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.
> 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.
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.
I think both would be correct, though your interpretation is more likely.
They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users.
I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…
It would make me so happy if they have an SQL table or whatever they use that's actually called "fake." That'd really be cutting the bullshit while also creating bullshit.
It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it.
Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.
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.
Funny, i get multiple daily notifications for suggestions on subreddits to follow. I'd love if we could just cut out the middleman and get the users following you to follow the threads that get suggested to me instead.
As others said, those are non-Reddit-operated spambots. But as for the names, any new Reddit users gets a WordWord1234 type name now, and you have to go out of your way to change it, so there are also a lot of legitimate users using those generated names.
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.
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).
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?
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)
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
The early Festinger (1959) studies are basically this exact point. Getting paid or paying transforms an internally driven experience into an externally driven one (get paid or deal with fines). Later studies generalized, but the idea that "external reward or punishment is involved" changes perception of the task from internally reward driven to external, due to the dissonance of "why I'm doing it."
The economists have their own name for many phenomena that come down to the same thing that the psychologists would predict. Hence the rise of "behavioral economics" to converge the fields.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
It's quite key to the legal strategy of all the LLMs that they do not need a license for their input data. So if they want reddit data they'll just scrape it (which is also legally protected). And if they do need a license then reddit does not have one to sell to the AI companies, at least for most of the text on their site. I don't believe it's a reasonable strategy for any platform (except maybe marketplaces like shutterstock) to attempt to charge money for data for machine learning.
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?
This isn’t how the world works. We live in a class based society. Reddit could just have LLMs pay more and focus on moderating correct API payment usage.
Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
..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.
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.
Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs.
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
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.
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.
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:
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly so. I mean look at it this way: You and I both know that the frontend of Reddit isn't exactly a complex machine. Even poor developers could make it work. Everything that happens is a choice made at a project management level or higher.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The problem here is that most Reddit moderators care very much about the bad experience, because it makes their unpaid jobs more onerous. And Reddit can't function with moderators.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
Engagement they were always great at. Not forced like on other platforms but organic, because they stepped out of the way and let users do their thing.
But everything they do now is to try and force arbitrary engagement metrics and this will only drive users away. Contrary to popular belief users don't like bubbles.
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?
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The problem is labelling, in that case. It should be NSFM (not safe for minors) as that's what it really means, but the NSFW label caught on and we're stuck with it now.
The obvious suggestion is multiple tags (drugs, sex, violence, gore etc.). But actually that's a really bad idea because it's a slippery slope of censorship - each flavor of the month bad thing gets banned over a decade or so until there's nothing left to ban.
Of course it's safe for minors. My son is a minor and he's seen me smoking a cigar on multiple occasions. As far as I can tell, nothing about his safety has been compromised.
Respectfully, I think you've lost the plot here. The problem isn't labeling. The problem is overreaching in the first place. And the problem is an inconsistent application of that labeling.
-People who see tobacco use on social media are more likely to be tobacco users and, critically, have an increased susceptibility to tobacco even if they are non-users (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35816331/)
The reality is that tobacco use disorder is a socially transmitted disease, and one of the best ways to prevent it's spread is to protect people from viewing tobacco use. By making it so that you have to opt-in to seeing posts about tobacco on their platform, Reddit is helping people avoid tobacco-related content.
That doesn't make r/cigars "not safe for work." It also doesn't make it "not safe for minors." It makes it "something that reddit admins want to force users to opt into seeing."
You're also really really really missing the broader point here. By what metric should something on reddit be "opt in"? There are some things that are obvious that we all tend to agree in, and those fall into the useful mental model of "would you look at this at work?" But r/cigars does not fit into that model, yet it is still labeled as such. That means there is some other model being used to force users to opt into "sensitive" content. So what the fuck is it and why doesn't it apply to marijuana? Or fast food? Or one of a number of other unhealthy things for you?
And how many of your links apply to cigars? When was the last time you saw a 15 year old smoking a Padron? Fucking never buddy. It's a non-issue. It might play if it were cigarettes or some other trendy thing, but that's not the case here.
I agree with you that it should apply to other unhealthy things and that the "NSFW" label is a misnomer.
However, I have seen children smoking cigars (albeit cheap ones). Evidence suggests that they are doing so because they are imitating their parents or characters in the media.
Tobacco use disorder is on track to kill a billion people by the end of the century. 20% of men die from it. Hiding tobacco use from people who don't have tobacco use disorder is one of the best tools we have to prevent the spread, and I'll gladly voice my support for any measure to do that - even if it isn't applied in the most consistent/fair way.
