The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
For me, no matter what Reddit is dead. Lemmy is enough for my time wasting and has enough content that I have not missed it one bit. I feel like the communities are smaller, less toxic, and I want to contribute more here. They could completely reverse their decision and I will not return and I hope there are enough like me to make a difference. It just amazes me a site that exists to link to other content on the web and store text comments about said content isn’t profitable.
Lemmy is also ad free. Love that.
I’m always astounded at how few people use ad blockers. Fuck the entire ad-based system, it is cancer.
The whole internet can be ad free if you want it to be… even from your phone.
For now, but this isn’t going to be sustainable.
For potentially large communities or a large enough group of related small communities, it can be. A core of people could spin up their own server off their own back and/or through donations. Communities exist this way outside of reddit already, this would just be a way to tap into a common interface and interoperability that federation provides. Or is there some centralised thing that means that no matter what someone might impose restrictions?
But not video and maybe limited images to keep costs in check. Maybe video hosting through unlisted youtube videos if that doesn’t get curbed.
Same here. Reddit had me going only on inertia for the past few years. Whether they revert their API lalala doesn’t matter - the communities are broken and I don’t feel like getting up again.
And even if through some divine intervention they manage to repair the communities, I’m like… eh. I went to sit over here now and it’s comfy.
At the end of the day, they treat their volunteers and users with disrespect too. The value in reddit isn’t from spaz, but rather from the users. Yet Spaz is pretending the services are why people use it.
In fact, I almost wonder if spaz is purposely trying to kill reddit, or whether he’s just another narcissist who genuinely believes reddit doesn’t need users
I’m currently refusing to visit Reddit on principle. If Reddit relented, I would stop actively avoiding them, but I would not go back to it as a primary social outlet.
Im pretty close to this as well. I think if they did a 180, and like, showed an ACTUAL attempt to right the ship, I would consider going back via Apollo.
But that said, I’ve been using Lemmy this week, and out of curiosity I’ve been comparing it with my reddit feed at the end of the day, and yeah. I really haven’t missed out on anything important.
I mostly used Reddit as a way to waste time, or get info on the latest big things, like all the Trump stuff for example, and Lemmy is doing just fine getting me that kind of info.
Lemmy is filling that void for me nicely. My only complaint is some bugs and lacking features, but that will get ironed out as Lemmy matures. Being wholly community driven is a hugely more solid foundation. And yeah, no ads. I see them rarely anyway because I mainly use a browser with an adblocker, but it’s good to know there’s no profit motivation for the Fediverse and never will be.
I’m with you friend. I’ve used Reddit daily since it practically opened. Sure the people who don’t care might stick around but the people who really loved Reddit are scorned and I have zero reason to go back to someone after they already backstabbed them the first time.
Right now it looks like it’s a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article’s title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren’t clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
Or it becomes mostly unmoderated, near a major election, at the same time as twitter turns into disinfo central.
I burned my account to the ground and sent them a GDPR request.
This will happen no matter what.
Depends, on what you call winning.
Sure, he will get his way. He will make his changes.
But- I do believe the original goals were profit-motivated.
I’d be willing to bet- the mass exodus of users, is going to hamper his plans pretty significantly.
I think we’re gonna see another huge blow to Reddit in a few days when all the third-party apps go permanently offline. I’ll bet that a lot of people who haven’t been paying attention so far are definitely going to start having something to say about it very soon.
Maybe, I’m certainly in that camp. Once RIF stops working I’ll stop using Reddit. I don’t know that there are a lot of people like me though (and the ones that are are probably here already).
When RiF dies, I’ll stop using reddit on mobile.
I’ll probably check-in occationally when I’m on desktop, but that’ll signifigantly reduce my time on the site.
I’ll bet that a lot of people who haven’t been paying attention
At least Apollo put up a huge honking alert dialog about the situation, it was impossible to miss.
This will be when the true test for Reddit begins; if the outcry is large enough that spez ends up relenting in some way then he will have already alienated a lot of users. If the outcry is minimal then I guess he won, but the prize hardly seems worth the drama that has been spun up.
It isn’t going to be outcry, it is going to be drop in traffic. Spez is gambling that third party app users will switch to the official app. I won’t, and I hope most others don’t.
Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
I, for one, just signed up on this website specifically so I can leave reddit
Why isn’t Lemmy viable?
Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
- After going through the list of servers, I had to pick one of them. As someone who went through that whole situation with XMPP, I know that this alone is enough to make most people turn away.
- Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
- Since the page told me that if I didn’t hear anything back after 24h, I could consider my application rejected, I wrote another account application at feddit.de after waiting for about 48h.
- The feddit.de account was approved, but I only noticed by my login working a few days later. I didn’t get any notification. That’s what I’m using right now.
- After more than a week, I got an email that my beehaw application was accepted.
