If they think they can get a cut of ChatGPT
| money going forward, I think they would be entirely
| willing to sacrifice all 3rd party apps and a decent
| chunk of their mobile users.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| While the APIs make it significantly easier to ingest for LLM
| training, scraping will still work.
|
| Unless they put 100% of content behind a login-gate, it's
| currently legal* to scrape and use for derivative works, as
| long as you have the money and the chutzpah to deal with
| lawsuits that may or may not come.
|
| - https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/12/hello-youve-
| be...
| rightbyte wrote:
| Why would you train with the API? Just render the site to
| scrape it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| After killing the old reddit. I don't think scrapping is
| very effective, at least for the comments. Visibility of
| comments on web site is pretty horrid.
| _-____-_ wrote:
| The API is still there, and it must still be usable
| without paying, since the mobile app is using it. So
| setup mitmproxy on your iPhone and sniff the traffic to
| figure out how it gets its key, and then replicate that
| in your scraper.
| moffkalast wrote:
| No need, there are already several projects that have been
| scraping and downloading posts and comments for archival
| reasons for years. It's just a one click download.
| bloopernova wrote:
| How difficult is it to rate limit API requests? Just
| Fibonacci the increasing slowdown.
|
| And require something like a public key to access the API so
| you can track requests coming from multiple hosts.
|
| Then any rate of access above that of a power user can be
| charged for appropriately. And make it so that activating API
| access is something that can't be automated so people can't
| create thousands of API dummy accounts.
| manmal wrote:
| > track requests coming from multiple hosts
|
| The problem here is that many users are behind CGNAT,
| meaning many end users share a single IPv4. Unfortunately
| the days of counting distinct users by their IP(v4) are
| over.
| saynay wrote:
| This is my read as well. I don't really understand the
| argument that Reddit wants to kill 3rd party apps, so makes
| an unaffordable API. If they want to kill 3rd party apps...
| why wouldn't they just kill them directly? Why leave any
| ability to purchase API access unless they have a customer in
| mind that can afford to buy it at that price?
| skeyo wrote:
| My initial thought on the timing is how much it coincides
| with the timing of Twitter's API becoming ridiculously
| expensive ($42k/mo). That maybe Reddit thought they could hop
| on that bandwagon and make some coin. But LLM also makes a
| ton of sense.
| nicce wrote:
| LLM does not make much sense anymore to be fair. Too late.
| They should have closed the APIs years ago.
|
| Biggest parties have already mined the data, which is
| enough for models for long time.
|
| Unless you want the model to find some specific comment
| yesterday.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true in all cases. As far as
| grabbing enough language data to produce useful language,
| it's probably enough for awhile until cultural and
| language shifts happen (slang, word usage distribution,
| new terms, etc.).
|
| The cases LLM will need this data in is compiling
| together more modern useful human knowledge as our
| knowledge base grows. Information in existing LLMs could
| shift. This is sort of the issue even academic textbooks
| deal with when publishing what is considered foundational
| knowledge: sometimes we discover something new that makes
| it either not quite correct or invalid.
|
| These are the sort of obvious failures and disconnects
| that should become apparent if training lags behind. LLM
| services interested in revenue without plans for
| continuously updating training data are somewhat betting
| that not too much will change from most end users
| perspectives for awhile and for some use cases that might
| be true but the limits of training data over time for
| public instances of GPT for example have already hindered
| some.
|
| Much of prompting, from my anecdata, needs to take that
| into consideration as one of the base constraints (does
| this model even have up-to-date information it could
| query and dump something useful from). To some degree
| those training limits also help expose "hallucinations"
| or interpolation/extrapolation attempts of LLM models. If
| I know it doesn't have this information in the training
| set and test the system against it, I can observe how
| well it interpolates, extrapolates, and is transparent
| about when that's happening. For example if I ask
| existing models about new syntaxes and structures
| introduced in Java 21, most should return something back
| like it doesn't exist, it lacks that newer information,
| or something to that effect. If instead it starts
| producing code samples that it couldn't possibly have
| knowledge of, then I know it's passing back garbage. If
| it's being continually updated at some frequency, I'm no
| longer so sure and it may actually be providing new
| useful information.