All I have to say is that we disagree, and I think your logic is deeply flawed. You're lumping all tobacco use into one category and also seem to be in favor of "any measure" to "hide" it, regardless of its costs and effectiveness. Overall, your position looks incredibly unreasonable to me. I also think that if your reasoning were applied consistently, it would lead to a complete disaster.
> It's quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved
why is this assumed? In my assessment, Reddit is offering a quite reasonable charge per API call. If this will somehow cause a third-party app to ride up $20M in costs, it behooves them to optimize. As far as I can see, Apollo caches an absurd amount of data pre load which is not a mandatory advantage any app needs to offer
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.
I don't see how you expect 3rd party apps to stay below 60 r/m, that is abysmally low for anyone but a single user (even still, it'd be faster to scrape the website at that point). Third party apps have all requests made by every user use their one API key, not one key per user. Even so, third party apps aren't non-commercial, the devs want to get paid at some point.
If it were a complete overreaction, all it would take is a single reddit admin going "he misunderstood, actually it's going to be x".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You're looking at the wrong product, $2/user/month is for their Workforce Identity Cloud, so auth for employees, not end users.
For a comparable market segment, Auth0 (acquired by Okta) which serves the B2C market charges significantly less [1]. Taking the B2C Professional plan at 1000 MAU which has the highest pricing per user due to lack of volume discounts costs $240/month for 1000 users ($0.24/user/month). Scaling up to the limit of publicly available pricing, at 10000 users Auth0 will only charge $0.15/user/month.
> 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
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
> Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.
They also have less than 2.5 the number of users. Counting the total is a very silly way to pretend the usage is high...
> 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.
Those are not strong reasons. He uses the current best availeble data he has, which is comparable API plans he is working with.
He is very, very generous when calculating Reddit revenue. When they published their 100 million revenue quarter Fidelity valued their investment in reddit at 100million, they now value it at 60 which is a 40% drop since then.
Despite this, Christian considers their quarterly revenue 2x what it was at their peak, and adds 150 million on top to round the number to 600 mill annual. Most industry estimates do not go past 350. He borderline doubled their revenue for his napkin calculations.
So no, there are no strong reasons to believe he was lying about his math when he goes out of his way to be unexplainably kind to reddits revenue numbers.
> Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
Depending on how the api is set up you can have. 1 request for the front page, 1 request for the post itself, 1 request for the top 100 comments. scroll a bit, anoher request for the next 100 comments.
That is 4 requests for 1 user by checking one post and seeing a bit of what the conversation is. 34 requests a day is about 10 posts and some frontpage/sub scrolling. That is pretty light use for someone who uses Reddit daily, and its basically patheitc use for Mods who have to put in hundreds of monthly free hours at keeping communities civil.
> For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c
You have 0 chance of getting those rates on reddit, for a number of reasons.
One is that many reqs are on posts with no ads embbeded. two is that 1% ctr is high for reddit. and 3 is because reddit has awful conversion metrics and you are not getting 10c per click.
They have tried soo hard to increase ARPU and so far they havent cracked past 0.6$ when industry leaders fly past 7$ per user.
So reddit is losing fuck all from those 345 requests, and instead is gonna lose a huge hosts of mods, which will make the site more toxic, harder to advertise and crater their ARPU again making Fidelitys 40% loss since 2018 look like child's play.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I only use Reddit in the browser, and I've noticed uBlock Origin doesn't intercept nearly as much stuff from old.reddit.com - new Reddit just has a lot more tracking shenanigans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I think you have this quite backwards? Moderating is awful, thankless, unpaid work. Why would a mod "need" an awful thankless unpaid job and why would Reddit have a rush of competent, honest, qualified people willing to replace the mods?
> Why would a mod "need" an awful thankless unpaid job and why would Reddit have a rush of competent, honest, qualified people willing to replace the mods?
It meets some psychological need. That might be a sense of belonging, power, purpose, etc. It's why you don't need to pay mods to do this "awful" work. The reason why Reddit would instantly see a rush of people willing to replace them is because that many people want to be mods, for the same reasons.
Whether they're "competent, honest, or qualified" is another question. It's why I love to see technology automate out the role (e.g. community notes).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'm developing a svelte site and it seems like the whole community is on there. I had a problem with a library so I hopped on the companies public discord and the main author helped me within hours. Reddit is mostly novice learn to coders and stack overflow is difficult to use these days. It's a bitter irony that open source web projects are using a closed platform. Google is already severely broken by SEO spam so it's a non-starter. Occasionally I'll use phind.com for dev searches.
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.
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?
Yes we do because
1) this forces the discord server owners to promote their servers on the web. 2) You're more likely to bypass Google all together and just search for open communities on discords catalog.
