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You can read through all of /u/spez's replies here [0]. It won't take long, because the most striking thing about this AMA wasn't that he said very many controversial things but that he barely said anything at all. There's one moment where he gives a sarcastic jab about how Reddit isn't profitable while some of the third party apps are, and an earlier one where he repeats some of the things he said about the Apollo dev. But mostly he just avoided even moderately controversial questions.

He put in an appearance for about an hour, ignored all the most upvoted questions, then disappeared.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/

The Reddit CEO's negative karma (-111,199 at this time) during the recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) session indicates an overwhelmingly negative response from the community.

You have to assume that the leadership team is not completely inept and that there must be a valid, urgent reason for willingly taking so much heat before the IPO.

What could it possibly be?

I’ve worked in tech long enough to tell you that leadership being completely inept isn’t as far-fetched as you think.

Can confirm. The people at the top in tech are a) primarily driven by personal advancement, b) focus all their attention on getting a promotion (or higher share price), c) if user welfare and personal ambition are in conflict personal ambition comes first.

It’s just normal humanity stupidity and greed, and these aren’t like head of the class intellects, it’s just boring people who love money and status and get no satisfaction from helping others.

It is not just Tech, but similar in every other industry. Only those industries with cut throat competition would have better leadership ( Because they are forced to compete ).

The problem with Tech is that they are the primary beneficial of hyper growth with zero interest rate era and Smartphone revolution. In the space of 10+ years tech have grown from an unthinkable Trillion dollar market cap to now we have a single company with close to 3 trillion, two other company with close to 2 trillion and other rushing to trillion dollar club. And this is unlike previous bubble they have actual profits and balance sheet for their market valuation.

People working in tech, especially within BigTech are not only partly dictating the world and media's attention, they are also so out of touch they became aristocracy in the old era.

I wouldn’t say it’s so much “greed” as business models that don’t actually make money. Take investor money until you’ve gotten as big as you can with billions in valuation while making little to no profit, change business models to try to make yourself actually profitable, and in doing so “ruin” what was only possible while being supported by hopeful patient investors.

Thus begins your decline and the gamble for who gets stuck holding the bag.

Yes, but you can flush billions down the drain and if you get a nice title along the way it doesn’t matter in Silicon Valley.

A VP who oversaw a billion being set on fire will still be hired as a VP at the next company as long as that money was burned on the tech trend of the moment.

I think that qualifies.

I wouldn't want to say that "he's at the top in tech", I'd want to reserve that for good programmers, engineers and researchers

Maybe more: "he's trying to be at the top in business/value extraction/rent seeking"

top of org charts?

That’s what I was referring to. What I’d call “top talent” is rarely the same as “top of the org”.

The topic has been analyzed quite extensively in my small bubble of very experienced people (mostly software developers, some with management experience, but also other people from various fields). We asked ourselves why so often such strange decisions are made out of management and our basic attitude was that we simply don't have the necessary information to be able to evaluate these decisions reasonably.

So we gathered a lot of information, as much of it as possible directly from management itself. We have indeed found information that explains some managerial decisions, but so far only of the variety that have benefited individual managers themselves, and always with negative consequences for the majority of others.

However, the overwhelming majority of what we consider peculiar (up to catastrophic) decisions are due to a combination of hubris, impostor syndrome and absolute incompetence. In one case where we could least explain the decisions at first, a manager under the influence of alcohol virtually admitted that they were not only aware of their own incompetence, but that they intentionally got rid of overly competent people so that they wouldn't make them look so bad. It's a mess.

Anecdotally, my experience is different. In my case this usually means that I am unaware of some other factors at play, usually business constraints that haven’t been made public.

I mean in the reddit case the business reason is "monetize the platform as much as possible", which clashes with a platform that's nothing without its users and the content they create. A good business strategy would be to build trust and have dialog and increase monetization in small steps that the majority of the userbase can tolerate (after all people understand that things cost money).

By taking a huge jump to early on and shitting on volunteers/3rd party app developers, they lost what little trust they had. Doubly sad that the same playbook played out with Digg and showed reddit exactly what not to do.

They’ve reached their natural level of user base.

Now as they ramp up to an IPO, 3rd party clients are seen as a liability, not an asset.

They view anyone that complains as a vocal minority, the my don’t believe their MAU numbers will change in any meaningful way.

If anything, all the press around it just raises Reddits profile.

That’s my take on what’s going on, but I have no insider knowledge so I’m just guessing :-)

Indeed, how many of Reddit's 500 million users per month base actually use anything besides new Reddit and the official app? I'd say the vanishing minority.

And I think Reddit will be delighted to get rid of the "troublemakers".

the problem is that the "troublemakers" are the cool kids that make the site interesting, so it's a bit like gentrification kids out the cool folks that made the place interesting in a first bit

I don’t think the “troublemakers” are likely to be the people who make Reddit interesting. The troublemakers are the people who are complaining the loudest about Reddit, and the people who make the site interesting are the people who spend most of their time caring about other things besides Reddit.

In the PC world, the power users could graduate into developers and make apps to share with everyone. In the Reddit world, the power users are people who are interested in farming for karma, the people who stake out claims as moderators, the people who respond to tons of AITA / legaladvice / relationships posts.

When I hear someone ranting, pissed off, about the latest Windows or macOS update, or systemd, it’s often because they use computers to get work done, and having the tech stack change under your feet makes it hard to get work done. Broad sense of the word “work” here, when I say “get work done”.

Nobody’s getting work done on Reddit, it’s a time drain from other stuff we could be doing. (Like, not nobody nobody, just nobody.)

This is very short-sighted.

The best places on reddit are good dude to stringent moderation.

They are all going dark in response. This will remove all quality from Reddit and finally turn it fully into a meme and porn dump.

In recent years I have seen more and more people comment here that they search reddit rather than the web when they want to get decent results. I can absolutely imagine that this could end relatively soon, and whether a "meme and porn" version of reddit is really worth more than a "central platform of all niche forums for all topics" reddit remains to be seen.... The fact that there have been many "meme and porn" platforms that came and went in the past makes me question that...

The good places on Reddit, with tight moderation, are few and far between. I can think of r/AskHistorians, but there are not many like it (I can’t think of another, off the top of my head). Maybe you know of other examples?

askhistorians is an extreme example. They basically change the entire nature of the site through very visible moderation. But my understanding is that places like r/physics would be drowning in lazy memes as well. Take any subreddit you like and look at the posting guidelines. Chances are they are there in reaction to significant amounts of people acting contrary to them.

I see what you are talking about, but I don’t think it makes Reddit interesting. It’s kind of like having a bunch of different HOA boards, all fighting over how to mow the lawns or what colors to paint the houses in their respective communities.

The people who make Reddit interesting are, IMO, the content creators and the people who answer questions. The content creators are spending most of their time off-Reddit, working on projects. The people answering questions are browsing /new on a few subreddits, killing time, and watching a mostly unmoderated stream of posts.

The moderation rules for individual subreddits are usually annoying—things like karma minimums, minimum ages, and sometimes a bunch of weird rules about what you can post and how you can post it. Rules against self-promotion.

Additionally I'll point out that people who search reddit like that are some of the most valuable visitors on ads-based platform, as many of them are looking for shopping advice.

Reddit used to be interesting but ever since it became a TikTok / Instagram meme clone with r/all, there really is no need for these sorts of power users. Sure, some subs like r/AskHistorians will suffer but I doubt they'll entirely leave the site, there is no alternative.

Having less stringent and totalitarian moderation might bring different sort of userbase to more active. And not even affect the number of passive one. It's not like in general people care about quality on Internet...

Much of the complaints seem to come from moderators who rely on third-party apps for moderation. That seems reasonable and like a real problem. I wonder if Reddit could have bought one of the popular apps moderators use and make it official.

The latest news from Reddit is that they're allowing free API access for accessibility apps and moderator tools.

What's "moderator tools" in this context?? Mods use apps like Apollo and RIF to moderate their subreddits, and both of these apps are shutting down at the end of the month.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

Kind of late now they are caught with their pants down before a black out. Pretty sure they are going to kill it again or put a barrier in there once they get the chance.

It doesn't really matter what they do. I guarantee by this time next week, Reddit will be back to normal.

if that's the case then why are they going after 3rd party apps? If they are a niche among the user base then the benefit of killing them is hardly worth losing moderators who've been doing work for free.

It's about controlling their user base in terms of how they use the service.

If those users weren't that important, Reddit wouldn't be needing to push through this change and capture the revenue from those users.

[dead]

The issue with that is that by far most users are reading (coming from Google etc. - which is at threat by ChatGPT btw.) or just lurking. Only few comment, very few comment a lot. Those produce the content for the majority of users and are the ones using special apps.

Risk is that if they kick out the "creators" by making the apps unattractive they might lose a lot of content for the lurkers.

But they should have statistics to see how many are using apps and how many of the most hit posts are written by app users ... if they didn't run such an analysis: their bad.

I obviously have no data to back it up, but I too suspect that third party app users post, reply, vote, and otherwise interact a disproportionate amount. Not only are these users likely to have been big reddit users in the first place, but apps like Apollo are designed to put these interactions in the forefront of the experience and make them as smooth and frictionless as possible.

Contrast this to the official site/app, which are instead designed to keep you jumping from post to post without dwelling for too long, but are also designed to sell junk like NFT avatars.

Reddit might continue on with business as usual after the API rate change goes into effect, but I believe the average quality of content and comments (which was already trending lower) will fall through the floor. There's no incentive for invested users who put more thought and effort into their posts to stick around.

>They’ve reached their natural level of user base.

Perhaps in the US. There is another 96% of humanity left to go so a little bit of additional growth should be feasible

They've already reached that 96%. Reddit has, and always had, international audience. At this point, anyone who knows a bit of English and is the kind of person to use a site like that, is on it (+/- government blocks, of course). Whatever space for growth Reddit has left, it's not geographical.

Almost half of Reddit is American. It’s not nearly as international or globally representative as you think.

Measured as?

A simple google search will bring up dozens of sites & a variety methods so take your pick. They all say Reddit is 40-50% American

> You have to assume that the leadership team is not completely inept.

On the contrary, I really resonated with the top response to one of his replies:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/comment/jnk...

> Did you not prepare any real answers ahead of time to obvious questions? You could just be copy/pasting detailed statements with actionable items in them right now instead of typing non-answers every 5-15 minutes. That would be a level of preparation appropriate for a potential billion-dollar company.

Elsewhere I've seen people complaining that one of his responses started with "A:" so he was "obviously just copy-pasting rather than actually answering".

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/146h9d6/reddits...

(E to put the last part in quotes)

> The Reddit CEO's negative karma (-111,199 at this time) during the recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) session indicates an overwhelmingly negative response from the community.

The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.

And it was really hard to see spez's comments without following them from his profile, because they were so downvoted.

So I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.

> The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.

I've been a Reddit user for a while, but I never knew this. I tried doing a quick search, but it dates back to 2015 when it seems they were actually disabled all together from the profile page [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2nzzhg/if_i_go_throug...

Perhaps ppl were using third party apps to have a better view of comments.

That is actually something I find about the new web UI, they seem to try to stop you from going too far down a comment chain. The comments are what I come to Reddit for.

The Reddit team linked to all of spez's comments at the top of the thread. They were quite easy to find (in Apollo, at least)

On the site you have to click the "load more comments" link for anything negative to appear...

So if they look at their analytics later, they will probably discover the comforting fact that only people on 3rd party clients were downvoting the CEO.

Yes, eventually they did this. But even before they did that, the scores were approaching negative infinity.

>I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.

By not going into the database and flipping the sign on that integer.

And before anyone says I'm memeing or otherwise attacking spez without cause: Remember, this is spez. He admitted to directly modifying the database to edit comments of people critical of him once upon a time. He called forth this level of distrust himself.

Some people were noticing, early in the thread, big steps up on the net vote a couple minutes after each comment, which triggered some suspicion of similar shenanigans.

I just realized all the threats of going private are a bit moot because guess who controls the database where this flag is set?

It'd be a massive fuck you to the community, but how would that be different to what's been going on the last few months?

I'm guessing the company will be like an abusive partner saying "we're in control, you can leave, but we know you won't."

Yes and no. They can force the the subs to go public again, but then the mods might quit. Losing a lot of mods is a bigger deal than losing the same number of users.

Trying to find a bunch of new mods will probably be an issue. Right now there isn't _too much_ complaining about mods. It's a very fine balance and replacing a bunch of existing ones with new ones might cause mayhem.

They've "organically" couped mods into subs to return them to normal operation in the past.

Why would you possibly assume reddit's leadership team isn't completely inept? I would need extremely strong evidence to think anything but.

reddit got lucky - right place, right time, and locked in a strong enough network effect to stay alive despite the best efforts of their leadership. Look at their atrocious UI. The clumsy desperate attempts to drive users to an app. The boneheaded copycat features that never quite work, or are just downright baffling.

In an alternate world a smaller team would have focused on site reliability, mod tools, and a small set of features that made sense. Use third party ad tools until, or if, you get a better homegrown solution. With this route reddit would have been profitable and probably good. Instead...

My guess is that they see themselves as potentially one of the companies which might not be able to attract sufficient investor money now that capital isn't essentially free.

I am not convinced that community revolts have staying power. Reddit the community has fought management a few times and besides trading Pao for Huffman, which was not really a win for them in that case, when has anything ever changed?

So, does the heat matter?

Generally the revolts have achieved their ends. Mod revolts have lead to the banning of many subs in the past. The most recent one that comes to mind is the ban on COVID skepticism subs. I can't think of a result that has wholly flopped, really. But I'd say that this one is more likely to fail since it represents a direct attack on a monetization strategy.

Banning COVID skepticism is commercially pretty easy, so while yes the Reddit revolters did win in that case, it was also a small ask as it was not like advertisers liked the content anyway.

I was thinking more of Victoria Taylor, where sure, the community did get rid of Ellen Pao, but they didn't get back AMAs and got an even less considerate and professional CEO.

> Banning COVID skepticism is commercially pretty easy

That wasn’t “skepticism” - it was outright denial of high-school-level biology facts, and it all gets worse from there.

> commercially pretty easy

I doubt it’s that easy - considering Facebook’s inaction.

Reddit was born of Digg's ashes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

"After a controversial 2010 redesign and the departure of co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, in July 2012 Digg was sold in three parts: the Digg brand, website, and technology were sold to Betaworks for an estimated $500,000;[9] 15 staff were transferred to The Washington Post Company's "SocialCode" for a reported $12 million; and a suite of patents was sold to LinkedIn for about $4 million."

Huffman is a clear downgrade. Pao was fine.

They’re sick of running Reddit and want a pay out. Then then bounce.

When all evidence points to the contrary, yes you can assume that the leadership is inept.

Benefit of the doubt only stretches so far.

Steve Huffman has proven to be a huge liability for reddit time and time again, outdoing himself with his recent behavior. I don't understand how anyone could think about investing into this company at all.

What is the platform even worth if it is riddled with bots like Twitter? Who are companies even advertising towards? Hey backend server "207fef50-b354-4c85-8865-f56f8313cd2c" look at these new electric BBQ offers!

I don’t get the “completely inept” or “valid, urgent reason” dilemma. The decisions Reddit leadership is making seem foreseeable / obvious, under the assumption that they own lots of Reddit stock and want an IPO.

