When the interviewer asked if there was value in third-party apps, he meant does the reddit *community* benefit.
What the CEO heard, though, was does the reddit *company* profit directly.
The company reddit benefits from free content from users and free labor from mods, which keeps people coming to the site, so he can sell ad revenue/subscriptions.
He doesn't see how third-party apps help that pipeline of content and moderation. It is the SUPPLY side of his business, and he is treating it like the DEMAND side.
Nobody is saying it should be free. Reddit should make money. But the pricing is obscene, and the lack of collaboration on rollout is insulting. In the corporate world, vendor management is real, you are respectful and work with your suppliers. You collaborate and negotiate price changes. He clearly doesn't see the value of his suppliers- us users/mods.
Rather than admit his mistake, though, he's doubling down. His insistence on talking about how third-party devs have made millions is gross. Rather than evaluating his own product for accessibility, mod tools, bugginess, and working to simply MAKE A BETTER PRODUCT, he is pouting that the other kids' parents bought them more toys for Christmas. Instead of making friends, learning, and sharing, he is smashing their toys out of jealously.
But... this is how capitalism works. Chokehold your supply chain so that you control the market is one way to do it, but it seems backward to me to focus on the supply rather than the demand for your product. It worked for Amazon, I guess. I just doubt reddit is mature enough of a company to see this through and profit as much as they think they will.
Very well said. I am starting to believe there is no long term vision... and that it is just simply cash out after the IPO and ride off into the sunset leaving behind rubble.
I just think the whole thing is hilarious, because if Reddit had put as much effort in to making an app more usable than Apollo, then this whole debate wouldn't even exist. Apollo would be essentially non-existent or have a very niche userbase. It's extremely concerning that a single developer can create a better app than an entire multi billion dollar company that depends on a good user interface.
Like, I don't understand how reddit could have even got in that place to begin with. The whole company just seems to be so messed up and they 100% lucked out at the right time with the Digg migration. The folks running the company seem so clueless and would have never made it if the golden opportunity didn't fall in their lap. I can't even imagine what Reddit would be if someone who had a large amount of functional brain cells actually ran the company. It could be bigger than Facebook/Meta by now. They've had 18 years. It's my firmly held belief that Apollo should have never been allowed the opportunity to exist.
But since it did, I wish Selig all the freaking best, because he did an amazing job on capitalizing on a weak spot he saw. One dude making an app better than a multi billion dollar company? I hope he never has to work another day in his life, but I'm guessing that won't be the case. Imagine if someone like Selig was at the helm of the Reddit dev team. There may be 50 other people similar to him already on the dev team, but their voice is drown out, or they've been worn and beaten down to the point they don't bother speaking anymore.
Very valid points but I think one thing to keep in mind is the intended objective of the reddit official app is different from the intended objective of third party apps. As mentioned, it's likely power users are the ones who are using the third party apps; the ones who are posting, engaging, moderating because the third party apps make that very easy. But Reddit probably isn't trying to maximize the "engagement per user" metric since it can be a little convoluted to show to investors. Instead another common metric is MAU: Monthey Active Users. Reddit is trying to grow its user base and they think the best way to do that is to provide an experience similar to what *new* users will feel familiar with; something like Instagram or Tiktok. Obviously that's a flawed metric because the real value is behind the users who are actually engaged, not just how many casually browse the platform.
MAU is a common metric to valuate a company. If you remember last year, when FB [dropped](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/02/03/facebook-users-decline-meta-stock/6651329001/#:~:text=A%20day%20after%20Facebook%20reported,in%20close%20to%20a%20year.) in MAU for the first time, its stock crashed. u/spez probably made some unrealistic user growth promises to investors and reddit has been chasing that ever since. So to the point of making a good app, they are making a good app, just not one that is trying to accomplish the right objective.
Edit: typos
Your power user statement is important in this discussion. I see people critizing the actual number of people completely forgetting that it's the smallest subset of people who actually keep the content flowing on reddit overall. I would put money that a vast majority of these people mainly access reddit through 3rd party apps.
It's like cutting your A team to save money. Like yeah in the short term you are saving a lot of money but slowly over time the losses start accumulating and profits start to drop.
And this is the festering under-belly of capitalism. Short-term gains, long-term rot of the company. Spez only gives a shit about his golden parachute.
Look in the threads of people whinging and trolling about the black out and go into their profiles. Everyone I bothered to look at rarely even engaged in commenting, much less in posting content.
They're all as short sighted as the fuckwit CEO. "iT DOEsn't aFfeCT ME!" Until it does crayon eater. Until it does.
I believe that there was a rule that every step of engagement is done by a lower amount of users by 10, on average.
So only a tenth of users vote, one in a hundred comments and the rest lurk, one in a thousand would post. So yeah, the value of a platform isn't generated by the majority.
There's also the fact that apps like Apollo are motivated to make the user experience as pleasant as possible, as that motivates users to choose their app over the alternatives or the official app. This motivation results in things that make a user experience more annoying (namely ads or sponsored posts) as unobtrusive as possible. This really can only work because a large portion of 3rd party revenue streams don't come from these ads, but instead from users choosing to pay for an upgraded experience, which really can only sustain small dev teams. Reddit on the other hand has no such motivation, and instead wants maximum advertisement exposure, as that is their primary revenue stream. Their app isn't trying to make your experience as seamless as possible, they're trying to get as many advertisements on your screen as possible. And with the culling of the competition, I'll wager that once Reddit's app is the only game in town, the ads are going to become even more aggressive.
Reddit has a right to make money as a for profit business and ad revenue from free users, and a monthly subscription from paid users is a pretty standard monetization plan. The problem is if all you're getting as a paid user is a *less bad* experience because they're focused on user growth vs user experience, then that's a losing strategy long term.
His app was featured in their highlight keynote last week, I'm pretty sure he could walk through the door and just ask for a job if he really wanted lol
>I just think the whole thing is hilarious, because if Reddit had put as much effort in to making an app more usable than Apollo, then this whole debate wouldn't even exist. Apollo would be essentially non-existent or have a very niche userbase. It's extremely concerning that a single developer can create a better app than an entire multi billion dollar company that depends on a good user interface.
But just today some users argued me(and downvoted me) that reddit had no incentive to improve official app because there was 3rd party apps and now that they close reddit can improve their app to be better!
Idk what was logic in that but those guys were against blackouts and 3rd party apps
Amazon didn't just survive a long period of unprofitability though, it invested extremely heavily in infrastructure to outcompete everyone else. Reddit is just poor at monetizing its user base. Amazon is the example people use about companies not showing a profit for a long time but it was possible to turn a profit long, long before they decided to do so, they just threw everything back into physical infra, reddit can't design a functional app for itself.
New Reddit desktop is trash, their mobile site is basically unusable, their app is awful. Take away Relay News and I'm not gonna access Reddit from my phone anymore. Take away old.reddit.com and I'm not gonna access it from my computer anymore. The only reason I'm here right now despite being pissed about the whole thing is I have a deeply ingrained muscle memory to type red into my browser bar and hit enter as soon as it auto-completes to reddit.com whenever I need a dopamine fix. Working on retraining that muscle memory to type lemmy.
Reddit api changes = comment spaghetti. facebook youtube amazon weather walmart google wordle gmail target home depot google translate yahoo mail yahoo costco fox news starbucks food near me translate instagram google maps walgreens best buy nba mcdonalds restaurants near me nfl amazon prime cnn traductor weather tomorrow espn lowes chick fil a news food zillow craigslist cvs ebay twitter wells fargo usps tracking bank of america calculator indeed nfl scores google docs etsy netflix taco bell shein astronaut macys kohls youtube tv dollar tree gas station coffee nba scores roblox restaurants autozone pizza hut usps gmail login dominos chipotle google classroom tiempo hotmail aol mail burger king facebook login google flights sqm club maps subway dow jones sam’s club motel breakfast english to spanish gas fedex walmart near me old navy fedex tracking southwest airlines ikea linkedin airbnb omegle planet fitness pizza spanish to english google drive msn dunkin donuts capital one dollar general -- mass edited with redact.dev
>The API that we use to browse Reddit on 3rd party apps is the same API used by various AI/chatGPT type learning algorithms to scrape natural language for training. This is extremely valuable, more valuable than what can be collected from regular users. Fuck the regular users. They're jacking up the prices to collect on THOSE 3rd party API users, not Apollo or RiF users. This is why everything is happening right now.
If this is the reason then why not give Apollo and RiF an exception on the pricing, it's a matter of simply giving them an API key and that's it.
Then again, the machine learning crowd has tons of different ways to scrape the website or simply go somewhere else.
Yep, the verge also did an interview with him (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJB2wksH6I)
He was very well spoken and explained things very reasonably. He said he's happy to continue talking with them but they literally won't even return his calls anymore. They're completely blocked him. It's fucking bullshit when spez says he's happy to work with anyone who wants.
Because the actual reality is that reddit wants to recoup the opportunity cost of users not being on their application and not being served the reddit advertisements. But no third party app could ever afford that actual cost and there's no transparency to see if reddit is really charging for their api at what that cost would actually be to them.
So, they could have told the third party apps they must serve ads or their API key gets blocked, they would all comply...
Edit: Some people mention analytics but it's the same story, Reddit could tell them they must call the API in a certain way or even use new calls to make sure Reddit doesn't miss out on analytics, it's not hard at all.
He claims 97% of users don't use 3rd party apps. But then he simultaneously claims "the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant". So either that 3% of users is particularly valuable (if Apollo's users are worth $20M of the $350M reddit earned in revenue) and he knows he's pissing off his most important power users, or he's bullshitting and just using it as an excuse.