Google is dead now thanks to SEO anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
So one would have to check every channels on every server they subscribe to, every day, just to see what's new? And you consider that a replacement for the Reddit home page?
I have several hundred subreddits, that would take me forever on discord.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Define "porn company", it'd be a stretch to call reddit one, but if the existence of any adult content is all it takes then there are plenty. Almost all of the premium cable channels (Cinemax) were showing softcore porn late night when cable TV was king. Twitter allowed porn while it was publicly traded. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLBY_Group
I expect what the average investor actually demands is restraint and keeping porn out peoples faces so it doesn't become what you're known for. Don't become a "porn company" and don't show porn to people that haven't opted in or to children.
As a side note, I remember the days when Reddit had to beg the community to bail them out as they were at risk of being canned from their corporate owner's disinterest: https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/reddit-gold/
By all accounts, it was very successful and saved the site, also leaving them resourced enough (including in hardware resources) to embrace the userbase from the imploding digg.
I think it's clear Reddit's current leadership have forgotten how the userbase stepped in for them in the past.
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.
Because Lemmy is a federated service, you can run your own instance to cater to your specific political alignment.
However, other instances can choose to block content from your instance from showing up on theirs. Likewise, you can ask to 'link' your instance to others with similar ideas/rules and share posts between both.
As a result, the only thing stopping someone with particularly niche political views from spinning up their own instance is the potential lack of other interested users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you click the three dots on a recommendation you can select "show less like this" and you won't see recommendations from that subreddit. Also, there is a setting in user settings to prevent recommendations from subs you don't subscribe to from appearing at all, but I would give the algorithm a chance since there are interesting subs you probably aren't aware of.
Also, I wouldn't call making recommendations in home feed a growth hack, fwiw.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I think a key motivation behind this is that Reddit wants to be able to collect more data on users. For example, reddit can't see how long you spent reading a post or a particular comment if that is happening in a 3rd party app. FB, IG, and especially TikTok monetize data like this extraordinarily well. If reddit is trying to play in the same league as the other social media companies, keeping all usage on the platform you own and control seems to be table stakes. This is why Twitter did this recently and FB did this years ago. Own the platform, own the data, make more money.
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.
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.
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
Is this a case of: "private equity / venture capital ruins everything"?
And relate to that, who exactly (what person) is applying pressure to the company directors to do this, who is it seeking to benefit, and who exactly is responding with decisions to meet what amount of bar of achievement? What $ is enough, and who is deciding that?
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.
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?
Guys, Reddit won't backtrack on jacking up the price. They are preparing their IPO and need to show revenue growth for investors to adhere to the equity story..
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users
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.
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.
I assume you meant "fake != 1"?
I think both would be correct, though your interpretation is more likely.
They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users.
I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…
It would make me so happy if they have an SQL table or whatever they use that's actually called "fake." That'd really be cutting the bullshit while also creating bullshit.
It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it.
Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.
The don't have to include those fake users in the active users count. They could exclude them.
Generating content is not the same as falsely counting users.
Sure, they could be dumb enough to do that, but no evidence of it.
>Generating content is not the same as falsely counting users.
I agree, but all content _is_ generated by users.
Are bots users?
> Doesn't this potentially open them to serious securities fraud?
Maybe they're hoping to find a private buyer for all of their equity who's willing to waive due diligence.
Pulling a Twitter XD
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.
In my experience it's all OnlyFans porn spam, which I doubt are bots created by Reddit.
Maybe for you. Those girls were genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy.
careful you're putting descartes before the wh... nevermind
Thanks. This made my day.
Wonderful!
Just share your credit card and they'll share even more... thoughts.
Funny, i get multiple daily notifications for suggestions on subreddits to follow. I'd love if we could just cut out the middleman and get the users following you to follow the threads that get suggested to me instead.
As others said, those are non-Reddit-operated spambots. But as for the names, any new Reddit users gets a WordWord1234 type name now, and you have to go out of your way to change it, so there are also a lot of legitimate users using those generated names.
I assumed this is simply spammers as they accounts are ~always deleted quickly.
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.
I noticed the same thing this past week.
I am not very active, but people are following me daily.
Just copying the playbook of every social media platform using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump their perceived value.
Should be illegal for the purpose of pumping your value for becoming a public company
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?
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.
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).
I'm not sure. But the answer should not be, for example, Instagram doing literally nothing about the sea of bots.
They gotta read more Dante
Amazing comment and I'm sort of left begging... how does Dante tie into this? (serious comment)
Is your username your (old) phone number?
Could be the ham radio sign-off "73" which is basically "cheers/best regards".
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?