There should be a corollary to Hanlon's Razor that states: Don't attribute to veiled motives what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Hanlon's handgun: don't attribute stupidity to what can be adequately explained with systemic incentives promoting malice. It applies here. Stupidity is extremely unlikely.

That is an old rule: Don't mistake malice for bungling.

That rule doesn't work in the modern age. The modern malicious clearly try to cloud there BS in incompetence.

It isn't necessary to emulate incompetence. Incompetence and bungling is the default state, and very hard to avoid.

They're relying on inertia and most people not caring about the changes. They know they can also force open a lot of the private sub-reddits whenever they want to. Sam Altman sits on their board so he's told them how much they can make by jacking the api prices up and selling the data to LLMs for training.

> The Reddit CEO's negative karma (-111,199 at this time)

Perhaps he's trying to pull a Nuclear Gandhi[1] and go 'deep' enough to underflow to being extremely positive?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

His focus is on having a successful IPO, to enrich himself. Karma has no effect on the IPO, positive or negative.

Is there a tool to see negative karma or did you add it all up manually?

Manually. It is not as if he answered many questions.

maybe it's just ego and reality will hit them in the face wework style lol.

Money.

> during the recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) session

People keep talking about an AMA session, but there was none. Not every self post on reddit is an AMA session, and I don't think it's fair to call his post one and attack it on that basis.

That’s what their staff called it - https://reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ceo_to...

“ Reddit CEO, u/spez, will be here tomorrow to host an AMA about the latest API updates, including accessibility, mod bots, and third-party mod tools. “

Oof, okay. Weird.

I'm quite surprised that he's still the Reddit CEO after he admittedly edited comments on production database.

Sometimes I feel the current situation is exactly what we (reddit users) deserve. Like, we chose to continue using this website even when we knew the leadership is piece of shit. What else did we expect?

Doesn't comment editing basically destroy any protections that reddit has regarding user generated content?

Not really. To the extent that Reddit exercises editorial control over some particular content, it could theoretically become liable for that content. But just editing one comment in a database doesn't automatically make them liable for everything that everyone else does.

It introduces a precedent for content manipulation for personal gain that cannot really be prevented though. Who says that Steve Huffman won't alter content of any entity posting on reddit? Politicians can do AMAs and post responses, then Huffman comes along to sneak-edit one or two words to make them look bad without any external user being able to prove manipulation - it could just be a user edit after all.

It should have.

Unfortunately things, as a super general term, don't work properly.

  Q: How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become 
  increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?

   Spez: We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. 
   Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.

Well, it's true. Third party apps don't have to deal with the entire server side of Reddit, ie hosting text, images, video etc. They're just dealing with the client side off a free API, of course they're profitable. At least the CEO is honest that companies exist to make money, of course.

Hosting the text content is one thing, but reddit willingly became a multimedia hosting site not all that long ago. The site grew and users got by fine using imgur and what not before i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com ever existed. They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.

Do you know why Reddit actually built their own multimedia platforms via i/v.reddit? Because Imgur didn't want to host Reddit content anymore [0]. This is about NSFW but more generally there was a cooling of relations between Imgur and Reddit because essentially Reddit users were freeloading on Imgur's platform without Imgur necessarily being able to show ads due to how Reddit linked directly to the image and not the Imgur link. Therefore, Reddit was forced (and yes, also wanted) to build their own versions.

There is no free lunch. Someone has to pay the bills on hosting, and I'm sure Reddit thought it'd be cheaper to do it themselves at scale than to pay someone as a middleman.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/18/20920977/imgur-reddit-ns...

According to that article you linked, Reddit started hosting their own images 3 years prior to that change.

As I recall, it was Reddit who moved away from Imgur, not the reverse.

This is the Reddit announcement about their hosting [0]. At that point in time, Imgur was already redirecting direct image links to the non-direct wrapper page so that they could show banner ads. This made it difficult for Reddit to show images in the site and app well, thus the cooling of relations between both I had mentioned. It's interesting since Imgur started off as "an image hosting service that doesn't suck" according to the creator, on Reddit [1].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4kuk2j/reddit_ch...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

Everything doesn't suck until you have to make money with it.

imgur started as site to host and hotlink images published at reddit (they wanted to change it to be profitable, but entire point of Imgur was to enable "freeloading on Imgur's platform")

>They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.

The original UI works well, and it's great they kept old.reddit. Everything since has been horrible, along with the dark patterns pushing their mobile client. It reminds me of all the craigslist UI redesign posts on hacker news many years ago that completely missed the point.

Reddit has definite value (really important as Google quality declines IMO), and I'd love if they could find a way to sustain without destroying the community... but I'm not optimistic.

Google has become unusable recently, maybe my expectations increased since chatgpt but Bing is way superior now.

He's myopic. It's not like any of the third party clients were drowning in millions in profits. The CEO basically shut out his best content producers in one fell swoop. If you're already looking to a third party client for Reddit, clearly it's something you value and that's now been destroyed.

Reddit doesn't care about users who use third party apps, that's simply a fact. It doesn't matter if they are content producers as there are 500 million monthly active users on Reddit and once people either migrate to the official app (or quit, but I highly doubt that since people say they'll quit a lot of things but never actually do), they'll continue to churn out content.

My prediction is it’ll be like the slow death of Facebook. Did Facebook users quit en masse after the Cambridge analytica scandal, or after The Social Dilemma? No, Facebook was still going strong. But it just doesn’t seem culturally relevant any more. People don’t seem to ask to be Facebook friends now. They ask for my insta or WhatsApp. (And meta buying both of those sites seems like an utterly genius move in retrospect.)

I predict the same will happen with reddit. It’ll take awhile for new platforms to mature, and for the good content to leave. But I’d put money on it losing its cultural relevance over the next 5-10 years.

Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users. It's not dead by any definition of the word. Even if you and I don't use it, many people around the planet do. It is simply that we are not in the target market anymore, but don't discount 3 billion people, that's around 30-40% of the world's population. Cultural relevancy doesn't matter as long as Facebook still has the install base to show ads to, which is how it makes its money, and why its stock is still one of the best performing in the business.

To an extent. Although the stock price includes the performance of Instagram, doesn't it?

But I count as one of those, and the only time I tap an ad is by accident.

The ads are literally every 3rd slot (for me at least).

What do the advertisers get out of this?

People do genuinely click on and buy things from ads. I've never done it, but I helped my personal trainer sell his workout programs online.

I thought he was absolutely crazy and was going to waste a bunch of money. I was completely and utterly wrong. People were clicking ads and buying his workout plans.

At that point I realized I'm completely out of touch with the majority of social media users.

Lots of users that are not you nor I click on ads. I should know, I used to run Instagram and Facebook ads for my product and my user acquisition cost on that was far lower than my average revenue per user. People absolutely click on ads and buy stuff.

Don't list "hosting text" as if it costs more then a paper bill per month for the entire website.

One solution to the profitability problem might be to remove all the non-profitable users.

When I browse the home page all I see is anti-work, anti-capitalism, nuance-less politics, etc.

As people have mentioned, the free money decade is over - users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.

> users are going to have to start becoming Customers if they want their voices to be listened to.

That would be an improvement to the current "free" platforms that users pay for with their data, or attention to psychologically manipulative content. The web should definitely adopt the business-customer model, and cut out the leechy middlemen.

Going a step further, the business should happen not with a centralized platform, but with web hosters, infrastructure companies, and ultimately ISPs. The technology for anyone to publish and manage their data already exists, but is not user friendly enough to be accessible to anyone but the technically proficient.

The internet is inherently peer-to-peer. Service silos only exist because user-friendly tools are made for consumers rather than publishers, and the easiest way for users to publish content is via a 3rd party. We have user-friendly web _browsers_, but web servers are still reserved for the technically proficient. There's a lot of work needed in this area, but all the building blocks already exist.

Yep. Its incredible that for decades we havent developed a decentralized internet of "apps" that is more aligned with how the economy works.

In some cases the current platform design is totally absurd: like linkedin (or github or azure) thus microsoft having insider knowledge about anything that happens in the digital space.

This is basically down to society being largely tech illiterate and various people taking enormous advantage of that.

I think this was a failure of the early web. You can see in the original proposal[1] that the building blocks were a "browser" and a "server". So the web client gets to have a user-friendly application for consuming content, but the web server is just... a server. There's no user-friendly counterpart for publishing content. This would be equivalent to the modern web browsers not existing, and users having to "navigate" using cURL. I love cURL, but it's intended for a technical audience, and the web would've never taken off had it been the default client interface.

You can also see in the proposal that phase 2 considered a "universal authorship" goal, and has a rough draft of what a user-friendly publishing interface could be, but it was far too vague, and to my knowledge this phase never came to pass.

As a result of this, companies like GeoCities and Angelfire popped up to fill the void of what the web lacked, and later on social media platforms served the same purpose. Advertisers noticed early on a very lucrative opportunity, and tech giants were built to support them. ISPs noticed that the demand was only for downloading content, so they never bothered to build the infrastructure needed to also serve content, and most internet connections were asymmetrical. And, so, here we are.

To be fair, there have been some attempts to make publishing easier. I think the best attempt was Opera's Unite in 2009. But by then, it was too little, too late, and Opera being Opera, it never gained traction. BitTorrent is a big one, but it's only a protocol, so it should be a building block of whatever the solution is.

Now we have all these distributed projects, web3, etc., but they're still unusable by the average internet user. A part of the problem is education, sure, but I reckon that the average internet user has been conditioned to believe that all these mainstream platforms _are_ the internet. So even if friendly publishing tools existed, and users had the knowledge to use them, they would still choose to use the centralized platforms. Partly because, unfortunately, most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content.

So I don't think any of this will change. Technical users will keep using niche tools, and the mainstream web will keep being centralized and run by advertisers.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html

> but they're still unusable by the average internet user

yep that asymmetry is deep-seated. but decentralized serving does not need to be extreme. I can imagine e.g. geographically local (e.g. city-level) infrastructure hosting - supported maybe by local taxes like a utility - and people using wordpress enhanced with activitypub.

Between each user doing self-publishing and all users being captive in one gigantic data-mining and humiliatingly abusive platform there are literally billions of options.

> most people don't care about their data, privacy, etc., and just want to consume content

This is something that is repeated a lot (also here on HN) and of course at some very basic level it is true. If the negative impact of current designs was obvious we would not have the nightmare we drifted into.

But it is a rather simplistic take on how things work with technology adoption, regulation of business behavior, markets etc.

E.g. people didn't not care about ozone layer depletion, they were probably completely unaware of it. That's why we have experts and regulators and institutions to advise the general population about what is safe and in their interest. In the case of the ozone layer, laws were passed. Substances were banned. Substitutes invented. The planet and our skin was saved. We moved on to the next existential risk.

The same playbook has repeated countless times. People generally assume that the system works to protect them and that is not a totally wrong assumption. If everybody moved fast and broke things modern society would quickly collapse.

Yet notice that nobody of authority ever warned users not to use these platforms. In fact the opposite. In what is unthinkable and unprecedented collusion, most public sector entities actively advertise them, by being in these platforms, providing links to them etc.

What has happened in this space is that a major social contract has been violated. Politicians, in a combination of ineptitude ("We run ads, senator") and capture have acquiesced to this drift.

This has played out for so long that people who are aware of what is happening are exhausted and defeatist. We should not give up though. This is important stuff.

That's not quite how I remember it. The early web was dominated by user authoring tools like FrontPage, Netscape Composer and Dreamweaver. Then you could publish to sites using FTP or WebDAV. Many ISPs provided a bit of web space for people as part of the default offer. And it worked - the early web was full of self hosted websites about all kinds of niche topics with relatively unique designs and which were thematically organized.

A few things broke this model.

One is that the web page design tools struggled to incorporate any kind of dynamism or collaboration. They were fine for as long as you had a website with a single author. The moment you wanted to have multiple people working on it simultaneously, or you wanted to add comments / ads / hit counters / guest books, the best you could do was stuff for programmers like PHP and version control systems.

Another is that the visual design tools weren't very good. Dreamweaver was by far the best, but expensive, and it was still amazingly annoying and hard to get a visual design that didn't look like amateur trash.

Yet another is that the web didn't have good tools for thematic design, and figuring out a good site layout was hard, refactoring even harder. Even things as obvious as a consistent navbar were hard because there wasn't good support for static site rendering and HTML doesn't have an include tag. People hacked it up with framesets for a while but that didn't work well either.

Finally, connecting your website address to your ISP meant if you wanted to switch to a better internet offer your website would disappear which was unacceptable, so in practice people wanted independent providers, and they needed to use ads to make money, which in turn meant that you hit the limits of the WYSIWYG editors that didn't really understand ads and which iterated, maybe if you were lucky, once every few years.

Into this void stepped yes, Geocities, but primarily WordPress. It supported dynamic features, it understood ads, it iterated fast, it had decent looking themes, it said "don't bother with organizing stuff, just keep a diary" and all that massively lowered the barrier to entry for web publishing. Later sites like MySpace and Facebook provided a kind of WordPress-lite and gained success from that, Twitter made it even more minimal and gained even more success, and then finally Instagram took away the obligation to even have anything to say at all and had even more success than that.

So the trend here has only partly been about tools. It's clearly not true that people only want to consume content, the entire success of social media and YouTube revolves around the massively huge desire to create and publish. It's done via centralized platforms for the same reason everything else is: they can move fast, they can raise and make money, they can hire the smartest and hardest working people to build them because there's some real chance of reward. Decentralized systems by and large can't do these things.

WYSIWYG tools came a bit later. GeoCities in '94, FrontPage in '95, Dreamweaver in '97.

They were also _much_ less popular. There were millions of GeoCities sites, while FrontPage was a niche tool, even after Microsoft bought it in '96.

Like you said, these tools weren't good enough. They produced a mess of content that was limited in features and difficult to maintain, but more importantly, they were still reserved for a technical audience. You still needed to know what a web host was, how to use FTP, etc. They were woefully insufficient, even compared to publishing services.

> Many ISPs provided a bit of web space for people as part of the default offer.

I'm not sure if "many" is correct. Certainly _some_ did, but the largest ones like AOL and CompuServe in the US didn't, AFAIK.

WordPress came much later when the web was already established. And it was also largely a technical tool.

But WYSIWYG tools shouldn't have existed either. Like publishing services, they are a response to a feature the web didn't have. People certainly have a need to produce content, but the barrier to do so was so high, that most flocked to services like GeoCities, and later social media, to fulfill this need.

If producing content was as easy as consuming it was in the early web, i.e. if we had an analogous tool to the web browser for publishing, the way the web developed and the modern web would've been much different, and arguably for the better. Nontechnical users eventually learned to use the web browser, and they would've learned the web "creator" as well.

Unfortunately that opportunity has passed, and we can't re-educate people to use a different web than the one they're already used to. At least I'm pessimistic that any of these decentralized projects will gain any mainstream traction.

> It's done via centralized platforms for the same reason everything else is: they can move fast, they can raise and make money, they can hire the smartest and hardest working people to build them because there's some real chance of reward.

None of these are advantages. Centralized platforms _require_ these things because running a centralized service at scale is incredibly complex. Most of the problems these platforms deal with is precisely because of the complexity of scale.

Yet if the web model reused the inherent decentralized model of the internet, scaling a centralized service wouldn't be a problem. Protocols like BitTorrent have solved content distribution that doesn't rely on a centralized server. Had this model been adopted from the start, none of the modern centralized platforms would have a need to exist.