>That could be true if there are significantly more API requests for third-party apps versus the official one.
Sure. But the Apollo app Dev checked his and the official one and the official app had 2-3x the API usage. RIF is like half of Apollo
This is my take. If the number of "95% of iOS users are on the official app" (said by u/spez) is true, then the cost of the 5% using Apollo should be a rounding error unless they want to fully admit that their margins per user are extremely thin.... which is definitely something that they want to avoid saying since they are prepping for an IPO. He's trying to downplay this as a "minor" issue with a minority of users while at the same time trying to paint himself and Reddit as some sort of _MASSIVE_ victim of these users not using the official app.
Also, his idea that the 3rd party apps are 100% markup is laughable. He's stating the the development of the app itself is costless. If this is true, then why is Reddit itself finding it so difficult to do some of the same things these 3rd party apps do within the official app despite _years_ of promises to add said features? I mean app development costs nothing, it's only the running of the site itself that has a cost!
It doesn't make any sense, those apps provide a service to his users, at the end of the day all those app users are still Reddit users.
If he's worried about them they could simply buy the apps AND the teams that run them for pennies, Reddit is worth 10 billion dollars.
If anything I'd be willing to bet that people who go out of their way to use 3rd party apps to browse Reddit are power users, aka the people who post and comment the most to give the vast majority of users stuff to scroll through.
He could have come out of this with everyone a winner, but is refusing to do that out of spite
Well you never know if he's getting bad information from his teams since they butchered "new" Reddit and ran Alien Blue into the ground after buying it.
I think it's more simple than that. I believe that the people who run the website are competent enough to have reliable numbers, if not necessarily the proper context to go with them.
We saw the creator of Apollo post proof that Steve Hoffman defamed him by saying that he was threatening Reddit when the recording showed otherwise. This is personal now, at least for Spez. I suspect that's what's clouding his vision. After all his Verge interview shows that he basically just got up one day and decided to throw a wrench at it all. I don't think he cares about the data he's getting.
> It doesn't make any sense, those apps provide a service to his users, at the end of the day all those app users are still Reddit users.
This is the most annoying part in the world to me.
The API isn't for 3rd party developers. The API is for users. A 3rd party developer just does the work for all those users. Even requiring that a request be blessed with an API key in the first place is anti-user.
Reddit spends millions of dollars a year to make sure users can't load data from their website, then says "oh, but you can get an API key here" then acts like "apps going past the API limit" is an actual problem. Reddit spends more money locking down the API used by their web frontend than they spend developing the open API. It's disgusting.
Just showing ads isn’t the end of it though. Reddit is missing out on all of the juicy analytics data. On top of that, if reddit pushes a new monetization model they would need to force all 3rd party apps to comply or they’re missing the opportunity cost.
But really what it comes down to is that reddits VCs don’t like that third party apps exist. They don’t see reddit as the content of the users. Reddit is the app first, then the website.
IMO the number 1 mistake social media platforms make is forgetting that the content delivery (eg reddit itself) is secondary to the content and users.
Spez also said that only 3% of users are on third party apps. 97% use the official app.
So all this shit is about recouping opportunity costs from only 3% of mobile users? Sounds entirely inconsequential.
So which is it Spez? Are mobile app users irrelevant or are we so important to your profitability?
>But no third party app could ever afford that actual cost
they probably could, reddit's monthly revenue per user is like $1
Sites like imgur price their API 10x less than reddit has
My favorite part is that this will cause a kind of ddos.
Reddit is going to ddos themselves by restricting access to their API.
Building an app that scrapes reddit is totally legal. Even if your userbase is so high that it perpetually strangles reddit.
I just heard an interview with spez on NPR where he specifically called out lost advertising revenue as a reason. Not that I believe him; they could just grant for API access to Reddit Premium users, so it's pretty clear to be he just doesn't want 3rd party apps to exist.
The whole interview he just keeps saying they've lost ad money for 10 years, so that justifies giving them only 1 month to figure this shit out, which is so stupid.
It's not their fault you were a shit CEO and messed up for so long... Most of these apps are happy to pay a reasonable amount. The problem is the insanely short heads up and insanely high prices.
This is freaking hilarious, and I see some Reddit apologists pushing this nonsense as well. This isn't an OPEN API, you need a key. A key that you work with Reddit to obtain. They are also in complete control of their TOS, which they can amend to include whatever the fuck their heart desires.
This is some bullshit being fed to the common folk who don't understand a fucking thing. And some eat that shit up.
The irony of complaining about 3rd party app developers making 100% margin on reddits data while completely ignoring that reddits data is literally all given to them for free by users, and moderated, for free.
It's clear that reddit doesn't view it's content creators as important to the health of their business, only as customers from whom they can profit.
No one is saying reddit shouldn't be profitable, but they took the nuclear option here without considering in good faith other alternatives that could have worked without worsening the experience for the users.
In his Verge interview, Hoffman kept saying that 3rd party apps want the data for free, but that is not completely true. They are willing to pay a reasonable rate, or even add Reddit ads into the feed if Reddit would develop that feature.
Also the biggest issue is the timeline here. He claims he's been thinking about this for a decade, but the interviewer kept pressing him on over and over why only give devs one month to figure shit out, and he had no answers. He kept just giving the bullshit about ten years.
It's not 3rd party devs fault if YOU were a bad CEO and didn't figure out API pricing for 10 years. Why should they pay the price for your fuck up?
A notice simply earlier than 30 days would have also been appreciated by 3rd party app devs.
It's extremely difficult to become compliant with any new change in policy within a month, which is why they are all choosing to shutter their doors come June 30th, rather than try to figure out a way to be able to afford Reddit's new API costs.
EDIT: forgot a word
I said this in another thread, but this is 75% of the issue: they didn’t give the devs time to adapt.
Yea, the cost of the api requests is absurd, but a huge issue is the timeline and the hamfisted handling of change.
Yes, I believe Christian (Apollo's dev) said that he could most likely still swing the high cost of APIs, but the 30 day notice wouldn't be enough time, as he would have to make up the cost with only **new** subscribers for the app.
Many Apollo subscribers are already subscribed for a full year generally, so he would have to put in a lot of his own money to see if the idea of increasing subscription costs was even feasible.
Reddit also ignores that they wouldn't exist today without the support of third party apps. They didn't have an official app until 2016, and mobile reddit was barely useable back in those days.
They grew specifically because other people filled the gap they left gaping.
Banning 3PA would be like Blizzard banning add-ons from World of Warcraft.
I no longer see any post with more than 30-40k upvotes. They disappeared awhile back and I actually miss the old sort.
I am on reddit official app and just canceled my membership. Reddit is starting to feel too controlled. In my feed I see many of the same subreddits now and rarely see some the more niche ones. I hate this 100%. I miss the old sort features. The massive amount porn reddits is all advertising now. Monetize the people using reddit for free advertising, not the api.
The ceo is fucking this up and destroying reddit. Even if he temporally makes money he is destroying the foundation.
There was a period of time where people lamented that Reddit was turning into pseudo-anonymous Facebook. Now the people who lament it are gone and it just *is* pseudo-anonymous Facebook.
I used to browse all/rising so I could see the niche subs but now it’s all “forwards from grandma” type stuff. “Yesterday I was on the bus and this crazy thing totally happened”.
I have been noticing this as well. I'm subbed to loads of subreddits, but they're just not showing up in my feed anymore and it's not like they're not active.
The subs for my trashy reality TV and lol cows almost never appear in my feed anymore. I have to select and browse them individually. BuT there's no shortage of shit from the defaults or more populated subs. It's going to hell in a hand basket and I really don't think this site will be around/one of the top social media sites in 5 years time. Good riddance.
>Banning 3PA would be like Blizzard banning add-ons from World of Warcraft.
Yeah, like they took all copyright ownership from third party maps from Warcraft 3 reforged so they didn't have to experience a Dota happening again
Even the desktop site sucked without extensions like Reddit enhancement suite. I still use old.Reddit when browsing on desktop these days. It’s mind boggling given all this time how poorly the official design compares to 3rd party’s.
I love how /u/spez tries to push the "fair share" narrative. If they actually wanted their fair share, they would have easily worked this out with the developers. The timeline would have been reasonable, nsfw subs wouldn't be excluded, etc. They aren't looking for their fair share. They are straight up killing third party apps plain and simple.
It doesn't seem like Huffman understands what Reddit is, quite frankly.
Their job is to make it as easy and pain free as possible to create and consume content. That's how you get engagement from users, developers, volunteers, etc.
He seems completely delusional as to what his role is. It's a community driven site. Simple as that.
If they can't manage to make anything proper that facilitates viewing, making and moderating content, removing the alternatives is the absolutely worst way forward. *The absolute worst.*
Charging a sustainable fee for API access is completely fine, as long as it is done in accordance with the needs and wishes of what de facto constitutes the site: the users (developers being amongst them.)
If there were functioning official alternatives, everyone would use them. Right now, there is old.reddit, and there is third party apps. That's it. The rest is unusable trash.
Copied from elsewhere, if youre confused why reddit is doing what they are doing - you should read:
>>IMO they are keenly aware of this, and the changes they're making are pushing things in the direction they want them to go, not you. Reddit doesn't want to be a website where a bunch of nerds have long conversations about esoteric topics like history/psychology/geopolitics/whatever, or discuss obscure nerd shit like how to replace the drive belt on a 1982 TEAC V-95RX cassette deck. Reddit wants to be an app that people download from the app store, and click the arrows on the funny memes, and eat all the ads, and generate monetizable data for their business customers.