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)
Have you looked at nextdoor or fb groups lately? They look the same
No, because in Germany we use nebenan.de :D And the fb groups I know are sane, otherwise I wouldn’t be there.
Elimination of the API’s used by pushshift will make it harder to observe and quantify this behavior across Reddit by outside parties.
Who even wants to moderate all that?
Oh boy, I'm sure that will work out fine (I mean, it does for the tiktok-minded people)
What do you mean about tiktok here? I've not noticed machine-translated tiktok being a thing.
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)
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
Reddit actually just fired 90 people and put on a hiring freeze for the rest of the year.
https://archive.ph/3wR5j
>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.
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/
Most tech companies are down 40% from their peak still unless they are part of this ai hype train.
Big difference between tech giants making software used by businesses and a glorified message board
Not really, all comes down to "are they making money?"
That's not far off tech in general though
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
Is there any way Reddit could support mods using the funds without paying them for moderation?
They could create better modding tools, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Cognitive dissonance in action.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
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
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.
The early Festinger (1959) studies are basically this exact point. Getting paid or paying transforms an internally driven experience into an externally driven one (get paid or deal with fines). Later studies generalized, but the idea that "external reward or punishment is involved" changes perception of the task from internally reward driven to external, due to the dissonance of "why I'm doing it."
The economists have their own name for many phenomena that come down to the same thing that the psychologists would predict. Hence the rise of "behavioral economics" to converge the fields.
> 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.
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.
Looks like you pasted the wrong reply in this thread ;)
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!
Oh, yeah, without actually having read freakonomics, that looked very out of place ;)
I disagree
Not sure if you're joking, because that is hilarious, but they do offer that sort of thing. Reddit Premium (née 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.
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
They had this!! It was called PowerUps.
Then they killed it.
Nearly everyone who cares at all as a user or creator hates how Twitch makes money. They take 50% of gift subs and yesterday banned some ads, etc.
I’m unsure why Twitch would keep squeezing every dollar in insane ways unless their funding model isn’t working either.
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.
>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.
Taking 50% of subs is not great for creators.
Twitch is ad driven though.
Discord doesn’t charge for per sub access does it?
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.
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.
"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.
So, impossible.
so they give lower ROI.
therefore they don't exist after IPO.
As a shareholder I don't want "instead of ads we have", I want "On top of ads we have"
On top of ads, you can have a dead website :^)
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
They could just block them if they want. Can't be that hard.
I think this is more about the IPO and inflating figures.
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.
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?
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.
Reddit hosts images and videos
Only recently. For most of its history of only stored text.
It was 7 years ago.
Yes, and those are features most Reddit users could care less about and or can be linked easy enough.
The real meat and potatoes is plain old text with Reddit style markup.
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?
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.
The context of the thread is machine learning companies. You're delusional if you think they don't have a ton of web scrapers running 24/7 already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
It's quite key to the legal strategy of all the LLMs that they do not need a license for their input data. So if they want reddit data they'll just scrape it (which is also legally protected). And if they do need a license then reddit does not have one to sell to the AI companies, at least for most of the text on their site. I don't believe it's a reasonable strategy for any platform (except maybe marketplaces like shutterstock) to attempt to charge money for data for machine learning.
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?
Reddit data? It's entirely user generated data, merely hosted by reddit, regardless of what the terms and conditions say.
This isn’t how the world works. We live in a class based society. Reddit could just have LLMs pay more and focus on moderating correct API payment usage.
Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.
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.
It sounds a lot like a version of "pump and dump", which the SEC puts in the securities fraud category.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
Fair point. I didn't realize they already filed for IPO.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Reddit Founders Made Hundreds of Fake Profiles So Site Looked Popular https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
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Yikes that DM in the first comment from a Reddit admin basically asking the community member to perform free labour.
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_husba...
Proper link: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_h...
Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs.
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
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.
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.
There is 0% chance of this happening. Moderators are too fungible
How many mods are there on Reddit that run big communities? For all we know it may result in mods getting $100 each.
Far more likely they'll just remove all the "offending" mods and replace them with puppets
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
This is essentially how reddit was founded - fake users, fake organic content. We shouldn't be surprised.
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.
Do you think humans would do that? Intentionally instigate online engagement for profit?
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.
I wonder why they don't just buy one of the highest rated apps (boost/sync/apollo), and go with it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And full of unwanted 'reels'
Only when that crap can be turned off it will be as good or better than a year ago.
Facebook moweb works really well, in my experience
It is. I've worked at a huge website that relies on ads. Ads trump any good UX.
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.
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.
Exactly so. I mean look at it this way: You and I both know that the frontend of Reddit isn't exactly a complex machine. Even poor developers could make it work. Everything that happens is a choice made at a project management level or higher.