| d11z wrote:
| It makes sense to me, but for LLM spam bots, not
| training. I'm assuming it'll only increase as time
| passes.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Reddit is good for product recommendations and in that
| regards recency matters e.g ask ChatGPT what ODE you
| should get for a Sega Saturn.
|
| By allowing LLMs low cost or free access to their users
| data companies like Reddit are essentially helping
| companies like OpenAI choke their traffic.
|
| Over time as people realise it's quicker to ask ChatGPT a
| question than it is to post a question on reddit they
| will start losing content also.
|
| Also think about the difficulty of policing content
| generated by swarms of LLM bots with API access for PR
| campaigns.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| Fenrir.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| For price and ease of install sure I would agree.
|
| I just asked Chat GPT this very question and it didn't
| mention the Fenrir. It mentioned the other contender
| (MODE) but it failed to differentiate it from all the
| other offerings i.e it has the ability to connect a SATA
| SSD and hold the entire Sega Saturn library on the
| device.
| nicce wrote:
| At which point you need API access, and the crawled
| indexes are not enough enough? Is Google also required to
| start paying for API access for indexing pages and
| showing them in the search results?
|
| I am just wondering, where is the limit, since in that
| case the model might not be trained anymore and instead
| it is used for similar purpose than search engine. I
| guess Bing is already doing this, without Reddit API.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| How many of those biggest parties do you expect to
| give/sell the data to new players if it'd even be legal
| for them to do so. Closing the gates can still provide a
| revenue stream for Reddit, especially if they do it early
| enough into the hype cycle.
| Sol- wrote:
| If that's the case, whitelisting the most popular apps might
| be somewhat of a solution, no? Also I think being transparent
| about the fears that LLMs take from your site without
| returning any value would probably be met with understanding
| from the userbase.
| philjohn wrote:
| The issue is, Reddit is ad supported. The popular apps
| bypass showing ads.
|
| The problem goes away if the apps charge for a
| subscription, which covers their API access.
| graftak wrote:
| This could have been solved by only allowing Reddit
| premium users to make use of the API (they don't see
| ads). in addition, the API cost is about 20 times more
| lucrative than a user seeing ads, which is an insane
| upsell. Then there's the issue that Reddit won't allow
| NSFW content over the API, which is just total BS in the
| picture you drew.
| saynay wrote:
| On the flip side, if they wanted to kill the popular apps,
| why wouldn't they just block them directly instead of doing
| so indirectly through crazy API pricing?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Maybe they think an obscure way to close down apps will
| lead to less dissent?
| saynay wrote:
| Clearly it isn't. Could be a miscalculation on their
| part, but I still think it more plausible they are hoping
| to find a big customer who will actually pay those
| prices.
| pookah wrote:
| Why do people think they need these big centralized authoritarian
| "communities" on the internet? In the late 90's and early 2000's
| we ran PHP forums from our parents houses.
| snthd wrote:
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
|
| >A Lemmy frontend based on phpBB 3.3.
|
| https://fedibb.ml/
|
| >Flagship instance for lemmyBB
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Oh, let me tell you about the real community young one, Usenet.
| Once upon a time, there was this system where servers
| collaborated and exchanged posts overnight with this dark magic
| called UUCP. In the morning you would wake up, and messages,
| discussions and such would be structured, and organized in a
| sane, logical manner! That is right! We did it both ways,
| uphill, in shorts!
|
| We good import certain "branches" into our BBSes, respond, and
| then at night we dialed up the nearest BBS or system and
| exchanged our messages. Sooner or later the entire collection
| was exchanged, and everyone was up to date. Not just that, you
| could slice off a piece and then splice it back in (FidoNet),
| and it still worked!
|
| You can have a discussion in _comp.compression_ and lo, people
| would discuss only compression! You wanted to chat about
| something off the wall? You can find it under the _alt._
| branch, and lo people talked off the wall stuff!
|
| There is nothing new under the sun.
| delecti wrote:
| Say I spend time on r/digg, then I find out about r/hackernews.
| I can start browsing there without creating a new account
| _immediately_. That lack of friction between communities is
| probably Reddit 's biggest strength. I can't even imagine how
| many PHP forums have leaked my email address over the decades.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| This doesn't seem like that big a deal, you can still have
| shared logins (Google etc)
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I don't know man. I feel like it's pretty self evident why
| folks would not want to have 20 different logins for 20
| different websites so that they can get information for all
| of their hobbies, professional questions, travel, etc.