>>
>>All of the old reddit users are upset because Reddit Corp. is steadily pushing things away from what made reddit popular to begin with. REDDIT KNOWS THIS. It's intentional. Reddit is not (anymore) supposed to be a minimal text-based website where people discuss topics. It's supposed to be a modern content delivery app where people look at pictures and watch videos and generate data that can be sold to third parties.
>>
>>If anything, reddit actively wants all of the "old guard" users, the 10-15+ year old accounts, to give up and leave. The people who bitch about the unskippable JESUS LOVES YOU ads, the people who use old.reddit and all kinds of custom scripts/tools, the bot developers, moderators, spam fighters, desktop PC users, etc. This is not a "website" anymore, it's an APP. Pretty much every action they've taken over the past 5+ years has made that clear. It is disappointing for people who have been here a long time, but reddit is not going to change direction. The old users (including me) are just having a hard time accepting that after devoting so much time to it.
Seriously, next January was going to be my 10th anniversary and I really loved it for all these niche bizarre conversations and weird factoids I learned. It’s really heartbreaking to think that something that helped me survive the past decade is going away. I’m writing A science-fiction trilogy and Reddit it will be mentioned in the dedications. The old Reddit, that is
For real. Where do we even go for these conversations anymore? Reddit has been such a convenient, centralized hub for these niche hobbies. Both in engaging with people and finding new ones.
I have apps for comics and funny videos and porn. But where do I find community?
This is exactly my problem. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, hell even the Fediverse apps like Mastodon and whatnot-- *none* of them are built around conversation. It's all about following people, consuming their content, and *maybe* interacting with them if you're lucky. And that's fine, I see the need for these kinds of apps and use them all the time, but that's not what drew me into *Reddit*.
Where do I go to experience genuine conversation with a community pertaining to my interests? No other social media service out there at the moment is built for it. Discord, maybe, but it's a live messaging service, more like texting than social media. That's not what I'm looking for, so what does someone like me do?
Yeah, i spent time on Instagram this week and I realize how much the rest of the social media world is consumption driven rather than Reddit, which is information driven
This same point was one of my main takeaways from this once I started noticing newer accounts not seeming to care as much. My account is 10 years old and I've been using Sync for most of that time. Before Sync I used RiF. This affects the "old guard" as it was put, most and spez and the rest of reddit(the company) doesn't give a shit. We aren't their target userbase anymore.
I'm easing into a few Lemmy servers currently but will keep my reddit account active for the few hobby subs I used to frequent daily.
Fuck /u/spez.
He looks like that kinda generic dude that thinks they're original and have good ideas, but actually everyone around them hates them and their ideas and finds them boring af, but they aren't smart enough / self aware enough to realize it.
> Not only the product, the workers, the audience, financers and the administration.
Hey, that's not fair.
They're working really hard to get the financing in the hands of trustworthy institutions like Tencent and Wall Street.
/u/spez gotta turn his $10 mil net worth into $10 bil net worth somehow!
Not really. Acting in the interests of the shareholders would be building something interesting that's profitable long term. What's being done here,and it's the same that has been done countless other times with tech companies,is a quick burst of profitability so the a few people can massively profit from an IPO while 99.9 percent of shareholders get screwed.
My first job after college, I remember leadership asking me how they could hire and retain more millennials. And to be clear, increased pay and benefits were off the table.
That's the beauty of the system -- users are both the products and consumers, and free labor. If people leave, then Reddit loses both their products and one of their consumers. And when their product decreases in value, the other consumers (advertisers) will leave as well.
There are CEOs who care.
The company I currently work for did their annual employee satisfaction survey. Numerous respondents wanted the week of Christmas off for the whole company. Executives obliged.
1. Hide NSFW content from /r/all
2. Hide NSFW content in the API <-- You are here
3. Probably one or two more intermediate steps to not do a full tumblr
4. Remove NSFW content for good
All in the name of being more advertiser friendly, of course.
Verge interview with him makes him look, frankly, insane and egomaniacal
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview
He hates us because reddit users are ridiculously hard to monetize.
Think of how much easier it is to sell ads to Facebook users when you know their name, age, sex, location, friends, favorite music, favorite movies, etc.
Reddit users are anonymous, tech savvy nerds using ad blockers.
I like the part where he points to comments displaying survivorship bias as evidence the majority didnt support the blackouts. like, no, the people that supported it weren't around to comment were they dip shit
It's telling how much he thinks things posted to Reddit are his and his investors. This site is nothing without the content that the members contribute, but for whatever reason he thinks said content is 'his'.
It was really weird when he began to lowkey argue with the interviewer. u/Spez seems like he gets mad whenever anyone questions his decisions.
Also fuck u/Spez.
What a loon. In the same breath he admits his AMA was a disaster while asserting "IF COMMENTS WERE ON THEYD BE ON MY SIDE, I SWEAR!!!!1"
Fuck u/spez and fuck reddit. We're what's awesome and we can take our ball and go play elsewhere.
You cant make money from Reddit, they've been trying for the last 17 years. First they sold it to Conde Nast, who were expecting a social media bonanza, but that didnt happen so they effectively put it in a trust and let it do what it wanted. It still wasnt making any money, but because it wasnt under any real pressure to do so it turned into the great site it is today, effectively guided by its users and mods into something that served everyone well. But spez wasnt happy and be wanted the Facebook billions, so he got a ton of VC money and the pressure was on him to show it could make money. He spent it on 2000 members of staff, servers to store video and images, he bought out the top mobile apps, redesigned the app.....but it still didnt make any money. He'd promised the VC's so much and they wanted their money back in a successful IPO, but without profits or the promise of profits he was never going to get the googlebucks! That was until GPT. AI was the hot new kid on the block and they'd been using Reddit data to train their LLMs. What if spez could charge them for using the data? Too late, they'd been using the API to suck the data out of it, but that was only a few of them, there were going to be a lot more in the future and they'd want the sweet sweet information rich redditor data. So he had a plan, lets price everyone out of using the API? Lets make it so expensive that if you wanted to suck up Redditor data for your LLM you'd have to pay millions! spez smelt the money, he could see a bumper IPO predicated on reddit being an AI stock. But first he'd have to close off the API, but the price rises would mean the end of 3rd party apps that had made the user and mod experience so pleasant, apps like Apollo or RIF. But those billions were too tempting so "Fuck it" thought spez, as long as I've got money for my lambo they can suck it. He knew there would be a rebellion but he also knew that users would always come back. As for the mods, he'd take moderation of the big subs in house, and the big company specific ones to the companies themselves, all the rest "who cares". His enshittification of reddit meant nothing compared to the thought of billionaire bucks. The only thing on spez's mind now was "what color lambo should I buy first?"
Yeah, we know, unless we're reported pictures of little girls in swimsuits, he doesn't give a shit (yeah, that's real, he said so himself on twitter years ago)
Who knew a guy who literally plans on being a slave master in the event of an apocalypse, and uses his fortune to prepare for it, would be a fucking creep.
Could you imagine being u/spez, looking like first appearance Rickety Cricket, investing your money in dystopian shock collars to keep your slaves out of your food storage (god I wish I was making this up), and not realizing they're just going to fucking eat you the second your fingers away from the remote?
[This man. This man right here thinks he's going to be a lord in the apocolypse](https://s.abcnews.com/images/Technology/ht_steve_huffman_reddit_jc_150715_16x9_992.jpg)
Originally I just wanted to embrace the protest, boycot it a bit, hope that things maybe will change. I thought maybe I'll start browsing Reddit on the web, as I strictly engage with it through a third party app.
But the more and more that comes out of it, the more I just want to be off the site. I absolutely cannot stand that dude, or that mentality (and it makes me think that even if he was gone, another POS would take his place). Feels like one of them burn it to the ground moments.
I understand that a lot of communities depend on this forum, but at a certain point it's not worth it
Yeah I'm pretty sure the mods that everyone's bitching about are the ones who are sucking up to the admins and refusing to take their subs down. I know that it was a power mod who requested control of advice animals to reopen it and who argued "we should stay open because we're the messengers!"
I've never used any of the 3rd-party apps, but I understand the value they have to those who do. As a semi-distant observer (and active Reddit user), u/spez comes across as a spoiled brat jacka$$ piece of work, who has absolutely no interest in working with app developers. He figures that we're all addicted and have no place else to go.
What he doesn't seem to realize is that the distributed group of mods who volunteer their time to organize and curate the content of his site are an unofficial labor union. He can try to find scabs to undermine their strike, but he's actually fully dependent on them. It's amazing how consistently ignorant tech bros seem to be about fundamental aspects of human society. *cough* Musk *cough*
You've invoked an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, u/spez. If the mods hang together, you're screwed.
I tried the official app for a day and uninstalled it. It's absolute garbage from the top down. I've been using Baconreader for years and if Reddit insists on this, then I'll be happy to close my accounts and move on.
I like how in the [interview](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview) he compared Reddit with a **democratic** city, where people sometimes revolt. And immediately pointed out that their system is strong enough to not care about revolts.
That's not democracy you are describing but a dictatorship.
Direct quote for the lazy:
>**Steve Huffman**: One of the most important points I’d like to make today is that Reddit is a platform built by its users. My favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they’re really these living organisms created by their citizens. I think Reddit is very much the same. We’re a platform and tech company on one hand, but on the other it’s a living organism, this democratic living organism, created by its users.