Were you using i.reddit / compact mode, or the default mobile layout?
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.
It's my understanding that the website that worked fairly well was i.reddit.com (which was disabled recently)
Side-by-side comparison (i.reddit.com on the right): https://old.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/7kaqgb/could_...
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.
> 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?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
It's not functional most of the time, still
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The problem here is that most Reddit moderators care very much about the bad experience, because it makes their unpaid jobs more onerous. And Reddit can't function with moderators.
The Apollo guy should create a reddit alternative, for realz.
This doesn't sound crazy to me.
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.
It's a CRUD app, best, top, hot and controversial are your recommendation options.
Not that it's simple to run a site this popular, but it's a lot less complicated than many other social media sites.
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.
I paid for Alien Blue to get rid of ads, and all I got in return was a bunch of months of Reddit Gold and an app full of ads. I miss Alien Blue.
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
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.
>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.
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…
The goal isn’t usability, Reddit wants engagement and to be as addictive as TikTok.
Engagement they were always great at. Not forced like on other platforms but organic, because they stepped out of the way and let users do their thing.
But everything they do now is to try and force arbitrary engagement metrics and this will only drive users away. Contrary to popular belief users don't like bubbles.
This has happened in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue
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?
Yes. Alien Blue will likely break on 7/1. Search the app store for "reddit".
That's what they did with Alien Blue, before killing it
What benefits do you get from moderation?
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)
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
It is just a matter of time when they choose to close old.reddit.com which also ends RES
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.
Here's hoping that a real viable reddit replacement will come out of all of this.
I think a major problem is the conclusion that moderators are hobbled at moderating unless they use a laptop/desktop.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.reddit.com/r/cigars/comments/ubu6b2/why_is_rciga...
> 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.
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.
None of them should be IMO. It's dumb. "I smoked a lovely cigar over the weekend" is fine safe-for-work chit chat.
The problem is labelling, in that case. It should be NSFM (not safe for minors) as that's what it really means, but the NSFW label caught on and we're stuck with it now.
The obvious suggestion is multiple tags (drugs, sex, violence, gore etc.). But actually that's a really bad idea because it's a slippery slope of censorship - each flavor of the month bad thing gets banned over a decade or so until there's nothing left to ban.
Of course it's safe for minors. My son is a minor and he's seen me smoking a cigar on multiple occasions. As far as I can tell, nothing about his safety has been compromised.
Respectfully, I think you've lost the plot here. The problem isn't labeling. The problem is overreaching in the first place. And the problem is an inconsistent application of that labeling.
Exposure to tobacco consumption drives tobacco consumption:
-Children of tobacco users are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084564/)
-People who watch TV/movies with characters who use tobacco are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2770193/)
-People who are friends with tobacco users are more likely to be tobacco users (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3691293/)
-People who see tobacco use on social media are more likely to be tobacco users and, critically, have an increased susceptibility to tobacco even if they are non-users (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35816331/)
The reality is that tobacco use disorder is a socially transmitted disease, and one of the best ways to prevent it's spread is to protect people from viewing tobacco use. By making it so that you have to opt-in to seeing posts about tobacco on their platform, Reddit is helping people avoid tobacco-related content.
That doesn't make r/cigars "not safe for work." It also doesn't make it "not safe for minors." It makes it "something that reddit admins want to force users to opt into seeing."
You're also really really really missing the broader point here. By what metric should something on reddit be "opt in"? There are some things that are obvious that we all tend to agree in, and those fall into the useful mental model of "would you look at this at work?" But r/cigars does not fit into that model, yet it is still labeled as such. That means there is some other model being used to force users to opt into "sensitive" content. So what the fuck is it and why doesn't it apply to marijuana? Or fast food? Or one of a number of other unhealthy things for you?
And how many of your links apply to cigars? When was the last time you saw a 15 year old smoking a Padron? Fucking never buddy. It's a non-issue. It might play if it were cigarettes or some other trendy thing, but that's not the case here.
I agree with you that it should apply to other unhealthy things and that the "NSFW" label is a misnomer.
However, I have seen children smoking cigars (albeit cheap ones). Evidence suggests that they are doing so because they are imitating their parents or characters in the media.
Tobacco use disorder is on track to kill a billion people by the end of the century. 20% of men die from it. Hiding tobacco use from people who don't have tobacco use disorder is one of the best tools we have to prevent the spread, and I'll gladly voice my support for any measure to do that - even if it isn't applied in the most consistent/fair way.