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
All of this is fairly reasonable for the kind of project it is. Sounds like you and those users don’t understand what signing up at any site really means and you’ve been so separated by the front end, you be have no ability to show grace when basically using a website for free hosted and manages by free people what takes money donated by others?
Why is this anyone else’s fault but you? You’ve gotten spoiled. Maybe everything isn’t for you if you cannot even do the bare minimum to participate?
How do you think I came to be here if I wouldn’t be able to do the bare minimum?
I’m very well aware of how it all works on the technical side, but the basic problem is that social networks only work when there’s a large network of people connected to each other. If you’re satisfied with the maybe hundred people that are active in this community that’s great, but the whole discussion in this thread is about why Reddit can’t be replaced by Lemmy.
I’m not trying to be judgemental about the process itself, I’m just saying that all of the points I made are dealbreakers for the question of Reddit replacement.
It’s obviously not Reddit numbers, but been a lot of posts about how much lemmy/etc have grown in the last week, largely due to the Reddit fallout.
Clearly it’s not going to replace Reddit overnight, but it’s made large strides very suddenly, and can def close that gap over time. Especially for people like me who enjoyed Reddit, but were just browsers, not really power users
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn’t even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they’re 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
Not all of them use the application process, many are just captcha plus email. Then Beehaw is failing to send confirmation emails.
The sign up process has to incorporate security to protect the Lemmy federation from spambots and other exploitation. Yeah it’s a hassle, but it’s not there to annoy people, rather to provide the best possible user experience. But still an application is something that can dissuade a potential user. That’s why many don’t use one.
Beehaw is one of the most heavily laden instances probably second only to the originating lemmy.ml instance. An overloaded instance can result in hangs and sluggish performance. Also true for one with high latency such as one located overseas.
It’s true the chore of finding a good instance can dissuade some people. If you don’t know any better and sign up on a bad instance it can unfairly soil your opinion of the whole Lemmy federation.
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
It’s not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won’t spend the time to figure it out.
It looks like it is going to be a pyrrhic victory for Spez. You’re right in that we don’t know the knock-on effects of this decision, including if Reddit can get long time users to jump to the official app and if moderators will continue volunteering time.
I suspect a lot of subs are now going to create contingency plans for leaving Reddit, even if they don’t implement them.
The time frame up to the IPO (I don’t know how that timing works) seems to be what is critical. Right now Reddit has been unprofitable. The CEO took on massive new levels of expenses via staffing with no real plan (or it didn’t work?) for how to pay for those expenses. This bad faith “negotiation” on API seems aimed at… I guess trading 3rd party utility and to some extent the community for the ability to sell data to AI industry?
I guess we will see but pick a time frame and none of it looks good for Reddit.
There has already been a relatively large population that has left the site (myself included) in a short amount of time. I doubt the rate will stay that high, but even though, integrating over time I see this is as the beginning of the end for Reddit and spez. The guy is a greedy jackass and I hope he loses it all.
A Pyrrhic victory. If he loses a large portion of his moderators, the whole platform will turn to shit. The whole thing was held together by passionate people in key places. Remove and replace with paid goons and the whole site suffers.
This article has so many inaccuracies… I haven’t talked with a single person that thinks Reddit shouldn’t charge for api access. And the final comment about being legally obligated to pursue profit is just factually incorrect. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
You can find plenty of other sources just like that one saying the same thing. I’m pretty sick of this myth, because it gives all these companies a bogeyman to hide behind.
This point struck me too:
Reddit is under no obligation to make its API free. But, it seems, the company has overreached in enforcing the new policy. If its target is the largest AI firms, then it should focus on curbing their parasitic proclivities and not going after beloved and useful software its users and moderators depend on.
This is my feeling. I understand that it could cost something. But the eye-watering rates for the small fish and the speed of the extortion is the issue.
Because the point isn’t the costs of the API. Reddit wants all its users to go through the official access points, the Reddit app and the redesigned web. This will allow them to hover the maximum data to sell and ensure ads flow.
They should’ve just been effing upfront about it instead of trying to scapegoat API creators. Did they think users are too dense to understand what they were/are really up to?
Reddit knows the rates it proposed are extortionist. They don’t have the nerve to honestly state that 3rd party access will be stopped from July 1 and accept responsibility, so instead they tried to find a way to blame 3rd parties.
Think of it as killing two birds with one stone: they monetize users by getting AI firms to pay for all the valuable content redditors have posted over the years, and they kill off app competitors who are giving redditors alternatives to the mobile app.
That’s really all it’s about.
AI firms will just scrape anyway.
Hrmm, I wonder who would benefit from perpetrating such a myth
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders, and after announcing his plans to purchase Twitter for the inflated price Elon couldn’t back out due to the same threat however I am open to the idea that I could of been misled on that situation.