|
| As someone in the film industry, I lean very heavily
| DVXuser, Cinema5D, and Gear Source. Three different sites
| with three different cultures and ways of doing things. I
| really like them and they are great resources, but frankly,
| I find myself on Reddit most of the time anyway because
| it's just easier to get the information I need from a
| variety of communities all in one spot.
| delecti wrote:
| Then you have the problem of "wait, which site did I sign
| up for this random forum for, google, facebook, or
| twitter?" and still keeps the problem of needing to
| _establish_ the account, things like a profile picture,
| signature, email preferences, learning that forum 's
| etiquette, the forum's organization (where's "general"?),
| and then only after a non-trivial investment might you find
| out that the mods are actually dicks so it's not worth the
| effort.
|
| On reddit, I can click the "random" button and immediately
| discover a community that I can already post in. Do I want
| to talk on r/entrepreneur, or r/galaxytab (the actual two
| first subreddits that "random" took me to just now)? I can
| do that right now, and while there I also see the orangered
| envelope telling me I got replies to comments I made on
| r/zelda (also a true story of what happened when I just
| clicked "random").
| gnulinux wrote:
| > This doesn't seem like that big a deal
|
| This is not a big deal _for you_ , it's the biggest deal
| for me. I refuse to make any other registrations unless
| absolutely necessary (healthcare/hospital website etc). If
| your website asks me for a password, I don't care enough to
| register.
| derbOac wrote:
| I have the same sentiment, but think we might have been in the
| minority. You might have run PHP forums from your parents'
| houses, but most people don't have that experience. I think a
| lot of the more successful social media sites over the years
| essentially are offering a centralized, easy-to-use equivalent
| to some of those federated systems (for example, personal blog
| RSS feeds -> Twitter, PHP forum -> Reddit). People use them
| precisely because they couldn't set up PHP forums in their
| house.
|
| The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just
| easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is
| to scour through Google search results for a forum topic.
|
| Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite
| understand why some modern decentralized or federated
| alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of
| the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising,
| but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in
| the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete
| lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the
| ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated
| system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with
| lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that
| are relatively circumscribed for most people.
| DrFell wrote:
| People who grew up in the Web 2.0 era are obsessed with trends
| and influence. Posit A#1 of these people is: The more people
| who think something, the truer it is. Therefore, you must be in
| the biggest group of people possible in order for your
| groupthink be true. A small group that tries to disagree with a
| big group is wrong. Therefore, their ideas will die, and there
| is no point in being a member of such a group. You might as
| well just think for yourself, which, as they all know, is
| insane.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'll have you know I still run a PHP forum but from my own
| house, lol. Unfortunately most activity seems to have moved to
| Discord.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Discord isn't great for slower paced and long form discussion
| so I never was able to really catch on to using it.
| code_duck wrote:
| I've seen various forums move to Discord. It doesn't make
| much sense to me as Discord is essentially IRC and is not the
| same format as a forum at all.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I would prefer those forums too, but there isn't a lot I can do
| about certain topics only having a useful community on reddit.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Anyone else notice Apple's mention of Apollo yesterday? It
| probably helps that Apollo is built by former Apple guys but it
| gave me a good chuckle.
| sgt wrote:
| Noticed that. Good ol' Craig Federighi. Also didn't know he is
| really good on the guitar.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I noticed. Was wondering if it was recorded before the
| controversy began or if it was shoehorned in there to give 'em
| some support.
| sputter_token wrote:
| The app icon has been shown in WWDC presentations before but
| I think this was the first time it was mentioned by name.
| They do record these before (weeks?) the event but they could
| have cut it out if they did not want it there.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Yeah I thought that was an interestingly pointed mention. Idk
| why they'd mention it though.
| daveidol wrote:
| It was probably recorded far before this controversy started
| anonred wrote:
| Christian interned for a summer at Apple. I don't understand
| why he pushes this narrative given that Apollo is good enough
| to stand on its own without shady marketing tactics.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| The problem with previous competitors of Reddit was, that they
| were created by people that were not wanted on Reddit. Toxic
| people, trump and fake news subs, hate subs and more.