All I have to say is that we disagree, and I think your logic is deeply flawed. You're lumping all tobacco use into one category and also seem to be in favor of "any measure" to "hide" it, regardless of its costs and effectiveness. Overall, your position looks incredibly unreasonable to me. I also think that if your reasoning were applied consistently, it would lead to a complete disaster.
Basically, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3D8670smTI
In a general office context people can talk about going wine tasting the previous weekend.
Not Safe For Work means "reasonably likely to offend your boss/coworker." Nothing more, nothing less. It's not a value judgment.
People get super weird about this. Like, "this is an artistic nude, how dare you condemn it as NSFW."
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
> It's quite obviously not the case given the numbers involved
why is this assumed? In my assessment, Reddit is offering a quite reasonable charge per API call. If this will somehow cause a third-party app to ride up $20M in costs, it behooves them to optimize. As far as I can see, Apollo caches an absurd amount of data pre load which is not a mandatory advantage any app needs to offer
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.
> 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
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/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda... for more detail.)
Is there a reason a user can't just paste in their key into the client? That seems to be the right model.
Can you elaborate on where the miscalculation was in the Apollo dev’s math?
The numbers he posted seem to add up.
I don't see how you expect 3rd party apps to stay below 60 r/m, that is abysmally low for anyone but a single user (even still, it'd be faster to scrape the website at that point). Third party apps have all requests made by every user use their one API key, not one key per user. Even so, third party apps aren't non-commercial, the devs want to get paid at some point.
If it were a complete overreaction, all it would take is a single reddit admin going "he misunderstood, actually it's going to be x".
Why would third party reddit apps all under non-commercial?
> 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.
And also kills all bots working through the API in a legitimate way. I hope reddit likes being spammed by puppeteer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fenrir.
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.
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.
It makes sense to me, but for LLM spam bots, not training. I’m assuming it’ll only increase as time passes.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Maybe they think an obscure way to close down apps will lead to less dissent?
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.
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.
> 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.
I think that could be mitigated by using a public key of some variety.
Every user would need one.
LLM trainers can just scrape the content. It would only slow them down. I wonder if reddit imagines they would pay for the data.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Why would you train with the API? Just render the site to scrape it.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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...
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> price is much lower
4x is not much lower given difference in capital investments and complexity of product
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> Okta for example charges $2 just for sign in: https://www.okta.com/pricing/
You're looking at the wrong product, $2/user/month is for their Workforce Identity Cloud, so auth for employees, not end users.
For a comparable market segment, Auth0 (acquired by Okta) which serves the B2C market charges significantly less [1]. Taking the B2C Professional plan at 1000 MAU which has the highest pricing per user due to lack of volume discounts costs $240/month for 1000 users ($0.24/user/month). Scaling up to the limit of publicly available pricing, at 10000 users Auth0 will only charge $0.15/user/month.
[1]: https://auth0.com/pricing
> so auth for employees, not end users.
and what is the difference in context of this discussion?
> 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
> 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.
>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...
> 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.
> Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.
They also have less than 2.5 the number of users. Counting the total is a very silly way to pretend the usage is high...
> 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.
Those are not strong reasons. He uses the current best availeble data he has, which is comparable API plans he is working with.
He is very, very generous when calculating Reddit revenue. When they published their 100 million revenue quarter Fidelity valued their investment in reddit at 100million, they now value it at 60 which is a 40% drop since then.
Despite this, Christian considers their quarterly revenue 2x what it was at their peak, and adds 150 million on top to round the number to 600 mill annual. Most industry estimates do not go past 350. He borderline doubled their revenue for his napkin calculations.
So no, there are no strong reasons to believe he was lying about his math when he goes out of his way to be unexplainably kind to reddits revenue numbers.
> Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.
Depending on how the api is set up you can have. 1 request for the front page, 1 request for the post itself, 1 request for the top 100 comments. scroll a bit, anoher request for the next 100 comments.
That is 4 requests for 1 user by checking one post and seeing a bit of what the conversation is. 34 requests a day is about 10 posts and some frontpage/sub scrolling. That is pretty light use for someone who uses Reddit daily, and its basically patheitc use for Mods who have to put in hundreds of monthly free hours at keeping communities civil.
> For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c
You have 0 chance of getting those rates on reddit, for a number of reasons.
One is that many reqs are on posts with no ads embbeded. two is that 1% ctr is high for reddit. and 3 is because reddit has awful conversion metrics and you are not getting 10c per click.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
They have tried soo hard to increase ARPU and so far they havent cracked past 0.6$ when industry leaders fly past 7$ per user.
So reddit is losing fuck all from those 345 requests, and instead is gonna lose a huge hosts of mods, which will make the site more toxic, harder to advertise and crater their ARPU again making Fidelitys 40% loss since 2018 look like child's play.