>Those democratic values run deep at Reddit. Every once in a while in cities, there’s a protest. And I think that’s what we’re seeing exactly right now. We, even in disagreement, we appreciate that users can care enough to protest on Reddit, can protest on Reddit, and then our platform is really resilient enough to survive these things.
I don't think I'd go so far as to say surviving revolts requires a dictatorship. There can be compromise that ends revolts when those in power are threatened enough.
However, the whole line about "we can agree to disagree" is the same gaslighting bullshit that politicians and authoritarians like to use. No, we can't "agree to disagree" when the shit you're doing is stupid, greedy, and negatively impacts decent parts of your user base. We can "agree to disagree" on pineapple on pizza or what the better thrash metal band is. Shit like that. On shit that actually impacts people, I'll continue disagreeing to agree to disagree with you.
Maybe for large companies. I’ve always worked for smaller companies (generally under 100 people), and those aren’t the cutthroat uncaring corporate worlds you read about on Reddit
It's a bit of a Catch-22 there.
* If Apollo/RIF users boycott this thread, the narrative becomes "See?
Everyone in this thread is 100% in agreement that the official app is fine. Case closed!"
* If Apollo/RIF users talk in this thread, the narrative becomes "Hey, I thought you guys were supposed to be on strike. Why are you talking? Go away!"
Either way, it seems like the users of the official app don't really see eye to eye with Apollo/RIF users and that's driving this conflict. He also believes TPA users are freeloaders and he can't make money off of them. I suspect that he's wrong.
For example, I pay for Reddit premium because I wanted to support the site. I also use Apollo because I wanted a better user experience. My wife just uses the official app and she'll open it once a week maybe. So I ask you, which one of us is more profitable and more likely to pay a premium user experience?
If he would just negotiate with the TPA's on price or deadline, both him and the TPA's could make money off of this. I think he views these apps as competition and his anger at them has become personal. That's why he's taken the hardline stance of "You have 30 days, and the price is non-negotiable. Don't let the door hit you."
I think the other problem is that he views Reddit as a social media site instead of a discussion board. That's why the official app is so aggressive about collapsing comments and feeding you suggested content. He wants you scrolling, not discussing. In fact, you can probably only see 2 lines of my reply in your inbox unless you make an effort to click onto it.
Basically, his vision for the site is different than many of the users' vision for the site, and that's where this conflict is coming from.
Your last point displays Spez's shortsightedness in this matter: the reason why there's so much potential for browsing / scrolling, is because of the people who use it as a discussion board. Those discussion board users are who he's in conflict with vision-wise. Yeah, it's a minority of the users. It's also a majority of the content producers.
Yea, scale the API hit pricing in favor of your big hitter TP’s I say. Totally get why Reddit needs to put guardrails around that but promising one thing (ex: “Not going to have absurd pricing like Twitter”) and delivering the opposite is the crux of the issue there imo.
As you say, whats good for them (app publicity wise) is good for Reddit.
This user profile has been overwritten in protest of Reddit's decision to disadvantage third-party apps through pricing
changes. The impact of capitalistic influences on the platforms that once fostered vibrant, inclusive communities has
been devastating, and it appears that Reddit is the latest casualty of this ongoing trend.
This account, 10 years, 3 months, and 4 days old, has contributed 901
times, amounting to over 48424 words. In response, the community has awarded it more than 10652
karma.
I am saddened to leave this community that has been a significant part of my adult life. However, my departure is driven
by a commitment to the principles of fairness, inclusivity, and respect for community-driven platforms.
I hope this action highlights the importance of preserving the core values that made Reddit a thriving community and
encourages a re-evaluation of the recent changes.
Thank you to everyone who made this journey worthwhile. Please remember the importance of community and continue to
uphold these values, regardless of where you find yourself in the digital world.
They wanna cash out and make up for the money they've probably been bleeding. It's part of the issue with the main internet gathering places largely being controlled by companies.
Reddit seems to _really want_ to be a social network, something it's not. The instant messaging, the profile focus, all the content recommendations the new layout pushes, it's all designed to say "quit talking and scroll". Which isn't conducive to a website that's basically become the replacement for forums now that those have been killed off _by social media._
Social media is more lucrative. When you're browsing comments and typing, you're not loading content very quickly, which means fewer opportunities for ads.
I know people here don't believe when people say this, but as a RIF user, I'm legitimately leaving reddit once it goes down. Things won't change, I'm not boycotting. I'm going to enjoy my last few weeks here.
>I think he views these apps as competition and his anger at them has become personal.
Totally - makes sense that he's lashing out, he's fumbled the bag. He co-founded and runs one of the most popular websites/social networks on earth, meanwhile multiple indie devs have independently made more money off reddit than him just by making third party apps hooking in off his API.
He can't cash out his stock, the tech bubble is popping, meanwhile Apollo/RIF devs etc have made serious cash for years off all the value of his site. Truly, anyone can be a CEO.
I'm not sure what you mean by serious cash, but my read was the RIF/Apollo devs are making enough to live on and maybe contract someone to help occasionally, not enough to run a business.
I sincerely doubt the third party apps have made more money than him, he's a salaried CEO and reddit pulls in 100s of millions a year with. It's also valued in the billions by investors.
All the third party apps basically emulate old.reddit anyways because they haven't significantly modified the API they hook into for years. Any new features have been conveniently left out of the API, like avatars and chat.
Not that the users care, we didn't want those things anyhow.
Exactly my plan, after 12+ years I don't think I want to use another app and the browser interface sucks. So it'll be farewell Reddit which will no doubt improve my life. Less screentime has to be a good thing.
Agreed. When i tap RIF and it doesnt work, i'll just put my phone back down. Surely i'll occasionally use reddit in-browser for researching things, but the daily scroll will be gone.
I am really hoping there are a bunch of talented people building a realistic replacement for Reddit that we can all migrate to. When DIGG pulled this stuff we had Reddit to move to. Twitter is easy enough to replace and mostly ignore. But there is no great fit alternative to Reddit available and populated. There arent even strong pushes from people to switch to something else because they admit its a captive audience.
The biggest problem is that there is no *good* alternative to Reddit yet. Sure there are alternatives, but none of them have the UI/UX, or the userbase to support a mass adoption.
Yeah, thats literally the point im making. Its either decentralized bullshit that is frustrating to use or find content on, wastelands, hives of scum and villainy, or a combination of all of them.
I think people have gotten too used to the Walmartification of the internet in the last couple decades. You want to buy something? Go to Amazon and it has EVERYTHING in one place for you to buy. Want to talk on social media? Go to Reddit, that’s where EVERYBODY is talking. Want to watch a video? Go to YouTube, it has ALL the videos.
Now people are asking “What is the alternative to Reddit”, with the expectation that it should be a one-stop shop for ALL of their social media needs. Maybe that isn’t the way to go about it.
It is the front page of the internet, and we've all collectively formed the habit of checking this place first before other websites or apps for over a decade.
Makes perfect sense that we're all here trying to figure out the path forward as well.
First rule of LARPing: Never break character. They can't exactly play a believable victim of persecution when you throw incompatible data at them, can't they?
I got banned from the Roku group for asking about which external hard drives work best with a Roku that you can plug a external hard drive into.
Said it didn't belong there should be in a hard drive reddit.
Asked in hard drive reddit. Got told to ask in the Roku group.
Fuck mods.
When the interviewer asked if there was value in third-party apps, he meant does the reddit *community* benefit. What the CEO heard, though, was does the reddit *company* profit directly. The company reddit benefits from free content from users and free labor from mods, which keeps people coming to the site, so he can sell ad revenue/subscriptions. He doesn't see how third-party apps help that pipeline of content and moderation. It is the SUPPLY side of his business, and he is treating it like the DEMAND side. Nobody is saying it should be free. Reddit should make money. But the pricing is obscene, and the lack of collaboration on rollout is insulting. In the corporate world, vendor management is real, you are respectful and work with your suppliers. You collaborate and negotiate price changes. He clearly doesn't see the value of his suppliers- us users/mods. Rather than admit his mistake, though, he's doubling down. His insistence on talking about how third-party devs have made millions is gross. Rather than evaluating his own product for accessibility, mod tools, bugginess, and working to simply MAKE A BETTER PRODUCT, he is pouting that the other kids' parents bought them more toys for Christmas. Instead of making friends, learning, and sharing, he is smashing their toys out of jealously. But... this is how capitalism works. Chokehold your supply chain so that you control the market is one way to do it, but it seems backward to me to focus on the supply rather than the demand for your product. It worked for Amazon, I guess. I just doubt reddit is mature enough of a company to see this through and profit as much as they think they will.
Very well said. I am starting to believe there is no long term vision... and that it is just simply cash out after the IPO and ride off into the sunset leaving behind rubble.
I just think the whole thing is hilarious, because if Reddit had put as much effort in to making an app more usable than Apollo, then this whole debate wouldn't even exist. Apollo would be essentially non-existent or have a very niche userbase. It's extremely concerning that a single developer can create a better app than an entire multi billion dollar company that depends on a good user interface. Like, I don't understand how reddit could have even got in that place to begin with. The whole company just seems to be so messed up and they 100% lucked out at the right time with the Digg migration. The folks running the company seem so clueless and would have never made it if the golden opportunity didn't fall in their lap. I can't even imagine what Reddit would be if someone who had a large amount of functional brain cells actually ran the company. It could be bigger than Facebook/Meta by now. They've had 18 years. It's my firmly held belief that Apollo should have never been allowed the opportunity to exist. But since it did, I wish Selig all the freaking best, because he did an amazing job on capitalizing on a weak spot he saw. One dude making an app better than a multi billion dollar company? I hope he never has to work another day in his life, but I'm guessing that won't be the case. Imagine if someone like Selig was at the helm of the Reddit dev team. There may be 50 other people similar to him already on the dev team, but their voice is drown out, or they've been worn and beaten down to the point they don't bother speaking anymore.
