this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023

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The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit (www.wired.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

117 comments fedilink hide all child comments

“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”

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[–] [email protected] 171 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

If it wasn't hurting them they wouldn't be doing damage control.

Spez wouldn't be doing (awful) interviews (going so far as to praise Elon Musk)
They wouldn't be publishing whitewashed versions of history
They wouldn't be changing the rules to silence dissent
They wouldn't be plotting to overthrow protesting mods to install compliant ones
They wouldn't be lying about trying to work with devs
They wouldn't be preventing people from deleting their old comments/posts
They wouldn't be forcing subreddits to reopen
They wouldn't be advertising on Facebook for new advertisers
They wouldn't be trying to smear Apollo's developer
They wouldn't be posting propaganda notices on new reddit's homepage
They wouldn't be censoring discussion about alternatives like Lemmy and kbin

It's working, keep it up.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (7 children)

It's seriously hilarious that the "damage control" has been more damaging than the blackout itself

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They could have even gotten third party apps to pay for API access. They just needed to set a fair rate and a workable timeline for the change.

Instead, they said "we're charging $20 million starting next month. Good luck trying to stay afloat with those sudden costs!"

Reddit could have increased their profits and kept users/moderators happy, but they chose Burn It All Down instead.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly I think every time spez says something stupid it convinces another wave of Redditors to check out Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

The exit didn't start with the API announcement, just gained steam. What's truly baffling is that Reddit seems to want data on where users' final straw is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Who knew the best "celebrity" endorsement for the fediverse comes from the CEO of Reddit...

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

There’s a term for that. The Streisand Effect, I think.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

That's in the same vein as "it's not the crime it's the cover-up"

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

They wouldn't be lying about trying to work with devs

Its fascinating watching him keep digging. He bullshits, gets caught out, so he bullshits about a different dev. Rinse. Repeat.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I haven't been to Reddit for a few days and they did these stuff already? Let's keep this up.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/43599/Reddit-censoring-information-about-kbin

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Thanks I've been trying to fill in those claims with links so this one is great :)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They wouldn't be posting propaganda notices on new reddit's homepage

I want to know more about this, i haven't heard of this yet.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This appears at the top of the page until you dismiss it (at least for me): https://i.imgur.com/Uo3t2TI.jpg

Here’s what it links to: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

Yesterday they were linking to some much more blatant propaganda/history whitewash, here's the link: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I like how it says their "updated" API rate limits but doesn't mention when those rules went into effect or how much warning they gave developers.

Spoiler: the answers are "very recently" and "not even a month".

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago

funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is

If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.

The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it's EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”

Brilliant. Reddit looks out at a crowd of people at a packed show and says "ok we could lose 5%". But those are the ones who return another night as musicians. And you cant run a music venue long term with open mic 7 nights per week.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Plus, you shut down the pipeline. No one's going to make the jump from the other 95% if the content sucks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Plus they dont want to pay bouncers so the number of assholes is going to keep creeping up

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).

The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I honestly can't believe he's being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as "landed gentry" and users' concerns as "noise" - those are literally the people that have created this "valuable dataset" he's coveting so greedily.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

That's why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fidelity dropping reddit's valuation by ~40% made me go "oh boy that's bad news" when I saw it at the start of the month.

Imagine thinking you're cashing out at 10 billion and now you're only getting 6. The horror.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Imagine you're an employee thinking you're going to have stock worth 100k, and suddenly it's worth 60k and falling.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Except that it already has been. They've already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.

They didn't pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It's no great loss.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Corrected headline: The Reddit API Cash Grab is Breaking Reddit

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hope Redditors don't cave and cease protesting, clearly it's working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I haven't been on since the 10th and I was on it near constantly before that. If reddit sync isn't going to be around 10 days from now then I have no plans to use the site anything like I used to. I literally have no desire to learn their crappy app and lose the curated experience I had set up for myself. The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they're doing this now because they've run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won't be noticed in a month.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Look, I am happy as long as there are enough people on lemmy and kbin to have a fun website here. I can go and visit reddit now and then to see what kind of stuff they're upvoting, that's not a problem. But I want the potentially better alternatives to grow.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the spirit. We don't need to complete obliterate reddit to make it the better alternatives viable. We just need to get a minimal mass of people here to keep momentum growing.

I keep thinking of Taleb's essay where he talks about how effective a intolerant minority can be on affecting change in general behavior.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. Reddit itself should be a case study. Lemmy and Kbin offer an opportunity to build something great and learn from what made current Reddit (the good and the terrible) what it is and some things to avoid.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It's simply "If I'm a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!"

Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn't mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I doubt anyone on the Reddit payroll tells spez the unvarnished truth right now. Musk's employees infamously curate their interactions with him. I read somewhere about one (I want to say working in info-sec for Tesla) who kept an extra monitor with a Matrix style scroll of bullshit because it matched Musk's perception of what a busy person in that field should have up.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It also came out that Musk's businesses have a Musk disaster mitigation team that reverses his bad decisions, and "guide" him. But Twitter didn't have that, so that is why his reign has been so disastrous.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.

Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.

I'm not too concerned about this though. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won't be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regular users don't care about the mod drama. The real backlash will start on July 1st when all the apps stop working.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I hope the real thing is more just stop doing their volunteer work. I hope spam and bots run amok, NSFW gets posted everywhere, reports to unanswered and people devolve into screaming matches.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When the "vocal minority" are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”

I'm looking at you too, Netflix.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

stares at capitalism

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public

Correction: Reddit's plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It boggles my mind that I read this sentence near the end of the article:

"Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want."

This isn't a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. "fill their needs.... with advertising."

Nobody has "advertising needs." It shows how fucked-up the internet has become when a journalist writes something like this unironically, without even attempting to explain themselves. They just assume everyone believes they have advertising needs. Unreal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

This isn’t a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. “fill their needs… with advertising.”