> Unfortunately that opportunity has passed, and we can't re-educate people to use a different web than the one they're already used to. At least I'm pessimistic that any of these decentralized projects will gain any mainstream traction.

This doesnt ring true. The web becomes more disruptable by the day. Familiarity with various aspects of technology is diffusing in various parts of society. The hypes (crypto, AI etc) are conditioning people to accept that "stuff is happening". They wont switch for another social platform. They may not wear goggles in the billions. But they will try tangible proposals.

The real problem is that there is no assurance the "disruption" will a positive one.

No matter how bad we think about the situation somebody can find a way to make it worse.

His reply has 0 class and no professionalism whatsoever. I am not familiar with him, how did he became CEO.

First YC Class.

He's the only remaining co-founder.

Basically the end of an era where tech companies will finally have to make a profit. Obviously from the development of Reddit over the years they never really care about any of it until interest rate punch you in the face.

Finally, it is nice. Back to the good old days where things have to at least pass the common sense test.

Does Spez thinks this makes them look good?

And then you "blame" the 3rd party apps?

Sounds like a basic failure of housekeeping. But, but let's blame "remote work" or something like that, yeah

I think Spez feels his power/dominance is threatened by Apollo/Christian and he is lashing out because he thinks the problem is Christian, and not his own actions. I think it's possible investors are forcing him into a situation he disagrees with, but I suspect that's charitable.

I think his lack of self reflection rivals that of Triplebyte's CEO when they forced public profiles on people.

People understand when force is being used against them rather than persuasion, and nobody likes to feel like force is being used against them. I am very happy to see collective force being leveraged towards someone in a position of power.

I think Spez hasn't explored the idea that people value their anonymity, so attaching a credit card to an "anonymous" account isn't going to be popular. If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account. But they would have to trust the community enough to be somewhat open with their books.

Of course the real problem here is likely a violation of fiduciary duties to their investors, although given how things are turning out, he may already be liable.

Steve Huffman (ie spez) made a deliberate choice to act without integrity, putting it mildly.

The company hoping to IPO too… Heck, I’ve been a user for a decade, I would have bought some shares. They could have made it super interesting for retail.

Absolutely not going to happen now, since we have a better sense for how the CEO handles difficult situations. I can only imagine the shitshow it must be internally with leadership like that.

> If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money.

I suspect the direction to employ dark patterns comes from the top.

Yes, professional ethics means rejecting unethical things from the top.

Semantics I guess. The way you worded it just seems like a bunch of machiavellian UX designers brought these dark patterns to management who were simply ethically negligent. All I'm saying is that I suspect the UX staff were directed to do this or at least to drive installs through "whatever means necessary".

> If reddit showed a desire to be frugal and fired all these awful dark pattern implementing UX devs who are devoid of professional ethics, and was ok breaking even instead of making money. I would strongly consider a 3-5 dollar a month donation not associated with an account.

You are a low value user to them. Why would they remove the thing that gets people looking at more ads? Most people don't pay for subscriptions if they don't have to, and the 3-5 dollars you'd pay per month is really nothing to them. People live in a tech and power user bubble not understanding that the vast majority of Reddit's 500 million user per month base simply do not give a shit about any of the drama that's happening and will continue to see ads.

The more I think about this the funnier it is. A third party app built by two guys is so much better than the official Reddit app that people are willing to pay actual money for it... and his response is to throw shade at the developrs?

Yeah, meanwhile reddit apparently has 2000 employees and can’t make a simple enough site written in react work well. It lags my $3000 computer that can run cyberpunk in ultra.

This is such an underrated point. I straight up can't use Reddit on my phone without quickly switching to the old interface. Seriously, my phone will just crash, and that's with trackers being blocked. I have no idea how they managed to make such a bloated UI, without even having anything new besides profile pictures.

That requires much less employees, which reddit cannot afford.

Hi Seph, sorry to contact you this way, but as you have left the Braid group, is there a way to contact you? You stated at your departure that we could message you, but your DMs are closed on Discord. No worries if you don't want to be contacted, just asking as you stated to be contacted via DMs, but your DMs are closed.

Flick me an email. No promises that I’ll reply, but my email address isn’t hidden.

Because third party apps are user agents, in the original sense of the word. The reddit app is Reddit's agent. The official reddit app exists to advance reddit's strategy. It isn't that reddit can't produce a better UI, it is that doing so isn't a part of their strategy.

Isn’t that an indication they should buy the 3rd party apps?

Also pretty damning they can’t make a profit where others can off their data lol

> Also pretty damning they can’t make a profit where others can off their data lol

I agree that Reddit's failure to convert their enormous reach into profit is a failure, I don't agree that this particular thing is damning. I'll bet if you pooled the revenue of every third party app it still wouldn't begin to cover Reddit's overall costs.

The CEO’s lack of integrity is a signal.

Well, one of the 3rd party developers suggested that course of action... alas spez and/or other folks at reddit decided to frame that as being 'threatened' by them.

Which, honestly is great insight into the fragile mind of a man manchild lucky enough that their startup happens to be very visible to.the public eye.

That doesn’t really follow. A third party app could be profitable because it pays little or nothing for the Reddit API and makes money from app sales or in-app purchases. If Reddit bought the app it hardly helps them.

Not necessarily.

1. It's entirely possible they could make more money monetizing the highly engaged users that use mobile apps through ads than those apps make directly.

2. Their cost structure is higher than the apps since they need to own and manage the backend and promote the overall Reddit branding.

In one comment, he neglected to remove the "A:" at first, presumably while copying from a pre-written document. It shows how little he cares.

https://archive.ph/X6EJq

It's not unreasonable for something like this to go through a PR team first. He's clearly not good at damage control (if history tells us anything)

It’s like he’s implying it’s the third party apps fault he can’t make money on a user base that big with that much engagement. Which is an…odd take.

He has said in the past that no one uses 3rd party apps and they're not a meaningful amount of their traffic. Non stop contradiction and lies.

Major subreddits I’ve seen run polls show that less than 3% of users are using third party apps.

You can't vote on a poll using a 3rd party app. For example, if you click on a poll using Apollo, it opens the Reddit website as a new window and you have to log in again and vote through that website.

This level of friction means I've never voted in a Reddit poll unless I was on a computer, and many other 3rd party app users probably act similarly.

It's impressive this many 3rd party app users went through the hassle IMO (3% of the whole).

Isn’t polling one of the features that Reddit doesn’t provide an API for? I think that would skew poll results heavily. I know Apollo can’t do polls and it’s one of the reasons I never partake in them on Reddit.

PC gaming over 20 percent

> He has said in the past that no one uses 3rd party apps and they're not a meaningful amount of their traffic.

I wish I had known about the Apollo app before all this drama. I would have gladly paid because the official mobile and iPad apps are atrocious.

What lie? He didn’t say that. He didn’t imply that.

[flagged]

I don't read that as the implication at all. He's saying that Reddit needs to make changes to become profitable, while making a jab at the fact that some of the 3P apps have a financial interest in preserving the status quo.

Ok, even in that scenario if you’re this many years in, have this many users, this many daily posts, and your underlying tech is a CRUD app, it’s not because you have a free API. It’s because you royally screwed up many, many, many things.

>Ok, even in that scenario if you’re this many years in, have this many users, this many daily posts, and your underlying tech is a CRUD app, it’s not because you have a free API.

Well, the argument is that it at least partially because they have a free/cheap API. And they're willing to stake a lot on betting that changing this will pay off.

So, like many other high-profile AMAs that reddit has hosted over the years. I mean, can we please talk about Rampart?

At this point, Spez's behavior is so out of touch that I'm genuinely wondering if the stress of being a pre-IPO CEO is causing him to have a breakdown.

If you want the context for spez's replies and the comments by the other admins:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/145bxmi/c...

> His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.

Talk about trying to rewrite history.

> It won't take long, because

He also deleted some of his comments seconds after posting :)

Got any screenshots? I was watching his profile page as the AMA was happening and didn’t see any answers disappear.

He did? What did they say?

He really needs to thank the 3rd party app maker for making mobile reddit a bearable experience. If you've used the offical app you know just how unpleasent it is to use.

> barely said anything at all.

This is pretty typical of AMA's from widely known people. It's nothing more than marketing. AMA do not translate to quality or quantity of answers, only questions.

Wow, he posted only 14 comments, and all but one were <100 words. Whose are shockingly low numbers given the stakes.

Seemingly he only replied 14 times. That was all he posted

The same story it always is.

Reddit, like so many other places, believes it has a right to extract the value the community creates.

But it doesn't. It didn't create the value, the community did. It convinces itself it has a right to profit here, but it really created almost none of the value.

It is then surprised when it can't just sit and extract value from the community without pushback.

This kind of value extraction only works (If at all), when the value being provided by the company is somewhere near that being provided by the community.

Then people are a little more willing to feel like you deserve something.

In reddit's case, it's very uneven. Despite providing the website and bandwidth, Reddit feels to most of its community like a large scale freeloader, as funny as that may sound.

That sort of relationship eventually goes south, though it takes a while sometimes.

All of these places eventually discover that they are not the thing driving real value.

Those that are smart realize this early on, try to make as much as they can while they can, and diversify before it all goes to shit.

Reddit is not one of those.

> It convinces itself it has a right to profit here, but it really created almost none of the value.

I used to believe that too, but reality has convinced me of the opposite. There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity. So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it.

The demise of Reddit has been a long time coming, and now that it is actually happening, there is once again no plan for "the community" to move forward. The open source alternatives are all effectively worthless, with Lemmy apparently telling people not to sign up (yep, seriously!) because they can't handle the influx. No doubt Facebook & Co, or perhaps new commercial competitors, are going to pick up the slack as usual, because the real value is in the infrastructure and network effects that make platforms like Reddit possible in the first place.

> If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it.

While not a message board, the Wikimedia Foundation does well financially, hosts lots of content, receives massive traffic, and has an open API.

> So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users.

Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing. Imagine the internet of old with countless message boards, but under a single sign on.

As far as content moderation, folks talk a lot about AI and the spam it will bring, however, there is also the opportunity for AI moderation.

> Federated authentication and open protocols are a thing.

In theory, yes. In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.

Lemmy is constantly mentioned in these discussions as an open source, federated Reddit alternative, yet the largest Lemmy instance has 1500 monthly active users. That's... nothing. There are tens of thousands of individual subreddits bigger than that. The "Fediverse" isn't going anywhere.

The beauty of open protocols is they don't preclude for-profit enterprise hosting large instances on their own server farm. This is already the case with email: I can host my own email server or signup with a small (or large) or free (or commercial) email provider and still communicate with everyone, regardless of their provider.

It's generally not in the interest of commercial providers to use open protocols. They do it for email because due to its history, there is a very long tail of small mailservers that they need to federate with to be useful, but the big email providers are all working to phase out the "open" parts, with anti-spam measures making it almost impossible to self-host, and privileged delivery mechanisms like push notifications that require closed APIs to use.

The Internet is not moving towards open communication protocols, it's moving away from them.

> with anti-spam measures making it almost impossible to self-host, and privileged delivery mechanisms like push notifications that require closed APIs to use.

There are anti-spam measures that don't require locking down protocols. Ideally, a user's feed would only consist of message boards they subscribe to. Similarly, message boards could limit posting to subscribed users, approved users, paying users, or those users with a "certificate" proving their human - the latter would be akin to certificate authorities we have today who assign certificates to websites.

> It's generally not in the interest of commercial providers to use open protocols.

Not to derail, but that's the capitalist's contradiction: a capitalist points to competition as a theoretical advantage of capitalism, but then in practice does everything to eliminate it.

> There are anti-spam measures that don't require locking down protocols.

Of course. Locking down protocols is never required. It's being done because it benefits the largest service providers by restricting their users' ability to move elsewhere. You're acting as if the status quo is an unfortunate situation that can be resolved by giving service providers the necessary technologies to interoperate. The exact opposite is the case. Service providers are actively undermining open protocols (EEE). They are very much aware that federation is possible, and they do not want it.

> It's being done because it benefits the largest service providers by restricting their users' ability to move elsewhere.

I agree which is why it will take a 501(c)(3) non-profit to drive the change.

What's going on though that a $5 / month server can't handle 1500 users posting a few bytes of text. I realize we're talking millions of bytes that have to be processed, but computers are fast. Are the protocols inefficient? Is the code just really inefficient? What's going on?

I wonder how many are willing tonpay that $5 per month. The community as a whole is worth disproportionally less if it becomes 90% smaller.

I mean, why can't a single $5 instance handle 1500 users? 1500 users might generate a few megabytes of text, that's next to nothing.

It can't scale without spinning up new (heavy) instance. Its database is hosted in the same <<thing>> as the web server ( https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker... ). Note that it's a single container that exposes port 80 and 443 - the database is hosted inside of that container.

That makes scaling the main instance impractical without redesigning how its built, deployed, secured, and connects to its backend database.

Note also that adding other sites increases this load without adding users as polling for content constantly is likely more expensive than having a user connect directly (and use it for a limited time).

Why does it need to scale? Does my laptop need to scale when I open a 100 megabyte file? No, it just does it in a few milliseconds then goes back idle. What I mean is, 1500 users sounds like a load you handle with a Raspberry Pi in a forgotten corner. I just don't understand what is happening to overload even the weakest of cloud instances?

>> In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.

I don't know anything about federation, but what you said basically describes the Internet when it started, so I don't see how you can imagine it is not going anywhere based on that. Most tech starts as a "niche endeavor of a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds" (I'm also thinking of Apple starting at a computer club).

Federation and open protocols aren't new ideas, and the vast majority of people have collectively decided that there is no value for them in those ideas. This isn't pioneering stuff that everyone would jump onto if only it was known/available to them. It is available, and has been for a long time, and the people are not biting. I see no reason to assume that this is going to change.

> Wikimedia Foundation does well financially

The ever present nags to donate would beg to differ

> There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity.

Usenet.

Usenet has/had hundreds of millions of active users?!?

That's certainly news to me.

I can’t find anyone who says how many users, but 110-120 thousand newsgroups.

With a tenth active users and ten times the spammers!

Which is just absolutely full of spam now, plus you need to pay for access (largely).

How about "email"?

Do people forget it's a common protocol that isn't monopolized by anyone and is the widest prevalent even today, perhaps because of it?

I don't think many people consider "email" to be a community in any meaningful way. The same way people don't consider physical mail, the telephone network or the internet as a whole a community.

Is a company that exists for a decade without turning a profit really a for-profit entity? It looks more like a robin hood scheme to distribute investor money to developers.

> According to CEO Steve Huffman, who hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) this afternoon, the company has never been profitable.

Why would anyone invest in this IPO they are trying so hard to make happen? I can’t think of anything left for them to do after this length of time to become profitable. The only things left are the things they are doing that alienate the user base. It seems Reddit is Uber and WeWork with a different hat on.

> I used to believe that too, but reality has convinced me of the opposite. There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity. So the really difficult part, the one where the value ultimately comes from, does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it.

Your logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from the specific for-profit company that currently exists.

That is unconvincing because it is overly specific in who it is attributing value to. Is Facebook responsible for most of the value of its community? No, because if Facebook didn't exist, Myspace would still exist and do the same thing that Facebook is doing. Therefore, Facebook (and Myspace) are both not creating the value, because if they didn't exist, someone else would exist that does the same thing. The main reason there's one behemoth is because of network effects, which makes it nearly impossible for competition to start, which gives the illusion that that behemoth is doing something unique and exceptionally skilful. But they are not. One valid interpretation is that they're free-riding off the community that they've captured.