|
| Apps like Apollo and other have a good opportunity to change
| that. They have a ,,normal" userbase that could easily converted
| to new user on a new platform with a simple popup on app startup.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36179853
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36187705
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36196343
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36198487
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202277
| jokoon wrote:
| Well reddit was still able to run without money for quite a
| while, I wonder how it was possible, and why they wanted an IPO.
|
| Anyway they improved the new reddit, it seems? It looks like they
| fixed some things and it's not as bad as it was 1 or 2 years ago.
|
| Anyway the reddit model seemed quite good enough, I don't doubt
| that anybody could really make an alternative clone and gain
| users.
|
| Mastodon is also expected to slowly get more and more users as
| twitter seems quite threatened.
| mda wrote:
| The reddit web on mobile is a sad experience, before it was
| possible to shut its continuously asking about installing the app
| but they removed the option. Now it always asks to use the app
| when I navigate to reddit. And no, I don't want to use any app to
| read it.
| activiation wrote:
| It doesn't ask me but I use https://old.reddit.com with an ad
| blocker (not sure which one stops it)
| Semaphor wrote:
| The developer of Reddit Sync (Android app) sounds like he's ready
| to throw in the towel [0]:
|
| > Right now I have no idea if I should continue to work on Sync
| but as a subscription only app or throw in the towel
|
| > A subscription + incomplete experience (NSFW etc) to me just
| doesn't sound like a good deal for you guys
|
| [0]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/142dzy8/the_fut...
| cyclecount wrote:
| Interesting to see Apollo mentioned in Apple's WWDC Keynote
| yesterday.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What really sucks about these sites is that they become great
| open hubs of information and then they start erecting barriers.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Yeah, it's called "enshittification" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
| asciimov wrote:
| You wanna know the secret to significantly raising API rates
| without complaints?
|
| You raise rates to a ridiculous number, drag out negotiations
| with devs and let them drop the news to their users, wait a bit
| for the revolts and news stories to happen, then make a press
| release saying "our bad, we love you guys so much, we 'found' a
| way to get our API prices down".
|
| After all of that, API prices are still higher than reasonable,
| but all the users and devs are all happy and news stories go out
| saying how the users and devs won and got a better deal. All
| while you got the price increases that you wanted.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| anchoring is not a secret
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Anchoring can also be used in other applications than just
| raising API costs - GP should revisit how they unequivocally
| declare their statements.
| shostack wrote:
| And Reddit has done similar things before. This is cost of
| business to them.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Honestly, I'd take this, because I think the far more likely
| scenario is that they just ignore all of this brouhaha and
| aren't seriously impacted as a result.
| weetniet wrote:
| Although Reddit currently faces a negative news cycle, I suspect
| they will easily overcome it by simply ignoring the uproar. Of
| course, there will be a percentage of users that feel that this
| is truly the last straw, but unfortunately, that pales in
| comparison to the enormous number of visitors for whom it doesn't
| matter enough.
| tetrep wrote:
| While there is much talk of protest, nobody in a position of
| power (like those organizing protests in various subreddits)
| seems to be offering a diaspora option. The protests are
| extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a
| fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what
| they want.
|
| I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on
| Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and
| now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for
| a weekend.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Protesting corporations is so silly. You're not speaking their
| language. Corporations only speak Money. You can wave signs
| around with English written on them, write long protest posts,
| do these temporary boycotts, and so on, but they won't
| understand you because you are not speaking their language.
|
| It's like protesting McDonalds for a day and then going back
| and ordering a Big Mac. The words you _say_ in your language
| are going unheard, but the words you say in their language: "
| _you buying things for money_ " are heard loud and clear.
| tapoxi wrote:
| The protests block access to subreddits, which stops traffic,
| which means they lose out on money.
| ryandrake wrote:
| As OP points out, most of these protests are time boxed, so
| Reddit has probably done the math and feels it can easily
| weather this very temporary loss.
|
| If the protest was "We're shutting down our subreddits
| indefinitely" they _might_ actually motivate Reddit
| Corporate to take action.