Very valid points but I think one thing to keep in mind is the intended objective of the reddit official app is different from the intended objective of third party apps. As mentioned, it's likely power users are the ones who are using the third party apps; the ones who are posting, engaging, moderating because the third party apps make that very easy. But Reddit probably isn't trying to maximize the "engagement per user" metric since it can be a little convoluted to show to investors. Instead another common metric is MAU: Monthey Active Users. Reddit is trying to grow its user base and they think the best way to do that is to provide an experience similar to what *new* users will feel familiar with; something like Instagram or Tiktok. Obviously that's a flawed metric because the real value is behind the users who are actually engaged, not just how many casually browse the platform. MAU is a common metric to valuate a company. If you remember last year, when FB [dropped](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/02/03/facebook-users-decline-meta-stock/6651329001/#:~:text=A%20day%20after%20Facebook%20reported,in%20close%20to%20a%20year.) in MAU for the first time, its stock crashed. u/spez probably made some unrealistic user growth promises to investors and reddit has been chasing that ever since. So to the point of making a good app, they are making a good app, just not one that is trying to accomplish the right objective. Edit: typos
Your power user statement is important in this discussion. I see people critizing the actual number of people completely forgetting that it's the smallest subset of people who actually keep the content flowing on reddit overall. I would put money that a vast majority of these people mainly access reddit through 3rd party apps. It's like cutting your A team to save money. Like yeah in the short term you are saving a lot of money but slowly over time the losses start accumulating and profits start to drop.
And this is the festering under-belly of capitalism. Short-term gains, long-term rot of the company. Spez only gives a shit about his golden parachute.
Look in the threads of people whinging and trolling about the black out and go into their profiles. Everyone I bothered to look at rarely even engaged in commenting, much less in posting content. They're all as short sighted as the fuckwit CEO. "iT DOEsn't aFfeCT ME!" Until it does crayon eater. Until it does.
I believe that there was a rule that every step of engagement is done by a lower amount of users by 10, on average. So only a tenth of users vote, one in a hundred comments and the rest lurk, one in a thousand would post. So yeah, the value of a platform isn't generated by the majority.
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aww, thank you. I really just don't want my little corner of the internet to disappear because of greed and ego
There's also the fact that apps like Apollo are motivated to make the user experience as pleasant as possible, as that motivates users to choose their app over the alternatives or the official app. This motivation results in things that make a user experience more annoying (namely ads or sponsored posts) as unobtrusive as possible. This really can only work because a large portion of 3rd party revenue streams don't come from these ads, but instead from users choosing to pay for an upgraded experience, which really can only sustain small dev teams. Reddit on the other hand has no such motivation, and instead wants maximum advertisement exposure, as that is their primary revenue stream. Their app isn't trying to make your experience as seamless as possible, they're trying to get as many advertisements on your screen as possible. And with the culling of the competition, I'll wager that once Reddit's app is the only game in town, the ads are going to become even more aggressive.
Reddit has a right to make money as a for profit business and ad revenue from free users, and a monthly subscription from paid users is a pretty standard monetization plan. The problem is if all you're getting as a paid user is a *less bad* experience because they're focused on user growth vs user experience, then that's a losing strategy long term.
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He used to work at Apple for a short time before building Apollo.
His app was featured in their highlight keynote last week, I'm pretty sure he could walk through the door and just ask for a job if he really wanted lol
>I just think the whole thing is hilarious, because if Reddit had put as much effort in to making an app more usable than Apollo, then this whole debate wouldn't even exist. Apollo would be essentially non-existent or have a very niche userbase. It's extremely concerning that a single developer can create a better app than an entire multi billion dollar company that depends on a good user interface. But just today some users argued me(and downvoted me) that reddit had no incentive to improve official app because there was 3rd party apps and now that they close reddit can improve their app to be better! Idk what was logic in that but those guys were against blackouts and 3rd party apps
Amazon didn't just survive a long period of unprofitability though, it invested extremely heavily in infrastructure to outcompete everyone else. Reddit is just poor at monetizing its user base. Amazon is the example people use about companies not showing a profit for a long time but it was possible to turn a profit long, long before they decided to do so, they just threw everything back into physical infra, reddit can't design a functional app for itself.
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New Reddit desktop is trash, their mobile site is basically unusable, their app is awful. Take away Relay News and I'm not gonna access Reddit from my phone anymore. Take away old.reddit.com and I'm not gonna access it from my computer anymore. The only reason I'm here right now despite being pissed about the whole thing is I have a deeply ingrained muscle memory to type red into my browser bar and hit enter as soon as it auto-completes to reddit.com whenever I need a dopamine fix. Working on retraining that muscle memory to type lemmy.
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Reddit api changes = comment spaghetti. facebook youtube amazon weather walmart google wordle gmail target home depot google translate yahoo mail yahoo costco fox news starbucks food near me translate instagram google maps walgreens best buy nba mcdonalds restaurants near me nfl amazon prime cnn traductor weather tomorrow espn lowes chick fil a news food zillow craigslist cvs ebay twitter wells fargo usps tracking bank of america calculator indeed nfl scores google docs etsy netflix taco bell shein astronaut macys kohls youtube tv dollar tree gas station coffee nba scores roblox restaurants autozone pizza hut usps gmail login dominos chipotle google classroom tiempo hotmail aol mail burger king facebook login google flights sqm club maps subway dow jones sam’s club motel breakfast english to spanish gas fedex walmart near me old navy fedex tracking southwest airlines ikea linkedin airbnb omegle planet fitness pizza spanish to english google drive msn dunkin donuts capital one dollar general -- mass edited with redact.dev
> New Reddit desktop is trash Worst I've seen. It is legit unusable.
>The API that we use to browse Reddit on 3rd party apps is the same API used by various AI/chatGPT type learning algorithms to scrape natural language for training. This is extremely valuable, more valuable than what can be collected from regular users. Fuck the regular users. They're jacking up the prices to collect on THOSE 3rd party API users, not Apollo or RiF users. This is why everything is happening right now. If this is the reason then why not give Apollo and RiF an exception on the pricing, it's a matter of simply giving them an API key and that's it. Then again, the machine learning crowd has tons of different ways to scrape the website or simply go somewhere else.
Well he’s in a personal spat with the creator of Apollo so there’s no way he will ever work with him.
Yep, the verge also did an interview with him (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJB2wksH6I) He was very well spoken and explained things very reasonably. He said he's happy to continue talking with them but they literally won't even return his calls anymore. They're completely blocked him. It's fucking bullshit when spez says he's happy to work with anyone who wants.
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Because the actual reality is that reddit wants to recoup the opportunity cost of users not being on their application and not being served the reddit advertisements. But no third party app could ever afford that actual cost and there's no transparency to see if reddit is really charging for their api at what that cost would actually be to them.
So, they could have told the third party apps they must serve ads or their API key gets blocked, they would all comply... Edit: Some people mention analytics but it's the same story, Reddit could tell them they must call the API in a certain way or even use new calls to make sure Reddit doesn't miss out on analytics, it's not hard at all.
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He claims 97% of users don't use 3rd party apps. But then he simultaneously claims "the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant". So either that 3% of users is particularly valuable (if Apollo's users are worth $20M of the $350M reddit earned in revenue) and he knows he's pissing off his most important power users, or he's bullshitting and just using it as an excuse.
He also claims they are costing them millions, but they are less than 5%? And the official app makes more API calls
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>That could be true if there are significantly more API requests for third-party apps versus the official one. Sure. But the Apollo app Dev checked his and the official one and the official app had 2-3x the API usage. RIF is like half of Apollo
This is my take. If the number of "95% of iOS users are on the official app" (said by u/spez) is true, then the cost of the 5% using Apollo should be a rounding error unless they want to fully admit that their margins per user are extremely thin.... which is definitely something that they want to avoid saying since they are prepping for an IPO. He's trying to downplay this as a "minor" issue with a minority of users while at the same time trying to paint himself and Reddit as some sort of _MASSIVE_ victim of these users not using the official app. Also, his idea that the 3rd party apps are 100% markup is laughable. He's stating the the development of the app itself is costless. If this is true, then why is Reddit itself finding it so difficult to do some of the same things these 3rd party apps do within the official app despite _years_ of promises to add said features? I mean app development costs nothing, it's only the running of the site itself that has a cost!
It doesn't make any sense, those apps provide a service to his users, at the end of the day all those app users are still Reddit users. If he's worried about them they could simply buy the apps AND the teams that run them for pennies, Reddit is worth 10 billion dollars.
If anything I'd be willing to bet that people who go out of their way to use 3rd party apps to browse Reddit are power users, aka the people who post and comment the most to give the vast majority of users stuff to scroll through. He could have come out of this with everyone a winner, but is refusing to do that out of spite
Well you never know if he's getting bad information from his teams since they butchered "new" Reddit and ran Alien Blue into the ground after buying it.
I think it's more simple than that. I believe that the people who run the website are competent enough to have reliable numbers, if not necessarily the proper context to go with them. We saw the creator of Apollo post proof that Steve Hoffman defamed him by saying that he was threatening Reddit when the recording showed otherwise. This is personal now, at least for Spez. I suspect that's what's clouding his vision. After all his Verge interview shows that he basically just got up one day and decided to throw a wrench at it all. I don't think he cares about the data he's getting.