> Your logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from the specific for-profit company that currently exists.

No, my logic is: there has never been a not-for-profit large online community, therefore the value comes from infrastructure, network effects, and brand recognition – and not from "the community" as commonly claimed. Once the infrastructure is in place (which requires immense upfront investment) and enough money is spent on promotion, the userbase will cross the critical threshold required for growth, and content will be generated as a result.

Just think about it: If it's really "the users" that bring all the value to the table, then why can't those users manage to organize into a community that's not run by greedy profiteers? Because the "running" is where the real difficulty, and thus the real source of value, is.

> infrastructure, network effects, and brand recognition

That's reasonable, but then you leap from there into giving credit to Reddit per se, instead of a Reddit-like company that would exist in Reddit's place if Reddit didn't exist. That's where we disagree. In Reddit's absence, another company would rise to do the same thing, therefore Reddit is providing little to no unique value to the world. The delta of the world with and without Reddit is close to zero. Hence no value.

> If it's really "the users" that bring all the value to the table, then why can't those users manage to organize into a community that's not run by greedy profiteers? Because the "running" is where the real difficulty, and thus the real source of value, is.

This is a conflation of necessary and sufficient conditions. Infrastructure, by itself, is a necessary but not sufficient condition. So are users. Either of these things in isolation have no value because neither of them are sufficient conditions.

I’m not sure how you can say Reddit deserves none of the credit for creating Reddit. It has to be at least as valuable (from a revenue perspective) to create the site as it costs to design and run one of the most trafficked site in the world otherwise no company would just magically appear in its place.

You almost act as if some people stumbled upon great software/infrastructure and improperly started charging people to use it. This isn’t some mountain spring some company claimed and is now charging the tribes down stream for access.

The communities on Reddit aren’t the valuable part. I don’t visit 99% of the subreddits. The valuable thing is I can go on one site, find a subreddit for everything I’m interested in, participate with the same account and have no learning curve/same UI/UX as the other communities I’m a part of. You can try to argue that those communities being there is what’s valuable to me, but without Reddit they all wouldn’t be on the same site.

Your argument reads as some poor adaption of the labor theory of value. Right now Reddit isn’t profitable, as long as these economics hold, no one is going to fill in for Reddit if it were to close. And all the mods and users can’t change that.

> without Reddit they all wouldn’t be on the same site.

Without a Reddit-like company, they wouldn't all be on the same site. That's the key distinction. If a clone won't arise if Reddit shuts down, then yes, you are correct, Reddit is adding a lot of value. As is, given they have a monopoly on this vertical of social media due to network effects, whether or not a clone would arise is a hypothesis that we can't test, but my money would be on a clone arising in their absence.

"Reddit is providing little to no unique value to the world. The delta of the world with and without Reddit is close to zero. Hence no value."

That's not the definition of "value" that everyone uses.

Suppose there was a bread company called Breddit that baked loaves of bread and sold them. It's very easy to argue that if Breddit didn't exist, someone else would bake and sell bread. No duh. But that doesn't mean a company that makes bread doesn't have value.

There's pretty much no company in the world that offers unique value...

It's not analogous. The bread company is lowering the price by providing competition. That's value that I get from their existence, that I wouldn't get if they disappeared. But I do agree with the proposition that companies in perfectly competitive markets without a differentiated product, aren't adding that much value.

> The delta of the world with and without Reddit is close to zero. Hence no value.

The same is true for the users. There are 8 billion people on the planet, two thirds of which use the Internet. There's no shortage of users able to form online communities. By the above logic, those communities have no value since they are replenishable from a near-limitless supply of new users.

No, because Reddit has captured all users that want to use a Reddit-like service. If Reddit's users all died, Reddit and all potential substitute Reddit-like services would die. But if Reddit itself dies, a Reddit-like clone would most likely arise, because Reddit itself isn't providing unique value to the world.

It also ignores the capitalistic system it lives in. Commercial projects prosper because everything is designed to make that happen.

" There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity."

What?

Sure there have been. Somethingawful? 4chan? Wikipedia? Usenet? etc

They each commanded a significant portion of the attention of the community on the internet at the time.

If you don't limit it to hundreds of millions, i belong to mid-sized successful communities (woodworking, electrical, DIY, etc) that are maybe 100k-1 million users, doing fine, have been doing fine for decades, and don't have for-profit entities behind them.

In fact, almost all meaningful communities i have belonged to online were not run by for-profit entities. Some later got taken over by for-profit entities, but then failed ;)

"does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it."

This is not at all related to the for-profit piece. The difficulty is in becoming popular, which seems to be, maybe mostly luck? Because unlike what you say, everyone is doing it. Is there any evidence at all that the for-profit was a pre-req to being popular?

In a world where reddit was not for-profit from the start, i don't think it would have changed anything.

It was a place that most Digg users were willing to go to. That was dumb luck. If Digg had not been so stupid, Reddit would not be popular, for-profit or not.

The thing is, the site itself while not easy to build or maintain is ultimately a commodity.

Reddit replaced Digg. Some other startup will replace Reddit.

It’s the users and the content they produce that’s irreplaceable.

Maybe sites like this will only be able to function in the long run if there is some profit sharing involved. Every user gets X ads in their feed every month, and for every 5X posts or 50X comments one ad disappears.

Is it reddit by itself that does the "attracting users" part or is it the community activity, aka the users?

No not seriously. The big instances restricted account creation so people use lower trafficked instances

4chan

>Reddit, like so many other places, believes it has a right to extract the value the community creates.

>But it doesn't.

I'm sorry, but it absolutely does. Yes, it has to do this subject to brand risk constraints. But the idea that investors should just expect to make losses on the site is insane. That trying to turn a profit on their own platform represents "freeloading". I guess normally I'd feel sorry for whatever platforms are afflicted with people who hold this sort of ideology, but Reddit has done a lot to cater to people who think like this.

Also, they explicitly do have that right, as laid out by their TOS - https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-...

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

"they have that right because it's in their TOS" == "they have that right because they so"

Well, yes, it's their platform. No one forces anyone to use it, if they don't like the terms they can go elsewhere.

Right, the investors are the problem. Reddit made a deal with the devil and now the community that made it bears the cost.

No, it really doesn’t.

If they paid their mods, it might be a different conversation.

No one on Reddit asked investors to come over and invest. They did so because they thought they could get a return. Well, that’s the risk of being an investor, isn’t it?

Reddit brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year ($550m is what I recently heard). Let’s not pretend that the community is at all taking advantage of Reddit, right? I’m firstly skeptical that a site like Reddit can’t turn a profit on HALF A BILLION dollars a year, but fine. Let’s accept that’s the truth. They could have worked with the community on this. There are things they could’ve done. They could’ve:

- engaged the community on the changes

- given devs more than a mere 30 days to figure something out

- responded to repeated requests by the devs to work together

- provided options to the community on various methods of getting more revenue in

They did NONE of those things. The CEO lied and spat in their faces.

Agreed.

In fact, I’m always a little bemused at the level of shock from folks, especially here, when a company does what companies will inevitably do.

Reddit, doesn’t exist for the good of its users, outside of retaining significant numbers for the purposes of generating profit from selling their data and selling ad space.

Like every other social platform, the primary motive is profit, full stop.

It absolutely feels sleazy that billions of people freely contribute their time and talent to generate content and then get pushed aside when the companies business model changes. But everyone should absolutely expect that from day one.

Social platforms are a fun, but one sided relationship that will eventually turn sour.

I mean, i'm not only shocked, i even said it's the same as it always is :)

3rd party app developers are the freeloaders I would argue. They contribute no revenue to reddit, are exempt from displaying ads but incur OpEx costs. Some are as big as 1B reqs a month but act as though they are the victim. Not only that, instead of being a professional business partner, they go on their respective subreddit to complain about reddit management… on reddit. Kind of hilarious actually.

This is no different the open source/free software. Just because you created some software, and it became popular, and a large contributing community, and you started 1% of the value, does not mean you either created most of the value, or get to extract it. Attempts to do so basically always fail.

The argument that it would not have happened without you is almost always wrong - it is almost always a mistake to assume success is simply because of your choices, and not lots of factors. This is one reason repeat success is very very very rare.

I'm not saying they have no legal right to try - of course they do. I'm just saying it doesn't work because nobody thinks they should be allowed to let it work.

How they run the site and whether they need to make a profit is of no consequence to users - they don't give a shit. You can't make them give a shit. It wasn't who they attracted. They don't have a 100 million users who want them to make a profit. They have 100 million users who don't give the slightest crap about whether they make any money at all.

Yes, trying to generate profit on value they don't create is freeloading. Quite literally, in fact. It is the literal definition of freeloading to try to extract value by taking advantage of what others do. You don't argue they create the value, but instead because they own the platform they are allowed to extract it.

Legally, yes. But that's sort of irrelevant. Socially, no.

The crux of your argument is basically "if my ideology is right than investors are dumb and this is a bad investment" I would agree with that. It was always a bad investment. It still is!

Precisely because freeloading of the kind they are doing always generates enough ire over time to ruin the community. Usually before you can extract enough profit to be worth it.

You can feel sorry for platforms, and for me, that's okay. But you still haven't shown that i'm actually wrong, and in fact, what i've said is backed up by the consistent failure of things that operate the way you seem to think is okay.

I mostly feel sad for you. You seem to have forgotten somewhere along the line that corporations as a kind of entity were created to serve society (not investors), and not the other way around.

I'm not saying all things this large should be non-profit, mind you, just that the kind of skimming that reddit is trying to do, where they think they can make a few bucks in profit per user through freeloading, while providing nothing in return, is neither helpful to society, and doesn't work anyway!

There are more symbiotic for-profits that realize they need their communities to want them to succeed, and do okay.

Put another way - for profits running hosting like Reddit where they think their profit is more important than the communities, and that they are the reason for the success of those communities, basically always fail. Those smart enough to realize neither of these are true sometimes can make a go of it.

[flagged]

Ye, this "it is non of your business as a pleb consumer to complain about companies, use another one" trope is getting old. If Reddit's lusers don't like Reddit they should complain, threaten to leave, then leave.

It is like this "Karen"-meme where the protagonist and antagonist are mixed up. The nominal protagonist blames Karen for the employer's fault. If you make money as being a firewall between the Karen and your boss, you are the problem, not Karen.

I don't think it's capitalism that's the issue. After all, that's existed for hundreds of years and across so many countries.

This seems like a more narrow problem, where the goal of new companies is no longer "Build good product, acquire users, slowly and steadily grow", it's "Build a product, give it away for free at a loss for years, get millions in VC funding, sell your users out, destroy product while laughing to the bank to repeat the process". Seems to really have picked up in the past 20 years or so, and largely specific to the United States.

The last 20 years you say? :)

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

Coincides almost perfectly with zero or below 5% interest rates.

Capitalism is obviously the problem.

Yet that was the business model from day one, no?

Every contributor and consumer of every post on Reddit was being exploited for profit. That’s why social media platforms exist, to exploit its users for profit.

The users are the product, always have been. It’s unfortunate, but the internet is businesses all the way down.

I also said it was a matter of user expectation. There's a level of extractiveness that is acceptable for users, because users get information, entertainment, etc. in return for their participation on reddit.

Of course, that's setting aside the more radical position of "social media is fundamentally harmful to humans, therefore we should all stop using it regardless".

It is just switching the roles which side is exploiting. Before it was communities, now it will be instead of Reddit. Surely it is reasonable to call people who used platform that didn't make money for their personal enjoyment exploitation. Even if they didn't know they did it.

You can host your own community then. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for hosting all of that data. Trying to not lose money from hosting said data is not a "distort[ion] at the whim of capitalist forces."

"You can host your own community then"; Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers

I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved. Based on the Apollo logistics, reddit API pricing seems to fall on the greedy end of the spectrum. At the same time we have examples with high-traffic websites (e.g. Wikipedia) which manage to build upon volunteer effort and be sustainable without pissing everyone off within a few days.

> I mean that there is a spectrum ranging from paying the bills and making profit to blatantly exploiting everyone involved.

They're not making profit, that's the entire point.

> Sorry but I'm not really a fan of this "make your own (...)" attitude, especially when excusing corporate behavior against volunteers

I'm similarly not a fan of discounting just how much money and work goes into building a company with millions of users, having helped do that in the past. My comment was not glib, it was entirely sincere; if you want to know just how much it costs, host your own community and see just how "greedy" it is.

I understand your point.

The thing is that they should be able to introduce their API pricing without triggering the events of the past days. I'm not even remotely an expert, but the pricing seems too aggressive and seems to contradict was communicated earlier (again based on the apollo transcripts).

On the other hand they are supposed to be experts, or they should at least ask one, given the millions of users, thousands of mods, etc involved.

How do you know whether it was too aggressive or not? They could have always revised their estimates when they did the calculation for how much each call costs as well as how much lost revenue they get from third party apps not showing ads. Sure, they could have given more than a month's notice but the bill comes due at some point. Based on the API call figures Apollo has posted and having worked on API products in the past, I can entirely see how $20 million a year is reasonable given how much Apollo is pulling from Reddit's servers.

I infer it was aggressive, based on the following:

Per Christian (the Apollo app dev): "(...) Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls." [1]

All assuming he is not lying (which I have no reason to believe, contrary to the reddit reps). Two orders of magnitude over Imgur pricing sounds a bit greedy, unless Imgur is also at the verge of collapse, which I'm not aware of.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

> I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

He's got a sweetheart deal.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing

There is no $166 plan. The least expensive $500/month plan is "only" 7.5M requests per month.

50M requests under the ultra plan (7.5M requests and then $0.001 for each one after) would cost $43k/month - and it would be more sensible to go to the "mega" plan then which is $10k/month for 150M API calls.

Yes, imgur also does not make any profit. Soon you will see imgur also raising prices, they simply have enough VC to not need to resort to that yet.

Not all high-traffic websites are comparable when it comes to sustainability. Comparing reddit and Wikipedia is definitely an apples and oranges situation. The software, data model and infrastructure are wildly different.

Just the simple fact that most of Wikipedia can largely be cached long(ish) term via CDNs reduces the capital needed to keep it running. reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content, user configured listings, threaded discussion, media hosting, etc. Caching those types of things is a lot more difficult.

> reddit on the other hand, has constantly changing content

You mean like how Wikipedia has pages that anyone can edit that can (and do) get edited many times per minute?

> user configured listings

Kind of like how Wikipedia supports saved articles and reading lists?

> threaded discussion

If only each article on Wikipedia had a discussion page where you could talk about edits to the page. We could call it the Talk page. But I guess that’s too dynamic for them.

> media hosting

I’ve always thought Wikipedia would be better if they had images and maybe even videos to go with each article. Maybe we should petition them to add this.

Those 'capitalist forces' you're talking about are 'you have to pay for resources if you want to use them'.

But I'm sure this wouldn't be true in magical communist land. They'd be well up for ploughing resources into r/cats and absolutely wouldn't be sending you off to dig up a field to improve production for the next five year plan.

I guess you should pray that the CCP invests more money in Reddit in order to make sure it's no longer subjected to the "whims of capitalist forces".