|
| It's like a worker walkout, except one where employees just
| take a long-ish lunchbreak to wave signs around, and then
| go right back to working. What's the point? Aint no
| corporation gonna care about that.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| A lot of the ones I've seen have said they're shutting
| down for _at least_ the two specified days, and a lot of
| them do use the term "indefinitely". I think that the
| two-day time span is just to give a starting point, and
| that as people start getting shut out of subs they like
| and want to visit they'll be less likely to care about
| other subs also being unavailable.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Lots are planning an indefinite shutdown until decision
| reversal. If they have people that moderate exclusively
| through apps it's a forced shutdown anyway, because the
| alternative is immediate ban due to being unmoderated.
| the_doctah wrote:
| > As OP points out, most of these protests are time
| boxed, so Reddit has probably done the math and feels it
| can easily weather this very temporary loss.
|
| They made this decision before the blackout was
| planned...
| sithlord wrote:
| > Corporations only speak Money.
|
| it seems reddit is already struggling with that piece, so
| gotta do whatever you can.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Some of the communities have announced they will remain dark
| until Reddit reverses their decision, so it will vary by
| community.
|
| But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully
| expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular
| communities have found a way to make money off of it. I mean,
| they run communities with millions of views a day, surely
| there's money to be made out of that even if you don't work for
| reddit?
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| You'd really think so eh? Unfortunately no one wants to pay
| mods.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Some of the communities have announced they will remain
| dark until Reddit reverses their decision, so it will vary by
| community.
|
| If the sub is popular enough Reddit will take it over and
| appoint new mods. Has happened before and will happen to some
| of the subs that choose to go dark as well.
|
| > But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully
| expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular
| communities have found a way to make money off of it.
|
| Definitely. Every (lead) moderator of a decently popular
| community is getting kickbacks one way or another. They do it
| for "free", but the only ones doing it without some
| compensation are absolute suckers.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I would love to see the evidence you have for the kickbacks
| claim.
| mjr00 wrote:
| As one example I know someone who moderates the
| "official" subreddit for a game, which isn't even that
| popular, and they get all of the DLC/microtransaction
| cosmetics for that game for free in return.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| When you said kickbacks I wasn't expecting the price to
| be so low.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > they run communities with millions of views a day, surely
| there's money to be made out of that
|
| This kills the community.
|
| Or rather, it sets up the possibility of the same thing
| happening over again on a micro scale: the users (who
| contribute to the community without being paid) in revolution
| against the mods.
| suprjami wrote:
| Some subs I'm on are going permanently dark from the 12th
| onwards and are looking for alternatives like Lemmy.
| arwineap wrote:
| What's to stop reddit from taking ownership of the subreddits
| and assigning new mods to them?
|
| This has happened in the past with subreddits with frequent
| rule breaks, and has even resulting in a reversal of the
| original viewpoint of the subreddit
|
| Even if the users start posting only black videos on
| /r/videos, couldn't reddit just remove it from the default
| subreddit subscriptions and laugh while the protests
| themselves have been de-platformed?
|
| It's really unclear where this power struggle will end.
| evandale wrote:
| Nothing would stop them because Reddit can do what they
| want with their site.
|
| That said I think moderators should make it permanent and
| see what happens. Reddit will have to install their own
| mods to turn them back on, and might even have to pay them,
| but then again I'm sure there's a long lineup of people
| willing to moderate any of the bigger subreddits for free
| if push came to shove.
|
| I'm starting to look for new places to go as well because
| this feels very reminiscent of what Digg did and their
| downfall. Going from Digg to Reddit seemingly happened
| overnight. That might even be a good idea - if an
| alternative is found moderators should go redirect the
| subreddit to a reddit replacement. That'll really tie their
| hands up.
| occz wrote:
| >but then again I'm sure there's a long lineup of people
| willing to moderate any of the bigger subreddits for free
| if push came to shove.
|
| I highly doubt that there's a long lineup of people
| willing to do unfulfilling work for free with little
| recognition.
| notatoad wrote:
| >What's to stop reddit from taking ownership of the
| subreddits and assigning new mods to them?
|
| i'm pretty sure some of the subreddits participating in the
| blackout have already been warned that this is what will
| happen if it goes on beyond the planned two-day period.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I heard that reddit has previously threatened replacing mods
| for any indefinite blackouts, which would be why a 3 day
| blackout is being pursued. They will lose a lot of money on
| these days, it just depends on how much.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I'm not defending Reddit's new exorbitant API fees, but having
| lived through several Redditor revolts before, I think there is
| only a very small chance the current uproar persists for more
| than a few weeks.