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.
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.
Heh maybe they are giving us insight into how out of control their operating costs are.
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).
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.
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
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.
>Youtube keeps making ads more intrusive and people keep watching.
How many of the complainers are actually watching the ads? It's trivial to block ads on YouTube; just install uBO, or use an app like Revanced.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The demographic of Hacker News is primarily tinkerers/engineers. So it is relevant.
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?
It's probably easier for them to pipe all of that information to 3rd parties by embedding their tracking client-side.
They get your eyeballs for their ads. They want you in their engagement stats too.
I only use Reddit in the browser, and I've noticed uBlock Origin doesn't intercept nearly as much stuff from old.reddit.com - new Reddit just has a lot more tracking shenanigans.
If Infinity no longer works I'm done with Reddit.
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.
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.
I kind of took it as a given that we weren't going to start using the official app due to assumed privacy issues.
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)
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
>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...
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.
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.
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...
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?
> 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.
I would love to see the evidence you have for the kickbacks claim.
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.
When you said kickbacks I wasn't expecting the price to be so low.
> 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.
You'd really think so eh? Unfortunately no one wants to pay mods.
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.
The protests block access to subreddits, which stops traffic, which means they lose out on money.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
> Corporations only speak Money.
it seems reddit is already struggling with that piece, so gotta do whatever you can.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some subs I'm on are going permanently dark from the 12th onwards and are looking for alternatives like Lemmy.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
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.
I think you have this quite backwards? Moderating is awful, thankless, unpaid work. Why would a mod "need" an awful thankless unpaid job and why would Reddit have a rush of competent, honest, qualified people willing to replace the mods?
> Why would a mod "need" an awful thankless unpaid job and why would Reddit have a rush of competent, honest, qualified people willing to replace the mods?
It meets some psychological need. That might be a sense of belonging, power, purpose, etc. It's why you don't need to pay mods to do this "awful" work. The reason why Reddit would instantly see a rush of people willing to replace them is because that many people want to be mods, for the same reasons.
Whether they're "competent, honest, or qualified" is another question. It's why I love to see technology automate out the role (e.g. community notes).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, but how does that help me if I'm trying to google something and don't even know this discord server exists?
One option would be to google "$tech discord", and another option would be to not put words in my mouth.
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.
> 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
I'm developing a svelte site and it seems like the whole community is on there. I had a problem with a library so I hopped on the companies public discord and the main author helped me within hours. Reddit is mostly novice learn to coders and stack overflow is difficult to use these days. It's a bitter irony that open source web projects are using a closed platform. Google is already severely broken by SEO spam so it's a non-starter. Occasionally I'll use phind.com for dev searches.
Discord really should invest in making their "posts" feature web-searchable if the server opts in.
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.
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?
Yes we do because 1) this forces the discord server owners to promote their servers on the web. 2) You're more likely to bypass Google all together and just search for open communities on discords catalog. Google is dead now thanks to SEO anyway.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It’s more akin to Slack, with text channels and voice rooms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
Because some MBAs always want to double-dip: collect the premium fee and serve ads at that user.
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.
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.
The users that pay for premium is probably also the most profitable ad viewers
Premium users get the option to turn ads off. It's one of the main features of premium.
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.
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.
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.
Taking something free and putting it behind a paywall of any size is going to anger users.
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.
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
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.
anchoring is not a secret
Anchoring can also be used in other applications than just raising API costs - GP should revisit how they unequivocally declare their statements.
And Reddit has done similar things before. This is cost of business to them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Christian interned for a summer at Apple.
Ugh, thanks for saying this, I'm one of those who believed the narrative that he was an ex employee who left to pursue his passion.
Yeah I thought that was an interestingly pointed mention. Idk why they'd mention it though.
It was probably recorded far before this controversy started
I noticed. Was wondering if it was recorded before the controversy began or if it was shoehorned in there to give 'em some support.
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.
Noticed that. Good ol' Craig Federighi. Also didn't know he is really good on the guitar.
My prediction: Reddit just pushes these changes through maybe with a non-apology.
I hope you’re right, and that this is reddit’s Digg moment. Looking forward to whatever the next big thing is.
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.
> There's no obvious alternative to reddit.
Less time on the internet. Social media seems to be dying and changing isnt it?
Untrue. Discord is the obvious alternative. Increasing numbers of communities are already there.
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?
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.
So one would have to check every channels on every server they subscribe to, every day, just to see what's new? And you consider that a replacement for the Reddit home page?
I have several hundred subreddits, that would take me forever on discord.
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.
Several banned/quarantined communities retreated to semi-private Discord servers.