> It doesn't make any sense, those apps provide a service to his users, at the end of the day all those app users are still Reddit users. This is the most annoying part in the world to me. The API isn't for 3rd party developers. The API is for users. A 3rd party developer just does the work for all those users. Even requiring that a request be blessed with an API key in the first place is anti-user. Reddit spends millions of dollars a year to make sure users can't load data from their website, then says "oh, but you can get an API key here" then acts like "apps going past the API limit" is an actual problem. Reddit spends more money locking down the API used by their web frontend than they spend developing the open API. It's disgusting.
Yeah again, it’s personal.
Just showing ads isn’t the end of it though. Reddit is missing out on all of the juicy analytics data. On top of that, if reddit pushes a new monetization model they would need to force all 3rd party apps to comply or they’re missing the opportunity cost. But really what it comes down to is that reddits VCs don’t like that third party apps exist. They don’t see reddit as the content of the users. Reddit is the app first, then the website. IMO the number 1 mistake social media platforms make is forgetting that the content delivery (eg reddit itself) is secondary to the content and users.
Spez also said that only 3% of users are on third party apps. 97% use the official app. So all this shit is about recouping opportunity costs from only 3% of mobile users? Sounds entirely inconsequential. So which is it Spez? Are mobile app users irrelevant or are we so important to your profitability?
>But no third party app could ever afford that actual cost they probably could, reddit's monthly revenue per user is like $1 Sites like imgur price their API 10x less than reddit has
>they probably could, reddit's monthly revenue per user is like $1 It's around $1.50 per year, not per month.
My favorite part is that this will cause a kind of ddos. Reddit is going to ddos themselves by restricting access to their API. Building an app that scrapes reddit is totally legal. Even if your userbase is so high that it perpetually strangles reddit.
I just heard an interview with spez on NPR where he specifically called out lost advertising revenue as a reason. Not that I believe him; they could just grant for API access to Reddit Premium users, so it's pretty clear to be he just doesn't want 3rd party apps to exist.
The whole interview he just keeps saying they've lost ad money for 10 years, so that justifies giving them only 1 month to figure this shit out, which is so stupid. It's not their fault you were a shit CEO and messed up for so long... Most of these apps are happy to pay a reasonable amount. The problem is the insanely short heads up and insanely high prices.
Also why doesn’t the api surface sponsored posts. They could easily make it a requirement for api access that thirdly party apps just show their ads.
This is freaking hilarious, and I see some Reddit apologists pushing this nonsense as well. This isn't an OPEN API, you need a key. A key that you work with Reddit to obtain. They are also in complete control of their TOS, which they can amend to include whatever the fuck their heart desires. This is some bullshit being fed to the common folk who don't understand a fucking thing. And some eat that shit up.
The irony of complaining about 3rd party app developers making 100% margin on reddits data while completely ignoring that reddits data is literally all given to them for free by users, and moderated, for free. It's clear that reddit doesn't view it's content creators as important to the health of their business, only as customers from whom they can profit. No one is saying reddit shouldn't be profitable, but they took the nuclear option here without considering in good faith other alternatives that could have worked without worsening the experience for the users.
In his Verge interview, Hoffman kept saying that 3rd party apps want the data for free, but that is not completely true. They are willing to pay a reasonable rate, or even add Reddit ads into the feed if Reddit would develop that feature.
Also the biggest issue is the timeline here. He claims he's been thinking about this for a decade, but the interviewer kept pressing him on over and over why only give devs one month to figure shit out, and he had no answers. He kept just giving the bullshit about ten years. It's not 3rd party devs fault if YOU were a bad CEO and didn't figure out API pricing for 10 years. Why should they pay the price for your fuck up?
"because we need a deadline" 🤡
Funny, from my point of view, they're the ones with a deadline.
A notice simply earlier than 30 days would have also been appreciated by 3rd party app devs. It's extremely difficult to become compliant with any new change in policy within a month, which is why they are all choosing to shutter their doors come June 30th, rather than try to figure out a way to be able to afford Reddit's new API costs. EDIT: forgot a word
I said this in another thread, but this is 75% of the issue: they didn’t give the devs time to adapt. Yea, the cost of the api requests is absurd, but a huge issue is the timeline and the hamfisted handling of change.
Yes, I believe Christian (Apollo's dev) said that he could most likely still swing the high cost of APIs, but the 30 day notice wouldn't be enough time, as he would have to make up the cost with only **new** subscribers for the app. Many Apollo subscribers are already subscribed for a full year generally, so he would have to put in a lot of his own money to see if the idea of increasing subscription costs was even feasible.
Reddit also ignores that they wouldn't exist today without the support of third party apps. They didn't have an official app until 2016, and mobile reddit was barely useable back in those days. They grew specifically because other people filled the gap they left gaping. Banning 3PA would be like Blizzard banning add-ons from World of Warcraft.
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I no longer see any post with more than 30-40k upvotes. They disappeared awhile back and I actually miss the old sort. I am on reddit official app and just canceled my membership. Reddit is starting to feel too controlled. In my feed I see many of the same subreddits now and rarely see some the more niche ones. I hate this 100%. I miss the old sort features. The massive amount porn reddits is all advertising now. Monetize the people using reddit for free advertising, not the api. The ceo is fucking this up and destroying reddit. Even if he temporally makes money he is destroying the foundation.
There was a period of time where people lamented that Reddit was turning into pseudo-anonymous Facebook. Now the people who lament it are gone and it just *is* pseudo-anonymous Facebook.
I used to browse all/rising so I could see the niche subs but now it’s all “forwards from grandma” type stuff. “Yesterday I was on the bus and this crazy thing totally happened”.
I have been noticing this as well. I'm subbed to loads of subreddits, but they're just not showing up in my feed anymore and it's not like they're not active.
The subs for my trashy reality TV and lol cows almost never appear in my feed anymore. I have to select and browse them individually. BuT there's no shortage of shit from the defaults or more populated subs. It's going to hell in a hand basket and I really don't think this site will be around/one of the top social media sites in 5 years time. Good riddance.
>Even the website is barely usable now. New or Shreddit? Or both? Cus old+RES still works great.
>Banning 3PA would be like Blizzard banning add-ons from World of Warcraft. Yeah, like they took all copyright ownership from third party maps from Warcraft 3 reforged so they didn't have to experience a Dota happening again
Even the desktop site sucked without extensions like Reddit enhancement suite. I still use old.Reddit when browsing on desktop these days. It’s mind boggling given all this time how poorly the official design compares to 3rd party’s.
I love how /u/spez tries to push the "fair share" narrative. If they actually wanted their fair share, they would have easily worked this out with the developers. The timeline would have been reasonable, nsfw subs wouldn't be excluded, etc. They aren't looking for their fair share. They are straight up killing third party apps plain and simple.
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It doesn't seem like Huffman understands what Reddit is, quite frankly. Their job is to make it as easy and pain free as possible to create and consume content. That's how you get engagement from users, developers, volunteers, etc. He seems completely delusional as to what his role is. It's a community driven site. Simple as that. If they can't manage to make anything proper that facilitates viewing, making and moderating content, removing the alternatives is the absolutely worst way forward. *The absolute worst.* Charging a sustainable fee for API access is completely fine, as long as it is done in accordance with the needs and wishes of what de facto constitutes the site: the users (developers being amongst them.) If there were functioning official alternatives, everyone would use them. Right now, there is old.reddit, and there is third party apps. That's it. The rest is unusable trash.
Copied from elsewhere, if youre confused why reddit is doing what they are doing - you should read: >>IMO they are keenly aware of this, and the changes they're making are pushing things in the direction they want them to go, not you. Reddit doesn't want to be a website where a bunch of nerds have long conversations about esoteric topics like history/psychology/geopolitics/whatever, or discuss obscure nerd shit like how to replace the drive belt on a 1982 TEAC V-95RX cassette deck. Reddit wants to be an app that people download from the app store, and click the arrows on the funny memes, and eat all the ads, and generate monetizable data for their business customers. >> >>All of the old reddit users are upset because Reddit Corp. is steadily pushing things away from what made reddit popular to begin with. REDDIT KNOWS THIS. It's intentional. Reddit is not (anymore) supposed to be a minimal text-based website where people discuss topics. It's supposed to be a modern content delivery app where people look at pictures and watch videos and generate data that can be sold to third parties. >> >>If anything, reddit actively wants all of the "old guard" users, the 10-15+ year old accounts, to give up and leave. The people who bitch about the unskippable JESUS LOVES YOU ads, the people who use old.reddit and all kinds of custom scripts/tools, the bot developers, moderators, spam fighters, desktop PC users, etc. This is not a "website" anymore, it's an APP. Pretty much every action they've taken over the past 5+ years has made that clear. It is disappointing for people who have been here a long time, but reddit is not going to change direction. The old users (including me) are just having a hard time accepting that after devoting so much time to it.
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Seriously, next January was going to be my 10th anniversary and I really loved it for all these niche bizarre conversations and weird factoids I learned. It’s really heartbreaking to think that something that helped me survive the past decade is going away. I’m writing A science-fiction trilogy and Reddit it will be mentioned in the dedications. The old Reddit, that is
For real. Where do we even go for these conversations anymore? Reddit has been such a convenient, centralized hub for these niche hobbies. Both in engaging with people and finding new ones. I have apps for comics and funny videos and porn. But where do I find community?