Of course, I have trouble taking this seriously when I suspect there's a huge amount of overlap between people decrying profit-seeking behavior here but who also are fine with wrongthink communities being banned out of advertiser revenue concerns.

If Reddit is that unimportant, it should be easy to take those communities and move them elsewhere, but that isn’t happening. The reality is that without Reddit a large part of those communities wouldn’t exist, and they only exist because of Reddit.

For the long term survival of Reddit it is essential they become profitable, otherwise they’ll go bankrupt. And seeing that these communities depend on the existence of Reddit it’s also in the interest of these communities that Reddit turns a profit.

They seem to have serious revenue, about 500M in 2021 (https://businessmodelanalyst.com/reddit-business-model/), you’d think they could make a profit based on that. They had 2000 employees in June 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit), assuming average of 100K cost per employee, that already adds up to 200M.

That may seem excessive for running some community website, but they get 400M+ from ads. Just running an organization to handle a 400M+ business for ads will require lots of people, infra, marketing, etc.

I can see the reasoning behind the thought that if you’ve created all this to enable these communities, someone doing less than 1% of the work, by simply putting an app on top of your APIs and infra and starting to make a profit seems unfair.

What i don’t understand is why they can’t outcompete these apps by providing a better app.

"If Reddit is that unimportant, it should be easy to take those communities and move them elsewhere, but that isn’t happening. The reality is that without Reddit a large part of those communities wouldn’t exist, and they only exist because of Reddit."

Oh boy. First, this already happened once, that's why Reddit exists. Second, it wasn't happening because it wasn't enough of a problem. Once they generate enough ire it will happen. Will this be enough? Maybe. If not, something else will. It always happens.

always

When for-profits are involed.

You make the same mistake they do - to believe that the success they have is deliberate, and not just mostly dumb luck. Had Digg not failed, nobody would give the slightest shit about reddit. But right up until that point, what you said here could have been said about Digg. In fact, it was said. By lots of people. Yet they moved to Reddit.

In the end, these communities don't exist because of reddit. They exist because people have shared interests. The only thing reddit enables is for them to find each other. If reddit disappears, they will find each other again. I've watched the end of similar sites. I had friends on them. We found each other again on other sites.

> What i don’t understand is why they can’t outcompete these apps by providing a better app.

The good apps are (a) free, and (b) don't show any ads. Pretty much by definition they can't compete with that and make money.

If they cant compete because the competition is freeloading on their APIs and community building efforts then it’s clear that they need to compensate the lost revenue by charging for the API usage. It seems Reddit has about 1.5b active monthly users, guess Reddit costs are about $0.3 per year per user. Would be fair to charge that for API usage. If the apps don’t like it, they’re free to create and host the community themselves, shouldn’t be too hard, as Reddit offers little value…

I think the argument you want to make is not about Reddit's costs (which are low), but rather that should be charging some fraction of their lost revenue per-user for API use, since API users don't see ads. (Or else require app developers to show Reddit's own ads.) The issue is presumably that Reddit isn't profitable, and free app users are a major source of lost revenue (in addition to being a fairly small cost due to API use).

Reddit costs are not low, running the organization costs at least 400M per year. You might state that they’re doing many things that are not core to running a community backend, but you can’t separate the core business from the supporting activities. They would have never reached their current scale if they hadn’t invested in marketing and ads for revenue. And that would reduce the value of the backend.

The price they want to charge is 100x that, iirc.

They state that for a typical user they expect an API cost of about $1 per user per month. Seeing that narwhal has a $6 per user per month plan, expecting 1/6 to go to the largest cost component doesn’t seem unfair.

a and b are basically the same point, since they both can be abstract to the point "make revenue".

I used Apollo because it provides a much better user experience and it is not even close to Reddits own App.

I guess it all boils down to whether they are willing to use user generated content for profit without misaligning the interests for users.

I guess they can't and they won't unless they become a NGO.

Even NGOs need money to run their organization, and even though they’re an NGO, it doesn’t mean all their services are provided for free.

And I’d say that aiming for long term viability by ensuring they run at least break even is in the interest of their users, so not sure how their current actions are against the interest if their users.

And the fact that users put time and effort in creating content on the platform, this doesn’t mean all its services need to be provided for free to these users.

This is a really interesting take because it’s so opposite of how Reddit sees things. Of course they own all the communities? But, no, not really. It’s like your landlord thinking they own your business.

It is a thought-provoking analogy. To take it further, would Reddit be like a shopping mall, and the apps would be the shops and the moderators be the sales staff? Or would the subreddits be the shops, and the apps be ... yes what would they be?

It is just a fun thought experiment. But I think Reddit the company has been more than just a landlord. They have made more than just rented out space to make Reddit what it is.

Reddit have used VC money to artificially put rent at zero, destroying community driven forums in the progress.

In a landlord analogy, it would be like opening a big mall and lure shops and consumers at a loss, making the city centre a void, then raise prices when the original functional community in the city is lost.

I agree entirely about how Reddit is essentially become a parasite on it's communities. It does sound odd, but IMO it's very true.

I look at these situations where growth is the main goal and it's always a matter of time before the goal outgrows the actual utility or function of the company itself. Reddit really has a job of just keeping the servers online and being there to enforce basic "property" rights.

They make a boat load of money from the dumb cosmetic features of the site.

The community has provided Reddit value for free.

It is Reddit’s to use at that point, right or wrong.

Unless the community were to just up and leave, I’m not sure anything changes. People provide other social media services their content for free too, even those they don’t like.

I am going to take a different stance here but these platforms do provide HUGE value. Hosting is a massive cost and so is moderating the volunteer moderators. These 3rd party apps were free loading, some getting billions of requests in a single month and acting like victims, while reddit bears the burden of OpEx costs. On a CPM basis reddit API fees are actually quite cheap and fair for 3rd party devs. 3rd party apps can turn a profit with app redesign, but, from their comments seems like something they were not willing to do.

Reddit has just laid off employees and is probably paying 4-5x it was before for financing due to interest rates and has to find new sources of revenue, and quickly, IPO or not. Users are great for building communities but they can just as easily turn into a non-rational mob like is being done here.

Don't forget that the vast majority of users don't use third party apps.

Long story short, the game with free services has always been to exploit them more than they exploit you.

Do you have some examples of the smart one that realize it early and diversify successfully?

You think Reddit is surprised? For all we know, this is going better than they expected.

I highly doubt anything of substance will occur after this going dark period. Remember Ellen Pao, and the firing of Victoria? There was similar drama then, and lo and behold, nothing happened, quite the opposite as Reddit's userbase increased. The average user uses new Reddit and the official app, they simply do not give a shit about any of this drama. In a year's time, most people won't care anymore.

People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money so Reddit would be glad to be rid of them while also saving on API costs. No other online service allows freeloading millions upon millions of API requests in addition to allowing third party apps to a large extent. Facebook, Whatsapp, Discord, Instagram, Slack, Twitter all don't, so it's a wonder that Reddit did all this time, for free.

If subreddits go dark for 48 hours, then from the perspective of Reddit, they'd think, great, then it returns to normal. If they go dark indefinitely, Reddit admins will wait a few days then force the subs open and demod everyone involved. There is a long list of mods who are willing to contribute.

In the end, consumer boycotts like this simply don't work.

It’s not that third party apps want to freeload and therefore have triggered this boycott. A big part of the reason people are upset is the handling of the monetization of the API. The pricing is absurd compared to what similar services charge and the timeline for third parties to switch over is extremely limited. There are many other ways they could have monetized their API without triggering this backlash. For example, they could restrict API usage to people who pay for Reddit Premium. Then, given sufficient time, third parties could rearchitect their workflow to support this.

Also, people are upset at how Reddit management, especially their CEO (Steve Huffman), has handled this transition. The potentially libelous comments regarding Christian Selig (Apollo developer) are just one of the many things people are upset about. The bungled communication and lack of transparency just continues to show that Reddit just wants to squeeze value out of the community without any genuine effort to make it better.

I can’t say for sure whether the boycott will work or not. But I definitely can say that there will be lasting consequences. This is a negative inflection point for Reddit as a community and as a community, especially if they forcibly remod communities that go dark.

The silver lining is that if Reddit does manage to squeeze an IPO out of this, we all have a new stock to short ;)

Why do you think Reddit wants to monetize via the API and not simply kill third party apps? They'd make a lot more money from ads à la Facebook than via subscriptions.

> But I definitely can say that there will be lasting consequences. This is a negative inflection point for Reddit as a community and as a community, especially if they forcibly remod communities that go dark.

No, there won't be lasting (negative) consequences. I've been a reddit user for a long time, almost since they started. There have been any number of controversies, from jailbait, to fatpeoplehate, to watchpeopledie, to incels, to the fappening, to thedonald, to finding the Boston bomber, to Ellen Pao, to the firing of Victoria, to gamergate, to wallstreetbets, and so on.

They had all been covered in the media but to the average user, they simply don't know nor care about these incidents. So many power users don't understand that the average user simply does not care about any of this. They just want to browse Reddit on their phone for the next 5 minutes.

Even for power users, I could see it being a pretty minor thing. Just speaking for myself - I don't really care about any of this as long as they keep "old" Reddit alive. I've been on Reddit over a decade at this point, and I'm there for a handful of text-based communities. I've never even posted images with Reddit's image uploader.

Some people have argued, in the abstract, that if they're willing to make changes to the API they'll probably kill "old" Reddit too, but idk. Some subreddit mods have posted traffic stats showing half of uniques are still coming through "old" Reddit. I don't see them killing it soon... but if they'll do I'll move on.

I have and will continue to use old reddit on my phone's browser as well, I really have no need or using mobile apps, official or otherwise; I use Joey for Reddit now on Android but that's just for convenience, I don't have to use it.

> People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money

I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.

Yes, however once they demod everyone, they will find other mods willing to do the work. There are a lot of people on reddit, something like 500 million monthly active users, at least some of them would be able to mod subreddits.

People end up leaving or not participating subreddits with low-quality moderation. They also tend to get overrun with spam and abuse, and have to be shut down. Finding a bunch of crappy replacement moderators isn't going to work long-term.

A small number of mods moderate the overwhelming amount of subreddits and posts on the platform (some moderate hundreds of subs), and those are doing just fine. At least for the most popular subreddits, nothing will materially change.

You just said those power moderators will be removed and need to be replaced, right? Isn't that contradictory?

What part is contradictory? Those moderators will be replaced by a similar number, ie less than 10, that can moderate the top 100 or so subs. My comment was on the scale of moderation required, at least for subs on /r/all which is what the vast majority of users use, not whether those exact moderators will still stick around. And you never know, mods might say they're going to quit but many mods might still stay. I don't expect to see power mods like GallowBoob going anywhere.

I see what you meant now. Fair enough.

The other part of my prediction is that some of the (real, non-bot) engagement that the giant generic subreddits get are from users that are anchored to Reddit by more specialized subreddits, like those for specific games, hobbies, that sort of thing. If those special interest subreddits die out, I think the large generic subreddits will become more hollowed out than they are already, and not worth much.

They're already not worth much, that's why I never go on /r/all in the first place.

Exactly. It's not about the absolute percentage of people using third-party services, it's about the users that matter: power users, moderators, and especially content posters/creators.

In this case, I agree. This is just people being noisy and flapping their arms about for the sake of being noisy and flapping their arms about.

If users really cared, they'd delete their accounts and quit using Reddit.

Anecdotally, a lot of people are deleting their accounts and quitting Reddit. I myself am archiving all my data, editing all my comments to something useless, and deleting my account.

Good for you. Reddit will not cease to exist.

People are comparing this to Digg, but Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay and will continue to comment share and moderate subreddits for free/points.

People think they have any power whatsoever over “their” subreddits, I don’t know how they can think that Reddit won’t just lock their accounts and reopen the subreddits.

Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.

> Reddit is not changing at all, so the vast majority of users will stay

Cutting off and/or driving up the cost of third-party apps through which users access Reddit is changing Reddit. The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average, so even if they are less efficiently monetized as eyeballs, they are large indirect contributors to Reddit’s revenue. Making their experience worse will, it seems near certain, cost content that brings the users that are purer eyeballs to monetize with ads, and thereby cost ad revenue. How much is, of course, unclear.

> Don’t forget that Reddit can and already did close a bunch of subreddits that they didn’t like, so it’s their community, not yours.

Sure, and they can take over the moderations, and the content creation, and the viewing for ads from the users that they chase off. Not sure how that will work out for them as a business plan, though.

> The impression I get is that third-party apps are disproportionately used by the kinds of users that supply content more than average

Are you saying that most users who post content also use third-party apps, or that most third-party app users post content? There’s a big difference here.

Back of the napkin math: You have to pay to post with some third-party apps like Apollo which has 50k subscribers. Reddit has ~500M monthly users, so we’re looking at… 0.01% if every person subscribed to Apollo posts. Even with a 10x safety factor, there’s no way shutting down third-party apps has a meaningful effect on the volume of content posted to Reddit.

This.

Add the addictive nature of Reddit and you’ll see the same people back on the site and native app. I hate Reddit but I still open it at least once a week.

It's the same hemming and hawwing about Twitter several months ago. Everyone vocally says they'll leave for Mastodon, but most simply don't. Listening to the vocal minority as a company executive is simply a recipe for disaster.

> People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money

I do agree with you. Bu the outliers usually feed the site with good content. There is a quote by Paul G (or someone)

> whatever the hackers do on the weekends, normal people will be doing regularly in 10 years.

This is a recital from memory, prone to be watered down. But the idea is that the outliers are the ones that makes it worthwhile to be in the community. If they are gone because for any reason, landed somewhere else, the normal users will eventually move away. It is not going to be visible immediately, but will have negative effects in the long run.

Like gamblers and drug addicts, power users are the ones most likely to return to the site after leaving. There really are no true alternatives like in the Digg days, so I assume most power users will begrudgingly use the official app. Hell, I use a third party app and I just downloaded the official app as well.

Probably so, but the theverge article and others like it will not go anywhere. This is ammo for future journalists to character assassinate the current Reddit leadership. Bad press is always available for later reuse.

The vast majority of people who use Reddit do not read articles on The Verge or similar. In fact, they simply do not care about company news whose product they're using. How many articles on Facebook and Instagram came out about privacy concerns, and how many people actually stopped using them due to that? It's simply not a concern to most consumers.

I meant to say that leadership still likes to avoid bad press for the sake of self preservation. Bad press focused on individualals has consequences even when consumers aren't the primary audience. Think stockholders, potential business partners, boards, etc.

Large subreddit protests are bad press.

Not sure about that, "any press is good press" isn't a saying for nothing. In this case, investors can clearly see why the protests are happening and would in fact side with the company, not the individuals, because their protests are getting in the way of becoming profitable.

I'm pretty sure nothing will happen either. People will use this as a moment to grieve and vent, management doesn't budge and things return to business as usual.

I bet somebody will port one of the third party clients to use web scraping instead of the API.

That's why people should consider hacktivism (at least DDoS)

Someone here in HN suggested that what Reddit should have done is to make API acccess a benefit of a Reddit premium account. That way Reddit would directly collect money from app users and would not have to rely on app developers to do it, and app developers would not have to shoulder risk in the same way. It seems so clear to me that that would have been a better approach.

I've suggested it a few times. One issue for this is it makes the market of users for 3rd party applications a lot smaller and it makes it harder for them to acquire users.