| post_break wrote:
| I'm not too sure, removing porn and nuking apollo is a pretty
| big slap in the face and will impact a lot of power users.
| Spoom wrote:
| I'm convinced that they _want_ to get rid of power users.
|
| My guess is that Reddit Inc.'s vision for Reddit is similar
| to TikTok. 99% of people mindlessly consuming, with
| surface-level, vapid comments but no deep discussion.
| nisegami wrote:
| But many of those same power users are the ones doing all
| the unpaid work of moderating communities, unlike TikTok
| which has little need for such users.
| taurath wrote:
| Without power users Reddit dies and something more useful
| will take its place eventually. The internet is still
| full of possibilities. There will always be a place for
| geeks to go and share.
| intrasight wrote:
| Reddit is a discussion board. There will be nothing to
| consume if there is no discussion.
|
| I am logging off. Hopefully I can maintain the discipline
| to stay logged off. Next step will be to delete my
| account. I probably won't as there are some DIY
| communities where I have really benefited from the
| feedback of others.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| These protests aren't the final course of action for reddit
| moderators. This is just a visible way to voice dissatisfaction
| and raise awareness. These protests come with the implicit
| threat of escalation if reddit continues with their planned API
| changes.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| What escalation? These mods need Reddit, but Reddit doesn't
| need them at all. Suppose Reddit banned every single mod
| today. They'd have a rush of incoming volunteers, and the
| quality of moderation might actually improve if anything. I'm
| saying this as someone who is pretty bummed about losing 3rd
| party apps.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| >The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were
| Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm
| followed by getting exactly what they want
|
| The community leaders aren't just upset about the policy
| change, but also trying to avoid contending with managing their
| communities 100% with reddit's inferior first-party moderation
| tools. It would make sense for the time-gated protests to be
| followed by a longer tail of deterioriating quality as mods
| simply quit.
|
| It looks like that's what the /r/music team is planning to do
| already. They'll be closing the sub indefinitely on June 12,
| and one of the mods has remarked in a sticky comment on the
| announcement thread that they've been paying "$5/month to run
| our own servers to do stuff that reddit can't for the past 7-8
| years."
|
| It's remarkable to imagine creating a platform where community
| members will be so passionate as to work for free and even
| spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to enable working
| for you for free. All the more remarkable to see Reddit
| treating said community this way.
|
| [0]https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/141tzgd/update_rmusi
| ...
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Reddit has in the past taken over and reassigned ownership of
| a sub when the top mod does something too disruptive, like
| shut the sub down. They did that with r/KotakuInAction.
|
| I assume they'll do the same to r/Music if they just shut it
| down. The move for them, imo, would be to automatically allow
| YouTube and Spotify links, and ban news and discussion posts.
| josephwegner wrote:
| Yep, I moderate a sub with ~85k subscribers, and pay $5/month
| to host a better auto mod than Reddit has built. It does an
| insane amount of moderator work for us. We will not survive
| without it, but it would cost a crazy amount with the new API
| fees.
|
| I will turn it off on the 12th, and we will just suffer
| without it until we all quit and the sub dies. Oh well.
| Zetice wrote:
| Mods quitting might be the best possible outcome for Reddit,
| as then they'd have to solve their moderation problem a way
| that doesn't just create virtual HOAs...
| grounder wrote:
| Have third-party apps like Apollo, etc. been using Reddit's API
| for free for all of these years? They've been building businesses
| and making money on the back of Reddit for free?
| charonn0 wrote:
| Or, reddit has been getting free mobile app development for all
| these years.
| Randomizer42 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| thih9 wrote:
| Note that in 2017 the official response to questions about
| breaking changes to the API was: "the API isn't going anywhere".