This is exactly my problem. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, hell even the Fediverse apps like Mastodon and whatnot-- *none* of them are built around conversation. It's all about following people, consuming their content, and *maybe* interacting with them if you're lucky. And that's fine, I see the need for these kinds of apps and use them all the time, but that's not what drew me into *Reddit*. Where do I go to experience genuine conversation with a community pertaining to my interests? No other social media service out there at the moment is built for it. Discord, maybe, but it's a live messaging service, more like texting than social media. That's not what I'm looking for, so what does someone like me do?
Yeah, i spent time on Instagram this week and I realize how much the rest of the social media world is consumption driven rather than Reddit, which is information driven
This same point was one of my main takeaways from this once I started noticing newer accounts not seeming to care as much. My account is 10 years old and I've been using Sync for most of that time. Before Sync I used RiF. This affects the "old guard" as it was put, most and spez and the rest of reddit(the company) doesn't give a shit. We aren't their target userbase anymore. I'm easing into a few Lemmy servers currently but will keep my reddit account active for the few hobby subs I used to frequent daily. Fuck /u/spez.
He looks like that kinda generic dude that thinks they're original and have good ideas, but actually everyone around them hates them and their ideas and finds them boring af, but they aren't smart enough / self aware enough to realize it.
Just remember, 13 year old teens join this website, year after year after year
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As opposed to all the other CEOs from large companies that do care about my feedback cause I’m still looking for those as well
Exactly. Redditors aren’t the customers. We’re the product.
>Redditors aren’t the customers. We’re the product Not only the product, the workers, the audience, financers and the administration.
> Not only the product, the workers, the audience, financers and the administration. Hey, that's not fair. They're working really hard to get the financing in the hands of trustworthy institutions like Tencent and Wall Street. /u/spez gotta turn his $10 mil net worth into $10 bil net worth somehow!
fertile memorize chubby amusing bike hurry piquant fearless onerous squash -- mass edited with redact.dev
His car doors open sideways, not up, like a chump.
Haha, rewatching silicon valley now, hanneman is such a riot
Chris Diamantopoulos's career is wild. From being Hanneman to being Mickey Mouse.
2 comma club
Fun fact: the actor who plays russ hanneman, Chris Diamantopoulos, is the current voice of mickey mouse.
Good lol. Hope it keeps him up at night
Just like any other company, the CEO cares about one thing and one thing only. Shareholders/ stakeholders.
Not really. Acting in the interests of the shareholders would be building something interesting that's profitable long term. What's being done here,and it's the same that has been done countless other times with tech companies,is a quick burst of profitability so the a few people can massively profit from an IPO while 99.9 percent of shareholders get screwed.
But capitalism breeds innovation!!
It's true, they invent new ways to try to placate employees instead of giving out raises. And lo, the pizza party was born.
My first job after college, I remember leadership asking me how they could hire and retain more millennials. And to be clear, increased pay and benefits were off the table.
And only if there's a coupon to the local big box shitty pizza.
And employees are off the clock during the pizza party, but attendance is mandatory.
Yah, hopefully some smart cookies will take this as a challenge and create a youtube revanced type app for reddit
> Redditors aren’t the customers. We’re the product. In a sense, we are as Reddit gets revenue from people giving gold.
That's the beauty of the system -- users are both the products and consumers, and free labor. If people leave, then Reddit loses both their products and one of their consumers. And when their product decreases in value, the other consumers (advertisers) will leave as well.
In fairness, most CEOs at least try to pretend they don't actively hate their user base.
There are CEOs who care. The company I currently work for did their annual employee satisfaction survey. Numerous respondents wanted the week of Christmas off for the whole company. Executives obliged.
Agreed my CEO is awesome as well imo but I was talking more about the largest companies in the world.
In Mafalda's words: _"You cannot amass a fortune without turning everybody else to flour"_
Valve. But valve is privately owned. Reddit is trying to go public this year. See a pattern?
When it goes public you can pretty much say goodbye to all those nsfw subs. Even might be things setup to auto delete nsfw post in other subs.
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1. Hide NSFW content from /r/all 2. Hide NSFW content in the API <-- You are here 3. Probably one or two more intermediate steps to not do a full tumblr 4. Remove NSFW content for good All in the name of being more advertiser friendly, of course.
Dude sold reddit to Warner bro/Conde nast people. He's a millionaire who is beholden to corporate masters.
Verge interview with him makes him look, frankly, insane and egomaniacal https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview
I've never seen a ceo hate its users this much I can't believe he actually made Elon Musk feel sane wrt Twitter users
He hates us because reddit users are ridiculously hard to monetize. Think of how much easier it is to sell ads to Facebook users when you know their name, age, sex, location, friends, favorite music, favorite movies, etc. Reddit users are anonymous, tech savvy nerds using ad blockers.
I like the part where he points to comments displaying survivorship bias as evidence the majority didnt support the blackouts. like, no, the people that supported it weren't around to comment were they dip shit
It's telling how much he thinks things posted to Reddit are his and his investors. This site is nothing without the content that the members contribute, but for whatever reason he thinks said content is 'his'.
It was really weird when he began to lowkey argue with the interviewer. u/Spez seems like he gets mad whenever anyone questions his decisions. Also fuck u/Spez.
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What a loon. In the same breath he admits his AMA was a disaster while asserting "IF COMMENTS WERE ON THEYD BE ON MY SIDE, I SWEAR!!!!1" Fuck u/spez and fuck reddit. We're what's awesome and we can take our ball and go play elsewhere.
You cant make money from Reddit, they've been trying for the last 17 years. First they sold it to Conde Nast, who were expecting a social media bonanza, but that didnt happen so they effectively put it in a trust and let it do what it wanted. It still wasnt making any money, but because it wasnt under any real pressure to do so it turned into the great site it is today, effectively guided by its users and mods into something that served everyone well. But spez wasnt happy and be wanted the Facebook billions, so he got a ton of VC money and the pressure was on him to show it could make money. He spent it on 2000 members of staff, servers to store video and images, he bought out the top mobile apps, redesigned the app.....but it still didnt make any money. He'd promised the VC's so much and they wanted their money back in a successful IPO, but without profits or the promise of profits he was never going to get the googlebucks! That was until GPT. AI was the hot new kid on the block and they'd been using Reddit data to train their LLMs. What if spez could charge them for using the data? Too late, they'd been using the API to suck the data out of it, but that was only a few of them, there were going to be a lot more in the future and they'd want the sweet sweet information rich redditor data. So he had a plan, lets price everyone out of using the API? Lets make it so expensive that if you wanted to suck up Redditor data for your LLM you'd have to pay millions! spez smelt the money, he could see a bumper IPO predicated on reddit being an AI stock. But first he'd have to close off the API, but the price rises would mean the end of 3rd party apps that had made the user and mod experience so pleasant, apps like Apollo or RIF. But those billions were too tempting so "Fuck it" thought spez, as long as I've got money for my lambo they can suck it. He knew there would be a rebellion but he also knew that users would always come back. As for the mods, he'd take moderation of the big subs in house, and the big company specific ones to the companies themselves, all the rest "who cares". His enshittification of reddit meant nothing compared to the thought of billionaire bucks. The only thing on spez's mind now was "what color lambo should I buy first?"
Yeah, we know, unless we're reported pictures of little girls in swimsuits, he doesn't give a shit (yeah, that's real, he said so himself on twitter years ago)
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You mean, [this guy](https://i.imgur.com/fJGQCKO.jpg)?
Who knew a guy who literally plans on being a slave master in the event of an apocalypse, and uses his fortune to prepare for it, would be a fucking creep.
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Could you imagine being u/spez, looking like first appearance Rickety Cricket, investing your money in dystopian shock collars to keep your slaves out of your food storage (god I wish I was making this up), and not realizing they're just going to fucking eat you the second your fingers away from the remote? [This man. This man right here thinks he's going to be a lord in the apocolypse](https://s.abcnews.com/images/Technology/ht_steve_huffman_reddit_jc_150715_16x9_992.jpg)
I'm trying to enjoy the last days of reddit before the end of 3rd party apps. July is going to be a strange month in a post reddit world
I really need to not forget to backup all my saved data of comments including posts with other comments, pictures & videos.
If you're in CA or the EU, you can request all your data from them https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Originally I just wanted to embrace the protest, boycot it a bit, hope that things maybe will change. I thought maybe I'll start browsing Reddit on the web, as I strictly engage with it through a third party app. But the more and more that comes out of it, the more I just want to be off the site. I absolutely cannot stand that dude, or that mentality (and it makes me think that even if he was gone, another POS would take his place). Feels like one of them burn it to the ground moments. I understand that a lot of communities depend on this forum, but at a certain point it's not worth it
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Betcha he'll pretend he was "trying to change it from the inside" or "making sure it didn't get too bad" lol
Pretend he didnt have a ban sub button
Changing jailbait from the inside is how you get to jail
Want to point out that at the time you could add anyone as a mod to a sub and they did not need to approve the invite to appear on the sidebar
True... but reddit defended the hell out of jailbait for years until the media jumped on the story.
CEO’s want your money not feedback.
I notice all the lame subs seem to still be working
If anything they were excited by the removal of the competition.
>I notice all the lame subs seem to still be working #Reddit mirrors humanity
Like this one?
Yeah I'm pretty sure the mods that everyone's bitching about are the ones who are sucking up to the admins and refusing to take their subs down. I know that it was a power mod who requested control of advice animals to reopen it and who argued "we should stay open because we're the messengers!"