Having a "free trial" of premium for 3rd party apps would mitigate this issue a little bit. You can use Apollo, for example, for 3 months free and then you have to pay for Premium. In fact, a good arrangement would be for both the app develop and Reddit to take their respective cuts.

But then that kind of payment infrastructure requires effort to setup and development and Reddit seems unable to execute on much.

> One issue for this is it makes the market of users for 3rd party applications a lot smaller and it makes it harder for them to acquire users.

Why is this an issue? 3rd party apps exist to solve a problem for users running into limitations of the web interface or Reddits own abomination of an app. So this will just drive existing users into premium accounts and provides a better UX for them with barely any extra cost for Reddit. If the need exists and the opportunity exists in the form of an API someone will build that app and could still collect money on that on top of Reddit premium fee. Just keep the two separated.

That would be a valid idea if Reddit wanted to keep 3rd party apps alive.

Perhaps they don't but it puzzles me why. With the suggested approach they would have mutual interest in making 3rd party apps flourish. Now they alienate the community and will certainly drive many people away.

more useless statistics to show to investors before the IPO to squeeze more money

Or knew how to make money in the first place.

Why do they want to kill them so bad if the end user was a paying customer?

Killing 3rd party apps lets them funnel traffic to the official app instead, or the official website. Not sure if you've compared 'old' reddit to new (on desktop), or the app to 3rd party ones, but there's a lot of gamification, ads, bad patterns they're pushing with what they have. I suspect it's largely to monetize on the user more significantly via tracking data and such.

I assume they'll kill off old reddit shortly here, once they implement the API changes.

Yes exactly. Even if it doesn’t work out in practice, a user forced into the official app is theoretically monetizable any number of ways, whereas a premium subscriber using a 3P app is only ever going to use the core product the way they always have. Their ability to shove whatever they want in front of the user while also mining their data is probably helpful for their IPO prospects.

I just don't believe that you couldn't charge enough for a single user to be worth more, subscribed and in a 3rd party app, than they would make on the website as an advertising target.

You are right, and we know this factually from YouTube premium providing more revenue than free users. I, the end user of Reddit, should be able to pay for the api access directly to Reddit the company without having to impose risk on Apollo to front massive api bill. There’s no need to funnel anywhere since there’s no ads to be sold.

Am I missing something here? It seems like a blatantly obvious compromise.

> Am I missing something here?

reddit's ceo does not behave like a logical actor but instead is driven by emotions, mostly negative ones towards 3rd party apps.

Can anybody explain why they didn't do exactly this? I spend tons of time on Reddit in Apollo. I would have gladly paid $10 a month for app access. Keep the rate limiting to prevent AI training scrapers or something. Problem solved? What am I missing? There has to be a reason they are acting like this and so actively ignoring the users of 3rd party apps, right?

Its not the posts they care about, its user eyeballs. They don't want subscriptions, they want ads. It's been a while since I was in the adtech business, but at that time static banners were getting $1-$5+ per 1000 impressions (CPM) for so-so user quality. Video ads are apparently running $10-$30+ CPM. Do they think they can push 1,000 ads a month to lots of users? You bet.

Subscriptions are high-friction, low uptake, and you're always battling churn. Ads are low-friction and everybody gets them. Plus they can goose the ad revenue whenever they want by just showing more of them.

They might grumble about AI training, but its not really affecting their bottom line. I doubt they'll care much until they start selling their own AI sizzle to investors.

Edit: Oh, and I doubt they care about the hardware needed to serve posts. Guarentee they're using 10-to-100x that for the ads. Ad bidding is complex and has tight timing requirements. Tracking ad/user view data is a big firehose. If they host any of the ads themselves that will absolutely dwarf the text or even video posts. And even then, if they have any kind of a compentent backend engineering team, all those costs will be a smallish fraction of total costs.

There would have been a huge uproar if they did that too. Most Apollo users don't pay. I'd be surprised if they would get even a 2% conversion rate. The other 98% of users would be angry about losing access. Reddit would still be accused of effectively killing off 3rd party apps.

The economics are basically the same. Apollo could charge their users $0.25 per thousand requests and continue to operate. They don't want to do so.

It is a burden for the app developers to implement payment processing. And one month was not enough notice. But fundamentally, this is killing apps because most users won't be willing to pay.

(Also, 1000 API requests isn't that little. For example, getting the top 25 posts of a subreddit is just 1 API request. Posting a comment is 1 request.)

Unpaid users are important to these apps because it's what drives adoption. You can release a new paid app to browse Reddit and get maybe 1000 users, or release a free app and get 1 million users, of which 1% convert to paying customers (i.e. 10,000 customers. These numbers are just made up for illustrative purposes).

> It is a burden for the app developers to implement payment processing

But they wouldn't have had to. Most of them (all?) don't have registration features, you're meant to have a Reddit account already. A system where only Premium accounts get API access would have just required a way for Reddit to say "sorry, this user needs to upgrade to use 3rd-party clients" when challenged. That's a very simple change, nowhere near the complexity of implementing a payment-processing flow.

A good strategy would have been something like Reddit saying "API users from now on will have to pay, and the price is 2-3x of a Premium subscription, because <bullshit about them taxing the backend more>", wait for the blowback, then say "alright, we listened to you and decided it will simply require any Premium subscription".

Sorry I wasn't clear, but I meant the current system is putting a big burden on app developers. This proposal does make that easier.

But it doesn't change the fundamental problem that most Apollo users won't pay. Having a free app is what drives their growth. There would still be massive anger against Reddit, and redditors would discourage each other from rewarding Reddit for this move. They'd say don't buy premium subscriptions, we need to send Reddit a message. Reddit ends up in the same mess it's in now.

This system doesn't address the angry comments I've seen in this thread or on Reddit. There are several types of comments. Some people here say Reddit doesn't have a right to exploit value that was created by the community. Some people are angry because there was a dispute between the Apollo dev and the Reddit CEO and they feel the CEO's characterization of the Apollo dev is slanderous. (It seems the Apollo dev implied that if Reddit didn't buy them out, they'd publicly make a stink and Reddit called this blackmail. I'm not sure of the details.) Some people think Reddit is a lying, greedy corporation and doesn't need to charge for their API.

Other disadvantages are that system wouldn't discourage apps from making hundreds of API requests per user per minute and there's no guarantee the cost of a premium subscription covers the cost of all the apps a user has. Heavy users get subsidized by light users with premium subscriptions.

My guesswork:

It appears that the eng at reddit is so incompetent that they have newer, better, more efficient internal APIs available only to their house apps.

So basically, the public APIs in question have both serious compute and eng costs that -- per a mod comment I can't find again -- are costing more than $10m annually. They can't amortize those costs across their first party apps as well, because those apps are on different APIs. They're looking -- again per a mod comment -- to make money on both the compute and eng costs for these APIs.

Add to this some incredible stupidity, as they continue to underinvest in mod tools and appear not to realize -- though I really can't understand how they could not, since it's been a point of incredible contention with their mod community for many years -- how many mods, particularly those of the biggest forums, are using tools reliant on the current apis to effectively moderate.

tl;dr: it's a big mess. They want to kill 3rd party front ends, and are unwilling to just say so; they continue to not build the tools mods need; they've lost trust with the mod community because of 10 years of lying about investing in mod tools; and they don't want to get everyone onto their internal APIs for reasons they haven't shared.

Oh, and meanwhile, they're launching a new dev platform because... they think someone smart would want to build a business with them after this? I don't know.

Because the purpose wasn’t to lockdown third party apps, that’s just an unfortunate bystander.

The purpose is to lock down API access to extract value from AI training.

Third party apps represents user control of the experience, which is unacceptable for the profit maximizing executives leading up to an IPO. The end goal of every big tech platform is to control the experience fully for ad delivery or other nefarious ends. To us, it is enshittification. To them, it is profit capture. It will happen again and again before we as a society establish safeguards against such abuse. It happened with Facebook, it's happening with Twitter and Reddit, and it will happen with Discord and other such platforms.

It really shows how braindead Reddit leadership is.

I don’t see how that would work. A fraction of Reddit users use Apollo. A fraction of Apollo users pay Apollo. A fraction of those users would be open to also pay Reddit on top of that.

Why would the Apollo developer keep working on their app if this subset of users bring in $500/month at best?

I do agree however that it would have probably caused less trouble, because suddenly the users have to pay Reddit rather than the developers.

Yeah I don't know, this seems so simple. All spez had to do was:

1. Identify the core value of reddit's service (community of communities who upload posts, videos, images, etc.)

2. Identify the cost factors associated with operating those services (app servers, CDNs, bandwidth, employees, etc.)

3. Identify 3rd party clients as competitors that impact reddit's ability to maintain and improve those services (reddit pays the cost of running the services, competing 3rd party clients do not.)

4. Extend an olive branch to the third party devs by offering them jobs (+ big bonuses if they onboard their respective apps' users onto the official app), and an opportunity to integrate users' favourite features from the third party apps into the official app.

It's not a total win, it was never going to be. But good lord, what an intensely poorly managed situation. Typically you get paid a lot as a CEO for moments like this, if you can't handle this then what are you being paid for?

Or you know, just tell 3P apps, 30% of your top line is ours and call it a day. Would leave everyone thinking, well this is fair. The crazy part is how they are back tracking on things like API usage for mod tools and accessibility. They gave this zero thought when they made the decision. It’s kind of disgusting.

So third-party devs would have to manually cut them a check every month? How would Reddit validate that they’re getting the correct amount? Multiply this logistical nightmare by hundreds of third party developers.

...yes? It's just an invoice. Determining exact rates are why sales teams and account managers etc exist. Reddit can trivially check app traffic levels. Seems a bog-standard API usage agreement to me.

The problem here hasn't been "reddit charges for API access"; it's the totally unreasonable pricing and switchover timeline.

GP is saying Reddit could trivially skim 30% off of third party app revenue. How is checking app API traffic levels relevant? This is revenue that apps would get through IAP or ads, where Reddit has no visibility. Good luck enforcing any kind of revenue split contract with hundreds of hobbyist devs.

Reddit stated that non-commercial apps keep free API. Reddit leadership doesn’t like that itself isn’t profitable and that others get to profit without paying anything, unjust enrichment. Reddit won’t touch any dev that’s too small, only the ones with large traffic matter. So probably only a handful or two. They can easily determine if anyone’s lying. And if anyone is suspected of lying, they can ask for audited financial statements and tax returns to keep API access. Would be pretty dum by any of them to lie to pay a smaller bill to risk getting your entire business wiped out.

Exactly. It was an exercise in making everybody hate you instead

> an opportunity to integrate users' favourite features from the third party apps into the official app.

"A clean and readable layout with no/less annoying ads" is a feature of most apps, except the official one, and I doubt Reddit is willing to have that.

I've been getting more and more active on the largest instance of lemmy - https://lemmy.ml - and its crazy how many popular subreddit names have been created on lemmy.ml in the last week.

I'm not sure if the philosophy of the fediverse really meshes with the idea of social media. It feels like if it caught on it would push people farther and farther into smaller echo chambers (and that seems bad!). However, adopting one large instance seems like a drop in replacement for reddit (and the least painful for the average joe).

They are asking people not to join because they can't handle the influx. Not a good sign.

It also looks like I can only post and vote on my own instance, so hosting my own Lemmy is worthless, unlike email where I can host my own without any fundamental downsides (although there are some cultural downsides, for lack of a better term).

The largest Lemmy instance, according to their list, has 1500 monthly active users, and they can't handle more?

How is that thing ever supposed to scale?

Congratulations, you have discovered why Reddit (and any B2C social network in general) took venture capital as it did and why it's struggling to contain its expenses on scaling to that many users.

The whole point of decentralization is to build many redundant points of equal size.

If you just put all the effort into one single node, you’ve essentially destroyed the idea of decentralization.

It is kind of a bummer that the votes themselves aren't federated yet, even if the content is. The whole point of federation is that you should self host your own so that you have ownership over the computing that powers your social media experience, which is the only way are going to move forward with it really. Otherwise, you are just depending on the good will of someone else, usually a corporation that needs to make money at somepoint. It's not like investment or venture capital is actually delivering any value for the users of these services.

Ideally, there will be more of a P2P structure for social media if everything moves forward. It doesn't solve for the problem where large companies can solve for doing the really large aggregation and drive engagement algorithmically. But even if 3-4 aggregators that are independent from each other emerge plus there being a relatively low barrier of entry to create your own, I think it could be sustainable and a major win. Privately funded social spaces are dying a quick death in the age of high interest rates.

If I see a post with 10 upvotes (let's ignore downvotes for now), did 10 people from my instance upvote, or did 10 people from the instance where the content was originally posted upvote?

> It is kind of a bummer that the votes themselves aren't federated yet, even if the content is.

Federating votes wouldn't be compatible with anonymous voting.

Is it so hard to set up a few $50/m Hetzner servers to offer refuge to the folks leaving Reddit? Rather than posting silly pleas to not put too much load on the server. I mean, that’s the best thing to happen to this project, is it not? Gotta make hay when the sun is shining.

The biggest problem is almost always not the hosting costs but the content moderation.

Not many people like removing CP when growing past a certain size.

LLMs + MTurk?

You can most definitely post/vote on other instances.

Lemmy is run by an extremist. I'd be fine migrating somewhere else as long as it isn't there.

Which lemmy?? The GitHub repository?? Can you substantiate this?

While nutomic is definitely known for being a lefty Socialist, and you're free to disagree with them on that, I am not aware of any noteworthy extremism. Unless there's something I am not aware of, he seems like a pretty rational person.

This is the same dude: https://lemmygrad.ml/ He's got a massive communist drum to beat if you're into that thing.

If you disagree with those politics so much just host your own instance. I know there was some concern about politics affecting the technical decisions behind Lemmy (content filter related) but it looks like cooler heads prevailed. Also, you can always create a fork of it anyway.

It would be difficult for a new user to find a non-political instance, since join-lemmy.org is heavily curated to the developers, literal, Marxist worldview.

So host your own.

It’s absolutely insane to see many parts of Reddit in open revolt. I think this is the worst it’s ever been. Worse than 2015, 2018, 2020…

It might turn out to be one of the largest protests, but it's also one where there's a large gap between how passionate your average mod feels about the issues here vs. your average Reddit users.

spez's recent comments have served to lower this gap, but probably not by that much. My guess is that if a lot of mods end up getting replaced over this, they won't be missed.

FWIW, in almost every subreddit where I've seen an announcement that they're doing dark, user sentiment has been overwhelmingly on the mods' side. In fact, in a number of cases, when the mods have said they're shutting down for 48 hours, there have been highly-upvoted comments from users saying that's not long enough.

As a counterpoint, the users that don't care about the changes simply...don't care. There is no impetus to come out in force and massively upvote or downvote anything about the protests, they're simply getting on with their days and will be back to business as usual when the subs come back, filling the time during the protest with other subs that aren't going dark. How efficacious this all proves to be will be interesting to discover.

Mods are going dark... So who says they have not been moderating views opposing this? They have the tools and they probably have the will? Also we need to remember that in general they support authoritarianism and are against free speech...

The contribution of content is very lopsided. I remember about 10% of the users writing at all and maybe 2% writing prolifically. You don’t need much to move the content somewhere else.