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
| diogenescynic wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| To recreate Reddit, only the backend is needed since there are
| several apps that function as the front end. All the backend
| problems for a site like Reddit are known and have been solved.
| Today, it is a nothing burger to create a backend API for Reddit
| Blue and other third party apps. Imagine creating a backend for
| Reddit Blue and then asking all its users to switch backends. It
| is possible to have a toggle button in the settings to switch
| between the two.
| heliodor wrote:
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
| yung_steezy wrote:
| Does anyone know if teddit uses the reddit API? I believe it is
| inspired by nitter which is a twitter reader which circumvents
| the twitter API.
| quikoa wrote:
| My prediction: Reddit just pushes these changes through maybe
| with a non-apology.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| I hope you're right, and that this is reddit's Digg moment.
| Looking forward to whatever the next big thing is.
| dageshi wrote:
| Reddit existed and was frankly already winning the race with
| Digg before the Digg redesign, the "Digg moment" was just the
| cherry on top really.
|
| There's no obvious alternative to reddit.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Several banned/quarantined communities retreated to semi-
| private Discord servers.
| duped wrote:
| Which is a good thing for reddit, toxic communities
| posting toxic garbage that drifts into /r/all isn't good
| for users or revenue.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| A minority of the banned communities fit that
| description, though.
|
| Regardless, I'm pointing out what is the current
| alternative.
| duped wrote:
| Scanning over lists of banned communities, I wouldn't say
| it's a minority. It seems like that they're pretty
| predominantly awful groups of people posting awful
| things.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Do you think all banned/quarantined subreddits were
| "posting toxic garbage"?
| daemoens wrote:
| The majority probably were.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > There's no obvious alternative to reddit.
|
| Less time on the internet. Social media seems to be dying
| and changing isnt it?
| adamc wrote:
| Untrue. Discord is the obvious alternative. Increasing
| numbers of communities are already there.
| dageshi wrote:
| I am no expert on Discord, I frankly have used it little.
| But my impression is, it's a replacement for subreddits?
| Not a replacement for reddit in the whole? Is there a
| single feed of everything that's popular within Discord?
| Like the equivalent of the reddit front page?
| adamc wrote:
| No. Then again, I never use the reddit front page, and
| don't care (personally).
|
| If subreddits move, reddit's front page won't avail them
| much.
| OGWhales wrote:
| While it's not a 1:1 replacement, I have to agree this is
| the most likely alternative for niche communities to
| live. It's already common for certain subreddits to have
| a discord server and direct users there.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Reddit's Digg moment was the horrible redesign. If they ever
| remove old.reddit.com the site will be unusable for me.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They haven't backtracked yet, but: a common strategy these days
| is to push an extreme thing, get people heated, then adjust to
| the thing they wanted to push in the first place so that it
| sounds reasonable and acceptable.
|
| Ex: I have a product, it costs me $1 to make. I want to sell it
| for $10, so there's a nice profit margin. People will balk
| because they think it's worth $8, or once I announce any
| pricing they will protest and try to talk it down. So I
| announce it'll cost $100. That's exorbitant! Rage rage anger
| anger etc, then I'm like... does $10 sound reasonable? Oh wow
| you came down 90% that's really good sure I won't complain
| about that you are so good to us.
|
| I wonder if Reddit tried this before with e.g. the previous
| content crackdown; they wanted to crack down to the point where
| the site would become ready for IPO (mainly get rid of porn),
| but they knew they'd suddenly lose two thirds of their
| engagement. They went for small steps then; remove hate
| subreddits (surely you cannot object to removing racism?? Oh
| right free speech), then remove porn from r/all, then remove
| porn from the API / 3rd party apps, before it gets removed
| entirely.
|
| Another comparison: Trump. Put a far-right nutjob in the
| forefront, have him come out with some really racist and
| offensive shit every day, so that the more moderate but
| mainstream right-wingers get to put in a little racism.
|
| Another stupid comparison: the Sonic movie. They did the first
| design badly on purpose, because it made people talk about and
| meme the Sonic movie for weeks on end. Then they did a
| redemption by changing the design to what they intended in the
| first place.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Why do they have to remove porn for the IPO?
| yurishimo wrote:
| Do there exist _any_ public porn companies in America?
| AFAIK, I think they are all held privately. From a cursory
| search, I'm not seeing anything.
|
| Whether we like it or not, most investor money is
| ultimately managed by rich old dudes who want to save face
| around their friends and family. Since the US is prudish as
| all get-out, they don't invest in porn directly through the
| stock market.
|
| If you want to invest in porn privately, I'm sure those
| companies will take your money and you can work out a
| payment scheme and contracts without involving the S&P.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| IME 99% of the time it's not a brilliant conspiracy but
| rather just people being dumb
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