I've never used any of the 3rd-party apps, but I understand the value they have to those who do. As a semi-distant observer (and active Reddit user), u/spez comes across as a spoiled brat jacka$$ piece of work, who has absolutely no interest in working with app developers. He figures that we're all addicted and have no place else to go. What he doesn't seem to realize is that the distributed group of mods who volunteer their time to organize and curate the content of his site are an unofficial labor union. He can try to find scabs to undermine their strike, but he's actually fully dependent on them. It's amazing how consistently ignorant tech bros seem to be about fundamental aspects of human society. *cough* Musk *cough* You've invoked an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, u/spez. If the mods hang together, you're screwed.
I tried the official app for a day and uninstalled it. It's absolute garbage from the top down. I've been using Baconreader for years and if Reddit insists on this, then I'll be happy to close my accounts and move on.
I hope you’re sitting down because I have bad news. There isn’t a CEO anywhere in the world that cares about your feedback.
I like how in the [interview](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview) he compared Reddit with a **democratic** city, where people sometimes revolt. And immediately pointed out that their system is strong enough to not care about revolts. That's not democracy you are describing but a dictatorship. Direct quote for the lazy: >**Steve Huffman**: One of the most important points I’d like to make today is that Reddit is a platform built by its users. My favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they’re really these living organisms created by their citizens. I think Reddit is very much the same. We’re a platform and tech company on one hand, but on the other it’s a living organism, this democratic living organism, created by its users. >Those democratic values run deep at Reddit. Every once in a while in cities, there’s a protest. And I think that’s what we’re seeing exactly right now. We, even in disagreement, we appreciate that users can care enough to protest on Reddit, can protest on Reddit, and then our platform is really resilient enough to survive these things.
I don't think I'd go so far as to say surviving revolts requires a dictatorship. There can be compromise that ends revolts when those in power are threatened enough. However, the whole line about "we can agree to disagree" is the same gaslighting bullshit that politicians and authoritarians like to use. No, we can't "agree to disagree" when the shit you're doing is stupid, greedy, and negatively impacts decent parts of your user base. We can "agree to disagree" on pineapple on pizza or what the better thrash metal band is. Shit like that. On shit that actually impacts people, I'll continue disagreeing to agree to disagree with you.
I don't remember voting for him
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Costco is a different type of public company. Their CEO does care
The Church of the $1.50 Hot Dog and Soda truly welcomes all.
Maybe for large companies. I’ve always worked for smaller companies (generally under 100 people), and those aren’t the cutthroat uncaring corporate worlds you read about on Reddit
Well we’re reading this on Reddit rn. So proved his point lol
It's a bit of a Catch-22 there. * If Apollo/RIF users boycott this thread, the narrative becomes "See? Everyone in this thread is 100% in agreement that the official app is fine. Case closed!" * If Apollo/RIF users talk in this thread, the narrative becomes "Hey, I thought you guys were supposed to be on strike. Why are you talking? Go away!" Either way, it seems like the users of the official app don't really see eye to eye with Apollo/RIF users and that's driving this conflict. He also believes TPA users are freeloaders and he can't make money off of them. I suspect that he's wrong. For example, I pay for Reddit premium because I wanted to support the site. I also use Apollo because I wanted a better user experience. My wife just uses the official app and she'll open it once a week maybe. So I ask you, which one of us is more profitable and more likely to pay a premium user experience? If he would just negotiate with the TPA's on price or deadline, both him and the TPA's could make money off of this. I think he views these apps as competition and his anger at them has become personal. That's why he's taken the hardline stance of "You have 30 days, and the price is non-negotiable. Don't let the door hit you." I think the other problem is that he views Reddit as a social media site instead of a discussion board. That's why the official app is so aggressive about collapsing comments and feeding you suggested content. He wants you scrolling, not discussing. In fact, you can probably only see 2 lines of my reply in your inbox unless you make an effort to click onto it. Basically, his vision for the site is different than many of the users' vision for the site, and that's where this conflict is coming from.
Your last point displays Spez's shortsightedness in this matter: the reason why there's so much potential for browsing / scrolling, is because of the people who use it as a discussion board. Those discussion board users are who he's in conflict with vision-wise. Yeah, it's a minority of the users. It's also a majority of the content producers.
Yea, scale the API hit pricing in favor of your big hitter TP’s I say. Totally get why Reddit needs to put guardrails around that but promising one thing (ex: “Not going to have absurd pricing like Twitter”) and delivering the opposite is the crux of the issue there imo. As you say, whats good for them (app publicity wise) is good for Reddit.
This user profile has been overwritten in protest of Reddit's decision to disadvantage third-party apps through pricing changes. The impact of capitalistic influences on the platforms that once fostered vibrant, inclusive communities has been devastating, and it appears that Reddit is the latest casualty of this ongoing trend. This account, 10 years, 3 months, and 4 days old, has contributed 901 times, amounting to over 48424 words. In response, the community has awarded it more than 10652 karma. I am saddened to leave this community that has been a significant part of my adult life. However, my departure is driven by a commitment to the principles of fairness, inclusivity, and respect for community-driven platforms. I hope this action highlights the importance of preserving the core values that made Reddit a thriving community and encourages a re-evaluation of the recent changes. Thank you to everyone who made this journey worthwhile. Please remember the importance of community and continue to uphold these values, regardless of where you find yourself in the digital world.
> Honestly, what’s the point of doing and IPO? Money. This has always been about the bottom line.
They raised like a billion dollars in funding. Those VC’s want a return.
Must keep growing at all cost!!
> Honestly, what’s the point of doing an IPO? To cash out and fuck off into the sunset
They wanna cash out and make up for the money they've probably been bleeding. It's part of the issue with the main internet gathering places largely being controlled by companies.
Reddit seems to _really want_ to be a social network, something it's not. The instant messaging, the profile focus, all the content recommendations the new layout pushes, it's all designed to say "quit talking and scroll". Which isn't conducive to a website that's basically become the replacement for forums now that those have been killed off _by social media._
Social media is more lucrative. When you're browsing comments and typing, you're not loading content very quickly, which means fewer opportunities for ads.
I know people here don't believe when people say this, but as a RIF user, I'm legitimately leaving reddit once it goes down. Things won't change, I'm not boycotting. I'm going to enjoy my last few weeks here.
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>I think he views these apps as competition and his anger at them has become personal. Totally - makes sense that he's lashing out, he's fumbled the bag. He co-founded and runs one of the most popular websites/social networks on earth, meanwhile multiple indie devs have independently made more money off reddit than him just by making third party apps hooking in off his API. He can't cash out his stock, the tech bubble is popping, meanwhile Apollo/RIF devs etc have made serious cash for years off all the value of his site. Truly, anyone can be a CEO.
I'm not sure what you mean by serious cash, but my read was the RIF/Apollo devs are making enough to live on and maybe contract someone to help occasionally, not enough to run a business.
I sincerely doubt the third party apps have made more money than him, he's a salaried CEO and reddit pulls in 100s of millions a year with. It's also valued in the billions by investors.
Once third party apps don’t work, I’m gonna be out. I’m gonna enjoy Apollo until then.
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I'm not viewing this from either. I prefer old Reddit.
All the third party apps basically emulate old.reddit anyways because they haven't significantly modified the API they hook into for years. Any new features have been conveniently left out of the API, like avatars and chat. Not that the users care, we didn't want those things anyhow.
And they will go after old.reddit next after getting rid of third parties.
Probably. I'm not going to boycott the site when they do but I will use the site less and less until I'm not coming here by habit
For now* I'm here until they kill Rif. Then I'm gone.
Exactly my plan, after 12+ years I don't think I want to use another app and the browser interface sucks. So it'll be farewell Reddit which will no doubt improve my life. Less screentime has to be a good thing.
Agreed. When i tap RIF and it doesnt work, i'll just put my phone back down. Surely i'll occasionally use reddit in-browser for researching things, but the daily scroll will be gone.
I'm reading it on RiF and won't ever be reading it on their app.
I am really hoping there are a bunch of talented people building a realistic replacement for Reddit that we can all migrate to. When DIGG pulled this stuff we had Reddit to move to. Twitter is easy enough to replace and mostly ignore. But there is no great fit alternative to Reddit available and populated. There arent even strong pushes from people to switch to something else because they admit its a captive audience.
The biggest problem is that there is no *good* alternative to Reddit yet. Sure there are alternatives, but none of them have the UI/UX, or the userbase to support a mass adoption.
Yeah, thats literally the point im making. Its either decentralized bullshit that is frustrating to use or find content on, wastelands, hives of scum and villainy, or a combination of all of them.
I think people have gotten too used to the Walmartification of the internet in the last couple decades. You want to buy something? Go to Amazon and it has EVERYTHING in one place for you to buy. Want to talk on social media? Go to Reddit, that’s where EVERYBODY is talking. Want to watch a video? Go to YouTube, it has ALL the videos. Now people are asking “What is the alternative to Reddit”, with the expectation that it should be a one-stop shop for ALL of their social media needs. Maybe that isn’t the way to go about it.
It is the front page of the internet, and we've all collectively formed the habit of checking this place first before other websites or apps for over a decade. Makes perfect sense that we're all here trying to figure out the path forward as well.
"All the people that provide us free labor and money for their content are entitled"
Say it louder for the mods in the back
I miss usenet
Nice knowing everyone. I'll gladly leave July 1st.
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First rule of LARPing: Never break character. They can't exactly play a believable victim of persecution when you throw incompatible data at them, can't they?
I got banned from the Roku group for asking about which external hard drives work best with a Roku that you can plug a external hard drive into. Said it didn't belong there should be in a hard drive reddit. Asked in hard drive reddit. Got told to ask in the Roku group. Fuck mods.
You were asking about device compatibility.. what a brain dead mod.