Sure, but since these changes aren't affecting many users I'm not sure why this would happen. It seems to mostly be wishful thinking on the hopes of activists that this will cause some sort of massive brand damage, or even the sort of advertiser revolt that Twitter has faced. But that would require a lot more mismanagement from spez, I'd guess.

For a long time, Apple kept the option to receive plain text emails when almost everyone else had moved to HTML.

Why? Because there was a crucial slice of unix-y developers who liked it that way, who were an important segment.

Even though third party apps might be 3% of users, I'm guessing that the users that are passionate enough about Reddit to find/seek out the best app/pay for app subscriptions/etc are much more likely to be those critical 2% of prolific contributors.

> Sure, but since these changes aren't affecting many users I'm not sure why this would happen.

I'm curious about how you count the number of users affected. 3rd party apps users are at a first order, but as those also included mod tools, any subs that had admins relying on these tools are also affected.

And sure reddit is promising adjustments, but at this points those are just vague promise, and looking at the CEO you wouldn't trust these promises much. Then as those subs go dark, if the mods are replaced, you also potentially get way worse moderation all around.

From that POV, the number of affected users feels pretty huge to me...

This is hopefully and likely going to be the biggest user revolt in the history of the internet. I'm sincerely hoping the cowards back down or my last favorite big place on the internet is also going to disappear.

Reddit is full of easily mobilized young people looking for a 'cause'.

It's funny and hypocritical because not one of those Reddit users would ever run their own company in a way that allowed third parties to freely redistribute and profit off their data, but it's wrong for Reddit to somehow.

It's like they have no idea how businesses stay in business.. not surprising really. They're going to burn down Reddit to defend someone who was asking for a $10 million buy out to screw them over and shut down the Apollo app anyways.

Do you have proof that all the uproar is caused by young people? Because I do not think that reddits user base is young compared to ig or tiktok.

Discord should put out a quick Reddit clone. I imagine they already share a lot of the same users. How much would it take? Make the forum feature more like a subreddit for the server, improve discoverability of discord servers, make a “front page” that aggregates threads from popular servers...

Guess what, Discord already doesn't allow third party clients. It is also an information black hole, with no proper indexing and users are not allowed to download logs. It's just worse than Reddit, even without API.

I know it doesn’t allow third party clients, but the difference here is that I like the discord app.

The question that should come up in a pitch like that is "if Reddit couldn't make money doing that, why would we?"

If hubris is the only differentiator then it's not a good reason. So, why would Discord take on such a large undertaking?

This is a good counterpoint, but I would say that if they can’t make money off of having Reddit-like features, how are they making money off Discord in the first place? They aren’t that different. The reason to add Reddit features to Discord would be to kill a competitor (Reddit).

Because discord has actually convinced people to pay for it.

Well spez isn’t exactly a good businessman, so under different leadership I think Reddit could be profitable.

What could he do differently?

I think it is very clear that a paid subscription couldn't compete with ads. Discord ARPU less than <$3, while Facebook ARPU is something like $30 for US. And I think if discord penetrates to more general circle, it's ARPU would decrease further.

> What could he do differently?

Give the image of a decent company.

That feels dumb, but people's willingness to pay is affected a lot by their perception of what they're paying for. I payed for 3 reddit apps, and never felt like paying for reddit itself as they went downhill. It always felts like they're accepting users like me despite their personal convictions, and I'm half abusing their platform by looking at decent content instead of the flaming hell of subs they had as default and then as prominent subs.

Their handling of many of the most public issues has been botched to no end, and their relationship with the mods has always been adversarial.

As a counterpoint, people donate to Wikipedia, pay for patreons, push money on Youtube. None of these corporations are perfect, and they have their controversies, but not spitting on the community at every turn helps a lot, to the point where the calculation on what you pay for what you get can be more skewed, or even negative, and it still works out.

PS: I see the same dynamic for Twitter, there's no way I'd pay for anything on Twitter at this point, when paying for better instances of Mastodon looks like a long term positive action.

> That feels dumb

Because it is dumb. Reddit is and has always been for profit company. To justify its valuation of $10B, it will need to generate at least $1-2B of revenue. Wikimedia has $165M revenue in comparison. No board member will be content with such small return.

You make it sound like needing to make 10x more money justifies keeping execs that are 10x dumber. I'm not sure that's how it works.

As a product discord is one of the best. But, it’s riddled with exactly the same incentive issues that eventually build up to the crisis we’re seeing now. Begging for another overlord isn’t going to solve any problems, just kick the can down the road.

We need something fundamentally different, whether it’s fediverse-style or just a different licensing on the content. I don’t know. But this pump and dump VC to IPO to “value-extraction” is guaranteed failure. Perhaps some businesses cannot exist without that, but a CRUD forum certainly could.

Please god not more discord

I'll take a company that's currently doing similar stuff to its userbase for 500, Alex.

Discord already has threading, its just that nobody ever uses it.

Discord doesn't want to listen to the users either. Looking at the current username fiasco. Change of system for idiotic reasons that no one wants or really asked for...

why would they want to?

Going dark for 48 hours seems rather toothless. Props to the subreddits at least attempting to go private permanently.

Doesn't matter, new subreddits will pop up to replace them.

Absolutely! Even Reddit itself already had multiple subreddits per topic, and I think that there will still be enough subreddits for people to go on.

They should fire that incompetent CEO. It‘s sad that bad management is never punished.

he's literally doing exactly what the board wants. reddit's investors are more than happy to sacrifices users and the user experience for profitability.

Doesn’t Reddit have a track record of getting the CEO to do something unpopular and then replacing them?

Spez... then Yishan Wong... then Ellen Pao... Then Spez.

Not sure if I recall Wong or Pao did things that seemed overtly business / investor motivated? I know there was the controversial firing of Victoria Taylor by Pao that eventually led to her demise.

A former Reddit CEO alleges that Pao wasn't the one who ordered Victoria to be fired.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...

That's correct. In a comment earlier that day, Alexis said it was his decision.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

This is not the path to profitability. This is how you lose the mods and power users who provide and moderate the content of the site leading to it's downfall. That's not profitable.

Mods can be replaced. Do the actual valuable users rely heavily on Reddit's API or 3rd party apps? I doubt they'd leave over pure moral outrage on this issue, although a large amount of generic brand damage could cause some attrition.

The (relatively small) percentage of people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps (and therefore indirectly on the API). A lot of the mods crucial to the site also rely heavily on the API or tools which are built on the API. Reddit has shown no signs of improving the mod tools, and without the ability to moderate NSFW content using the new API, Reddit will get objectively worse. It doesn’t matter if leadership remods subreddits and forces them open; mods and content creators now objectively have a worse experience and will produce worse content/decisions.

> The (relatively small) percentage of people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps

Is that published somewhere? I would find those kind of usage stats really interesting to see.

There's no evidence for that whatsoever, it's just bullshit conjecture stemming from hope and a tenuous idea that third party app users are "power users" and therefore must be eminently important.

I’d love to see a source for “people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps” because that seems categorically impossible when you consider the number of users able to post (i.e. subscribed) using these third party apps.

Lol. People will definetly leave. Once I cannot use my fav 3rd party app I'm done. That's the end of reddit for me. We'll see if after the purge reddit will still have enough critical mass to keep going but acting like this before an ipo is nuts.

People who use third party apps are power users, most users simply don't care. I also highly doubt power users will leave, they say that but they're the ones that use Reddit the most, so it's very likely they might take a break for a while but begrudgingly come back in a month or so.

I guess we'll see. Anecdotally, I will stop using it and have been using it since the beginnings. Same sentiment from all long term users. We'll juat see

I don't want reddit mods leaving and ruining other sites. They should stay on reddit.

But where will they go? If there was a good alternative, it would make sense, but there isn't. You don't "just quit" heroin, people who like reddit and use it a lot will continue using it.

You're right that usually you need a new addiction but it doesn't have to be the same type of addiction.

I used to like reddit and use it a lot. After all the dick moves over time I am not sure I like it anymore

I left when Twitter killed off Tweetbot and I‘m happy I did it. Colleagues of mine don‘t want to go without their dev bubble though. It‘s time for a better tool to catch-up to the newest stuff.

I also left Twitter when Tweetbot died, but only because I can’t use Twitter without a chronological timeline and keyword filtering. My impression is that third party Reddit apps had some nice quality of life features, but their main purpose wasn’t to literally alter the underlying content. Happy to be proven wrong though.

Yes, more than zero people will leave. I'm sure Reddit has already factored this in to their analysis.

How likely do you believe their analysis sucks and they didn't properly account for the 2nd order effects of this exodus?

The valuable users are the mods that rely on third party apps lol.

I don’t think yall realize how much free labor the mods are doing.

There will still be mods doing free labor after whatever purges. Less effectively, sure. But I think Reddit clearly believes that they can be replaced with nearly zero negative impact, or even a positive impact if some particularly toxic powermods can be erased.

I don't think you realize how much mods/power users, who act like a funnel for a lot of content, rely on third party apps and api access. The built in mod tools are hot garbage, with critical features going years without development or progress.

I have heard numbers in the realm of 10% of users make content and only 1% ever submit things. What happens when your users aren't getting that constant dopamine drip of new content when a decent portion the people submitting stuff use third party apps stop submitting content. Or even worse, they head to another platform and submit stuff there, which is how Reddit got its big start from digg.

For folks who were around during that time, things like lemmy or the fediverse are in a similar state that Reddit was in when the digg exodus happened.

Reddit needs to realize they aren't just losing users, but adding users to a competing platform, which is arguably a worse sin.

> Do the actual valuable users rely heavily on Reddit's API or 3rd party apps?

For start: unpaid moderators.

Debateable whether any users will be sacrificed?

If anything this has given reddit more visibility, and more engagement within its website too. All publicity is good publicity

Until there are no users and reddit is a dead husk.

agreed. but as long as the investors are to move their shares during the IPO before a complete exodus occurs, they are perfectly happy with that outcome.

Remember: this is what YCombinator considers their premier success startup.

17 years and still not making money...

Have we as civilization actually wasted over a decade on rot?

This is a really good question

They have millions of weekly active users… on the way to an IPO…. Lots to improve on monetization, and one of the best alternatives to Facebook…

what’s your point…?

It, like almost all their top startups fails to achieve all the advice they constantly pump out. It’s not revenue positive. It is user agnostic at best if antagonistic. It was not fast to pmf from a margin perspective.

Basically it feels like all the things YC advises are bs when you look at their “success stories”. Other than connections to investors what they say and what they do so entirely opposite.

Valid point! But I strongly believe it depends on how you define success. On paper, you’re right, Reddit is the textbook definition of a successful company, with insane amounts of soft power.

However I think that it’s still valuable to look a level deeper at the specific decision making that’s going on at the management level, and how that’s affecting the overall dynamic which has caused Reddit to be popular for so long.

Specifically, these changes disproportionately affect power users and mods, two groups of people who are largely responsible for creating the content that most Reddit users come to the site for in the first place as well as moderating that content to ensure the quality is high (all unpaid!)

In any case, time will tell if these decisions help or hinder the IPO. My personal gut feeling is that reddit will be around in 5-10 years time, and possibly even growing in terms of popularity but we’ll probably see a decrease in quality of content and moderation and potentially a few competing sites existing on the fringes.

It’s already deep in the chumbox content and enshitification cycle with users

It missed the IPO window and overcooked and now is trying to monetize on the backslide.

I would have thought that title would go to Airbnb, Dropbox, etc.

Your right this is their premier “exit”.

I think the CEO will have to step down in a few months. It's difficult to survive this level of cluster.

While the recent A4A seems like an obvious tactical mistake, I've yet to see anyone make a strong argument that the API changes are bad for the site's bottom line. And if no one can do this, then why would spez get fired? I guess maybe just for optics?

The question that is unknown is what percent of reddit's userbase uses exclusively third party clients vs those who use reddit's official client. And then, what portion of the third party userbase will migrate to the official client after those third party clients go away.

I'm sure spez knows at least the first set of numbers, and they find the amount of expected loss to be an acceptable risk.

partly optics, but mainly loss of confidence, not just by the users, but Reddit's employees.

It may be an OK business decision (though I personally think they didn't think it through), but he handled the aftermath in an extraordinarily bad way.

Either he doesn't have good lieutenants around him to advise and support him, or he is too stubborn to listen to them.

Yeah, I think that although the complaints about these changes are largely overblown, it might be best for spez to fall on his sword at some point before the dust settles. Maybe take a vacation and come back in a few years again.

with a massive golden parachute thanks to this being exactly what the board wants.

Define massive. Doubt reddit is going to give him 50 MM.

Yea the CEO's response was tone deaf and not tactful at all.

However, it seems insane that people are complaining about this for the following reason:

1. Reddit is not profitable, it is literally bleeding money. 2. No Reddit = No 3P apps to access Reddit. 3. The discussion that should be had is whether it is sustainable for Reddit to keep running it's servers and whether the recent decisions are made in favor of additional growth or survival.

reddit Premium costs $6/month and eliminates ads. That's an upper bound on how much reddit values serving ads to users. Include an API key with reddit Premium that users can plug into the app of their choice. reddit gets the value per user, gets the analytics per-user, and it's hard to complain about price gouging given this was the previous price for ad-free service.

This is a pretty simplistic take tbh.

Reddit makes money from ads having reach and they're hoping that only a small percentage get premium so that they can continue to make money off of ads.

Why would they reduce the reach their ads are having by making it easy for people to opt-out?

Their API pricing probably reflects the money they are losing by not getting the users on their own platform and showing them ads.

Their hope is that people would switch over to the main app so that their advertisers can pay them more.

So what do you think is the real reason?

Incompetence/stupidity are my leading hypotheses. But I don't care enough about reddit to give it much thought.

Get the government to order VC to support their investments if it is in the public interests. That's capitalism - they aren't all winners financially.

It's this perception that assumes that CEOs can do no right by the people if there is a financial interest in not doing so.

Whether you believe this is the case or not, you have to agree that all nuance goes out the window and the mob is only satisfied when it gets what it asks for, not what is in its best interests.

They are certainly having g a poor track record. Most of the CEOs and managers I talk to think that it is a noble pursuit for them to be profitable because the free market determines what is moral and in the public interest. Its a pretty commonly held belief in the business world - it's very similar to a religious faith. 9ne manager even believed that scientific discovery only occurred to fulfill the objectives of business managers. Most scientific research in the US is publicly funded, so it isn't even funded by business. But, he didn't accept that explanation.

I was half joking when I was talking about nationalizing social media, but we should ask ourselves why we as a society are destroying these tools that we all used and enjoyed using because a bunch of money changed hands. Twitter is undeniably worse off, so is Facebook. Surely we have proved that we can have these things if we wanted to. At the very least, we should have net neutrality.

So they're going to force them open, right?

That's my assumption. They'll just force open all the big ones, with or without demodding them all.

No way they let something as big as funny and videos(among many others) just shut down for days...

Unless they already have moderators that are up to speed on taking care of subs that big and active, there's going to be a deluge of spam content...I hope. It would be a shame if r/videos turned into a bunch of OF and crypto spam, especially on the day of IPO. Hardcore porn on r/all as the markets open would be hilarious.

I had the exact same thought. A real shame indeed.

That would be a disaster for them. It would be "Mods are asleep, post X" taken to extreme. Any remotely contentious subreddit will be filled with crap and Lemmy will keep getting new users. I think it would be significant numbers switching, even if it takes only 2 days. And that's assuming mods will want to come back after the blackout...