Which is a good thing for reddit, toxic communities posting toxic garbage that drifts into /r/all isn't good for users or revenue.
A minority of the banned communities fit that description, though.
Regardless, I’m pointing out what is the current alternative.
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.
Do you think all banned/quarantined subreddits were "posting toxic garbage"?
The majority probably were.
Reddit's Digg moment was the horrible redesign. If they ever remove old.reddit.com the site will be unusable for me.
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.
IME 99% of the time it’s not a brilliant conspiracy but rather just people being dumb
Why do they have to remove porn for the IPO?
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.
Define "porn company", it'd be a stretch to call reddit one, but if the existence of any adult content is all it takes then there are plenty. Almost all of the premium cable channels (Cinemax) were showing softcore porn late night when cable TV was king. Twitter allowed porn while it was publicly traded. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLBY_Group
I expect what the average investor actually demands is restraint and keeping porn out peoples faces so it doesn't become what you're known for. Don't become a "porn company" and don't show porn to people that haven't opted in or to children.
Porn is toxic to publisher platforms who rely on advertising and UGC for their business.
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...
As a side note, I remember the days when Reddit had to beg the community to bail them out as they were at risk of being canned from their corporate owner's disinterest: https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/reddit-gold/
By all accounts, it was very successful and saved the site, also leaving them resourced enough (including in hardware resources) to embrace the userbase from the imploding digg.
I think it's clear Reddit's current leadership have forgotten how the userbase stepped in for them in the past.
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.
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
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.
Because Lemmy is a federated service, you can run your own instance to cater to your specific political alignment.
However, other instances can choose to block content from your instance from showing up on theirs. Likewise, you can ask to 'link' your instance to others with similar ideas/rules and share posts between both.
As a result, the only thing stopping someone with particularly niche political views from spinning up their own instance is the potential lack of other interested users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you click the three dots on a recommendation you can select "show less like this" and you won't see recommendations from that subreddit. Also, there is a setting in user settings to prevent recommendations from subs you don't subscribe to from appearing at all, but I would give the algorithm a chance since there are interesting subs you probably aren't aware of.
Also, I wouldn't call making recommendations in home feed a growth hack, fwiw.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I looked into Lemmy, but sadly it has a worse interface than even new Reddit, because at least new has a compact view.
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.
One of those "Recommended instances" advertises it is "loli friendly".
Yikes.
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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.
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.
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...
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.
It doesn't ask me but I use https://old.reddit.com with an ad blocker (not sure which one stops it)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"He cleared the subreddits with a whiff of grapeshot."
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.
Bundling IE and custom clients seem quite different right?
I feel like getting an API access is a nice to have.
I don't see how, given that reddit gives wast preference to their own client in a marketplace.
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.
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.
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
What really sucks about these sites is that they become great open hubs of information and then they start erecting barriers.
Yeah, it's called "enshittification" [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
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.
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.
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...
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?
That's not quite true, it has previously been effective: https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired...
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
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.
I doubt developers will have a problem understanding these warnings.
Interesting to see Apollo mentioned in Apple's WWDC Keynote yesterday.
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
2021 - quit Facebook 2022 - quit Twitter 2023 - quit Reddit
Gee, thanks for making this a lot easier for me, guys!
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
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.
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
I think a key motivation behind this is that Reddit wants to be able to collect more data on users. For example, reddit can't see how long you spent reading a post or a particular comment if that is happening in a 3rd party app. FB, IG, and especially TikTok monetize data like this extraordinarily well. If reddit is trying to play in the same league as the other social media companies, keeping all usage on the platform you own and control seems to be table stakes. This is why Twitter did this recently and FB did this years ago. Own the platform, own the data, make more money.
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.
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.
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
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.
Is this a case of: "private equity / venture capital ruins everything"?
And relate to that, who exactly (what person) is applying pressure to the company directors to do this, who is it seeking to benefit, and who exactly is responding with decisions to meet what amount of bar of achievement? What $ is enough, and who is deciding that?
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.
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?
Or, reddit has been getting free mobile app development for all these years.
Guys, Reddit won't backtrack on jacking up the price. They are preparing their IPO and need to show revenue growth for investors to adhere to the equity story..
I'd be happy to use reddit's app if they would put a few bucks into it to make it not total crap.
How does all that pricing and business decisions work with volunteer moderators? Is it just momentum?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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.
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.
This doesn’t seem like that big a deal, you can still have shared logins (Google etc)
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").
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Discord isn’t great for slower paced and long form discussion so I never was able to really catch on to using it.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
>A Lemmy frontend based on phpBB 3.3.
https://fedibb.ml/
>Flagship instance for lemmyBB
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.
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