As for the why of a myth like that circulating I doubt its due to malice and more due to misunderstanding as Ive always understood that any wording made on a legal case could be used as precedent. It could also fit well with people rationalizing why companies seek record profits while underpaying workers for their labor.
If anyone could clarify the Twitter situation without sucking off elon it would be appreciated
The rule is that a corporation is primarily organized for the benefit of shareholders, but it’s not exclusively organized for only that purpose, and the corporation has no obligation to maximize the benefit for shareholders today versus tomorrow, in cash versus in future equity, in certain profit versus uncertain risks, etc. So the company can choose to pay out dividends to shareholders, or reinvest profits back into the company. It can give money to charity to improve public goodwill, and it can give bonuses to non-shareholder employees to keep things running smoothly, and shareholders can’t sue that their money is going to non-shareholders.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders,
The article actually talks about that specific scenario, in the Revlon case. If a company is going private and buying out its shareholders, then there’s not an ongoing set of broad interests to balance. The shareholders are being forced to give up their shares in exchange for cash, so if that transaction is going to go through, the corporation has an obligation to maximize the price for those shareholders. There’s no today versus tomorrow, dividend versus reinvestment, etc., because that one transaction distills everything down into money for shares.
With the Twitter case, it’s a bit in between the two: were the Twitter shareholders better off between taking the cash for shares today, or declining the cash to keep the company and see if that is better for them in the long term? The directors were obligated to negotiate a deal and submit that deal to a shareholder vote. So if the shareholders decide “hey this is a good deal for us,” then that pretty much simplifies the question into a clear answer, rather than a complicated set of countervailing interests of uncertain weight.
I didn’t originally think that reddit shouldn’t charge at all for API access, but after spez’s recent interviews I wouldn’t go back to the site without a promise that API access will be free forever. Is that reasonable? No, but fuck spez.
You’re right. Would you recommend I take the post down?
no haha, I like the title. and it started a good conversation! leave it up! hopefully people read the comments though :D
Fuck u/spez
(That was missing from this post.)
They did say he’s “the Kmart version of Elon Musk” which I thought was quite funny.
wish.com version, of elon musk!
Fuck u/spez and fuck reddit’ board of directors.
Reddit ceo Steve Huffman is an idiot, and also a massive prick.
I do fee so much better now that reddit is dead to me. I check lemmy few times a week.
Feels like Spez won’t be taking this one to the chin. Let’s just see how deep the ship will sink with its captain.
I don’t think the ship is doomed yet but they’re definitely in ‘what is that ominous noise coming from the bilge’ territory. To carry on the analogy they’ll plug the leaks as best they can and try and make it to the safe harbour of the IPO (where she can sink at her mooring for all Spez cares) which they could still well do, but it’s also likely the captain and his officers being half-baked sons of lubberly farts will smash into several reefs on the way and sink their already damaged vessel.
I mean, Digg is still around. It didn’t go under, it just lost a huge chunk of users, which is Reddit’s most likely fate.
I think that is what counts as sinking for a large social media site nowadays. They’re technically still alive but they’re empty husks of their former selves and will never return to their heydays.
Judging by the recent less big brand advertising, I think he was trying to shore up the IPO but failed. At the very least Reddit is still alive but it’s going to be valued less.
Remember the house always wins. We can play at our casinos today thanks to fediverse.
We love to see :3
reminding me I need to manage to archive my data off reddit. XD And ready the kill script on June 30ths to delete my posts.
I’m curious why this is classified as “losing battle”… seems pretty successful so far to me.
In what way? Reddit’s outlook was a lot brighter before this thing started. Maybe they’re not losing as fast as one would like but they are losing.
Reddit still has hundreds of millions of active users per month. They may have lost some people, but this many eyeballs has a huge potential for profit.
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. In the long term we’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. In the long term we’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
Those are just users numbers, which didn’t dip all that much even during the blackout. The doomscrollers will keep coming until it sucks.
Battle’s not over until the third party apps go offline. That’s when the real damage is bound to start.
It’s his site. He will always win. Fuck him and greedy capitalists fucks like him.
PS: Enjoy Lemmy
Wasn’t lemmy created by tankies? Avoided it for kbin (I’m aware of the federation) due to this.
Doesn’t matter since they don’t and also can’t retain control over the network, and the network by and large all defederated lemmygrad.
Lemmy kinda belongs to its users now.
Lemmy kinda belongs to its users now.
Not until its users actually start developing Lemmy the software.
I mean they are?
You can host an instance, and if the instance is doing something you don’t like, you can certainly change it and prevent it from doing it. If the main Lemmy devs put stuff in most people don’t like, the software will just get forked, and most instances will use the non-shitty version.
Lemmy is what the majority of users want it to be, since everyone can just start a competing site that’s not suffering from the “outside-the-walled-garden” effect, with a different featureset. Users will move to the instance with the best featureset for themselves.