>That would be a disaster for them. It would be "Mods are asleep, post X" taken to extreme.

They wouldn't be forced open with zero mods, obviously. They'll find volunteers.

I would expect that if mass demoddings happen though you would see some sort of weird civil war on Reddit emerge though where outraged users would support spamming these subs in the way you describe specifically to ensure that their prophecy is fulfilled. You can even see people hoping for it in this thread already.

They already found volunteers before. Those volunteers with significant personal investment are effectively going on a strike.

Finding replacement volunteers with no experience and short notice is unlikely to work well... and worse if they include people with an agenda against the current mods.

Who would volunteer for that though? Modding is hard. Good mods make a good sub.

Can't they just close registration for a while, and ban the spammers?

none of this will have any impact. the subs need reddit as much as reddit needs them. collectively sure the subs can control reddit; for a short time. but new ones will appear. and the subs make money by being online so none of them will risk pledging more than 2 days

There is no tech secret sauce to reddit. Reddit is a good experience because of unpaid moderators who care a lot. There is a reason quality of content on reddit is higher than similar websites like quora.

There is SOME secret sauce. The admins _do_ play a crucial role. The history plays a role.

Everyone says this about reddit and Twitter and yet it's still not true that twitter has been replaced in spite of the shit show going on there.

The various alternative reddits that have popped up in the past prove the tech stack isn't complex. Their lack of user adoption shows that the secret sauce is the userbase, not the tech.

>Reddit is a good experience because of unpaid moderators who care a lot.

Arguably they care too much, and a bit of humbling will be good for Reddit. If the powermods had their way Aimee Challenor would still be working for the site.

Moderators aren't paid though, why would they be risking any money?

How do the subs make money on reddit?

I've seen some pin posts from sponsors. Eg advertising for SaaS apps.

Can you share a link to an example? I've been using reddit for a decade, I've never seen anything so blatant (unless it's a sub dedicated to a specific product).

I can’t find one now, but it was in the e-commerce merchant space, promoting a Shopify app. I thought “interesting”, I hadn’t thought of it before.

I think most people who run sub-reddits don't make meaningful income from the platform. Yes, one could advertise certain things, but it is rarer in larger communities.

Its the end of an era. It doesn't matter if reddit survives this (which it will obviously do) and goes on to a lucrative IPO and milking the unwashed masses for a few more years.

Because of the moderators reddit felt like a more human place, a least bad option.

For anybody with two firing neurons it is clear now that these centralized ad-driven platforms are where humanity's conversation goes to get annihilated.

The new thing will be the fediverse. Its still unclear how it will get funded etc. It may well be that parts of it will have the same or similar pathologies. But it wont be all of it.

I wonder on that lucrative IPO. Unless they deliver some misleading AI spiel just at the right time to exploit the mania...

my assumption is that they are executing on a game plan towards that exit (lock down any revenue "leakage", revisit any monetisation options that were held back, reduce costs etc.)

ofcourse nobody can guarantee that they will execute well, that the outcome will not be a disaster even if well executed or that there will be a willing market at the end :-)

but that plan will go ahead irrespective of user action.

I found this image funny. https://i.redd.it/616ijgmgb75b1.jpg

Reddit... It's never been high quality content, but it's something to read when I'm bored. But I think I'm done with it.

For me it was probably this little exchange. Where Spez doubles down on claiming that the creator of Apollo was in some way being shady, without providing any evidence.

Behavior like this shows me that Spez is used to lying and getting away with it. Long ago, Spez was caught editing user comments. Sort of shows that in 15+ years in a leadership role he hasn't learned how to be a better human...

Spez -5264

> His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.

iamthatis +5727

> Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

In one comment, he neglected to remove the "A:" at first, presumably while copying from a pre-written document. It shows how little he cares.

https://archive.ph/X6EJq

I'm surprised reddit even allows moderators to change the public/private settings for large subs, especially default ones.

The alternative would be unworkable. Turning a subreddit public without mods just creates a new 4chan. Reddit it’s highly dependent on the free labor provided by the mods.

Reddit can definitely afford to hire mods for the default subs tho, if they want.

Conspiracy: is it possible that they already have? Some of the super mods are notoriously anonymous and might even pay for the pleasure of controlling the agenda in eg worldnews.

I would be surprised if Reddit was interested in setting community policy at that granular of a level. Reddit's strstegy up until now has been salutary neglect.

I, for one, really hope that on June 30 Apollo goes dark and so does my use of Reddit.

It would be an ethical thing to do on my part. At least Covid-19 days taught me to stick to ethical decisions.

There is a non-zero chance they realize they fucked up and backpedal on this.

People using Reddit essentially laid their eggs in someone else’s nest, on purpose and with intent to get value for zero investment.

Reddit offered in the free market and everyone chose. Those who didn’t choose Reddit are still out there not on Reddit… nothing was taken that wasn’t given by choice in the past.

You can’t moan and complain your way into owning Reddit, or it’s api or web services, etc.

Just take your invaluable content elsewhere.

To me this whole thing is about whether it's ok for a failing tech company that users depend on to pivot, and whether this applies to reddit currently. Failing would be any company that can't continue in its current direction. I think it's not ok to ruin a product or service people depend on for no reason. I also think Reddit is failing in a sense and has good reasons to do most of what they're doing. Perhaps what would make it ok with me is if they had made the API change in such a way that supported freemium business models for third party app developers. For instance accounts could be limited to 20 subreddits unless the app pays some amount per user that would be a fraction of a reasonable charge to the user. Like say 50 cents a month.

Should happen on IPO day as well.

This unsubtle reminder that if you don't control the iron your community is platformed on you're someone else's product has been brought to you by the letter M and the number 8.

remember when people needed enough brains to get online that most of them were capable of figuring out Usenet and IRC? Seriously, if you're a "mod" or "dev" whose life's work rotates around the good graces of a private company that doesn't give a flying f** about you, you're basically just a tapeworm in the colon of the consumer internet. Good luck with your protest; you sold your soul years ago.

Bravo.

Additionally, with reddit it gets a huge amount of consumer advertising, PR, marketing spend by companies but its not actually to reddit the company (paid mods, sock puppets, customer support, teams of PR "users" and fan boys all shill for their products and brand). Reddit sees other products being sold and want their cut.

I don't use web reddit. Tried old and new and it's horrible on both side!

But I use Relay Pro some pros :

-Gallerie View -List view -better comments section

They said that each Oauth based auth user/key will have 100 requests/min.

So is it not possible for third party apps to create a process which generates Oauth token for each user when they sign up/join in via their app ?

In that manner, each user have their own token and each user can have their own 100 req/min, which should be sufficient for most if not all users.

This would seem like a good way to remedy the problem, but afaik, the limits also include the Oauth clientid. So, limits are actually tied to the client application as a whole -- not just user usage. This is where the limits for a popular app quickly fall over.

Isn't reddit source code open? Don't we already have an archive of its content? Aren't there even other open source alternatives (lemmy).

Sorry, I really don't get why people are so concerned. If reddid wants to shoot themselves in the foot, nothing is stopping people from self hosting alternatives.

Reddit went closed source a long time ago.

Is it just me or have we lost the ability to collectively move to competitors in social networks?

I remember the day when digg was overthrown, MySpace, livejournal... there's a long list. But in recent memory, Twitter, reddit, and more(eg twitch) are calling people's bluff and they seem to be at least partly getting away with it (at least they've maintained the market leader position).

Any ideas why?

One guess: These markets have matured into a monopoly with fragmented competition so that the only competitors that are in position to accept new users are niche products and not ready to absorb or capitalize on these collapses (eg federated products or alt right platforms).

Anyways, it's a bit of a pipe dream but I would love if we had something like a non-for-profit which could come in and create a better long-term home and single ecosystem to compete with these monopolies when they start misbehaving. I think signal did a really good job at this. I've been able to move a number of my messaging groups onto it. Pipe dream but Signal or Wikimedia foundation run social networks might be interesting.

The number of users on these platforms has increased considerably. Orchestrating a “movement” consisting of hundreds of millions of people takes a really significant forcing function that affects everyone, not just a vocal minority.

And thousands new ones will arise . I think it's about time. And reddit might even want this. One of the worst things about current reddit is the same moderators moderating multiple subreddits for more than decade , it has gotten really old while its audience is always young.

I guess it’s a good time to mention this: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

u/spez's AMA was a complete dumpster fire. Hard to believe he's the CEO.

I mean, it’s hard to believe Reddit is a company with 2000 employees. Have you looked at their app? It’s like somebody’s high school coding project.

Well there's multiple versions of it so it's more like multiple groups of students' attempts at a high school coding project

Its unfortunate for Reddit, they have been forced in between a rock and a hard place.

They need to become profitable asap since the markets have dried up but users have gotten so used to being subsidised.

Unfortunate for.. Reddit? They’re immediately instituting pricing that will kill off the 3rd party apps. How does that help profits exactly? They could have given more notice, they could have started at a lower price point, they could have not lied and accused Apollo dev of extortion.

This is their own fault and they’re refusing any self reflection as a company.

I think, cynically, this will drive most users from apps to Reddit's own site/app where they can serve ads and do invasive tracking. So, long-term, Reddit gets what it wants.

I doubt enough people care enough to stay off Reddit because Apollo is shut down. (I aways think about how the "nudie scanner" revolts fizzled to a whimper in the end--and how people now just put up with doing the perp stance and being mm wave scanned.)

One way out would be for Reddit to enforce certain restrictions on 3rd party app, similar to Apple's App Store. "You must show ads", for example.

Third party apps don't show ads. The official app does. Therefore, if they funnel third party users to the official app, they can show more ads and make more money. You may not like it but that's the thinking they have.

It doesn't kill of 3rd party Apps, it just requires them to do a minimum amount of monetisation.

The pricing is actually reasonable. 1/4the of Twitters price.

What does that have to do with the ridiculous api pricing or the lies about the Apollo dev?

Its not ridiculous though. Its 75% cheaper than the Twitter API pricing and the free tier is good enough for MVPs & experimentation.

The API pricing is a way to force users to see ads.

They could, I dunno, send ads through the API. And sure, clients can still ignore the ads but as of a few weeks ago I think all the 3p clients would have been willing to play ball given the alternative world we're in right now.

They could make this a Premium feature, driving more people to Reddit Premium. Users would pay them directly and still get to enjoy 3rd party apps. It could even be used a "age verification" for their new NSFW rules.

They could also continue to allow free access, but send ads (which on reddit look like posts) together with the content. Or even better, change their API terms so apps have to follow some guidelines and show ads to free users... and maybe give apps the option to pay for a clean API too?

And of course, continue to offer and promote their own app, with all the ads and tracking they want to add.

Instead they've picked the worse option for their users. They're killing 3rd party clients and tools used by moderators and communities. Apparently they've even lied about their talks with developers and accused one of blackmailing them...

I understand the need to generate revenue, but they're not handling this well.

The pricing is actually reasonable, thats the annoying part. The free tier is good enough for tweaks and MVPs, this is the opposite of what Twitter did which effectively ended experimentation on their API.

The paid tier is reasonable, $12k for 50 million requests (1/4th of twitter api) means Opollo will be paying $1.68 million a month. Thats entirely reasonable for such a popular Reddit app.

This gets us back to the original point, users got used to subsidised pricing (free) so Reddit was inevitably gonna get blowback no matter how they spliced this. To put it in perspective, $1.68m is 168k users paying $10/m a month. They have 1.5m active monthly users. Thats means they only need 10% of their active users to be paying customers.

P.S. Its not just a need to generate revenue, if they don't become profitable soon its game over for the current investors and management team. The IPO markets have dried up and nobody is touching anything series A and above.

SV's darling Stripe had to cut their valuation by 50% to get some money, Reddit wont be able to get anything near that. The best they'll get is some private equity type deal (FATAL).

Poor Reddit. Doing exactly what they intended to do...

This is Digg v4, but for Reddit this time. Where do the nerds go this time like when we migrated from Digg to Reddit?

Interesting, I recall it being the nerds of Reddit getting the users of Digg.

All these darkening will do nothing.

For a large, Chinese invested corporation, the best way to act against, is to ignore it.

Or force a US investor to buy it out.

Reddit is pretty much dead to me after they decided to put a paywall on their API and after their CEO's embarrassing AMA. I'll keep using my libreddit instance until the API lasts, and then just delete any presence I have over there.

"Profitability" is killing the internet. Either you scoop up as much user data as possible, or charge users for basically anything more than the basis (RyanAir model coming to haunt IT?), or investors think that it's just not worthing putting money into you.

Investors are a negligible minority of Internet users, most of them don't even know how TCP/IP works, yet they have the biggest say on how the Internet should be designed. And they're killing it. These big pocketed motherfuckers who put their money into things they don't even understand aren't welcome anymore.

It's time to develop open forums based on open protocols, so all this shit about profitability, walled gardens and centralization goes out of the window for good by design. We need an ActivityPub for forums too - and, who knows, maybe ActivityPub itself with a few tweaks will suffice?

It’s pretty easy to make a Reddit clone right? Didn’t they release their source code?

It's also somewhat easy to plan a party. The problem is getting people to show up.

And a venue with big enough infrastructure to support that many people at your party. And then we get back to the staff who you usually pay…

The app isn't the secret sauce. The moderation team is. Moderation is the hard part of running a site like reddit, otherwise it will turn into a big steaming pile of porn, botspam, crypto poop and probably a whole bunch of other illegal stuff.

If Reddit had years of runway in an easy money macro climate and still can’t achieve profitability. How’s a startup/clone supposed to get up and running today?

It is way overdue for redditors to switch to Mastodon or something similar.

...or Lemmy or kbin...

Redit fucking blows anyways. Fuck those jackwagons

Redit blows anyways

Still doing this CPS style. Recent and related:

Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277814 - June 2023 (232 comments)

Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268458 - June 2023 (188 comments)

Ask HN: Where are Reddit users migrating amidst the API fee controversy? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36267206 - June 2023 (15 comments)

Reddit CEO Spez AMA Overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265027 - June 2023 (22 comments)

Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36264232 - June 2023 (470 comments)

Thousands of Reddit communities will be inaccessible on Monday in protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36263059 - June 2023 (16 comments)

Addressing the community about changes to our API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261369 - June 2023 (364 comments)

Ask HN: Are there alternatives to the subreddits which will go dark next week? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259785 - June 2023 (14 comments)

Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254086 - June 2023 (361 comments)

Reddit announces plan to lay off 90 workers as subreddits plan mass protest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237285 - June 2023 (38 comments)

Addressing the community about changes to our API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36261369 - June 2023 (320 comments)

Archive your Reddit data before it's too late - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259930 - June 2023 (341 comments)

Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Reddit comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981 - June 2023 (221 comments)

Ask HN: Anyone else disinterested in Reddit API drama? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256545 - June 2023 (26 comments)

Apollo Back end just made public - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256167 - June 2023 (229 comments)

Ask HN: You are given 100M to launch a new Reddit competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255767 - June 2023 (23 comments)

ArchiveTeam has saved over 11.2B Reddit links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172 - June 2023 (150 comments)

Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254086 - June 2023 (352 comments)

Using unmodified third-party Reddit apps with a custom server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36252061 - June 2023 (20 comments)

Power Delete Suite for Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36250785 - June 2023 (31 comments)

Apollo will close down on June 30th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 - June 2023 (1568 comments)

Continuation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36251707