I just posted it elsewhere, but that’s only the beginning. They also announced their intent to turn reddit into an even more ad-infested hellhole than it already is: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/investing-in-what-makes-reddit-unique-introducing-contextual-keyword-targeting-and-product-ads
This is the future of reddit everyone - abandon all hope ye who clicketh here: https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/image2.gif
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable - Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO
Translation - we don’t have control of the 3PA and they are getting in the way of moooore profit, so we want them gone.
What a shitty job at astroturphing there.
"Won’t someone think of the corporations! The evil third party apps (that we admitted were less than 10% of our userbase) are (somehow) bankrupting us! They’re using so much API (even though our website uses at least 5x the API calls)
[Translation: There’s 10% of the people we could shove ads in front of who are getting around it and I want to sell this sucker so I can buy another vacation property]
They’re using so much API
I’m 100% convinced the reason they think 3PA API usage is unusually high per user is because all the high engagement users use 3PA, because their app actively repulses people from wanting to spend time on it. It seems like such a classic product misinterpretation of the stats, I’ve seen this from the inside as a developer before, ironically also at a company trying to IPO and failing spectacularly by completely misreading the room and their users
I hadn’t thought about this but it makes sense. It’s widely known that their largest contributors are 3PA users, I wonder if they did take the bias into account
IIRC they used some Reddit outage causing API usage to blow up on all platforms as some sort of anecdote toward 3PA API usage…
I’m 90% certain that this whole thing is due to to Reddit’s new marketing execs saying “we can’t run ads on third party apps”, and then deciding that third party apps need to pay up for their supposed “projected loss in ad revenue”.
It’s the piracy fallacy: “Somebody is using my service without giving ME profit, and so we’re gonna go into a self-destructive tantrum”. “Ignore the fact that nobody ever wanted to pay us for that anyways.”
We don’t need that kind of greed in control of our online communities, good riddance.
Something like reddit doesn’t long if it’s not profitable. He’s not in the same reality that we are
They love to get creative with the definition of “profitable”.
@artistan It’s funny in a way that 3PA manage to monetize their business better than they are themselves.
Instead of working with the 3PA devs to come up with something that is a win-win for both parties, they’ve chosen self-destruct.
Yeah I’m done having ads shoved in my face constantly. Corporations ruin everything and this was just the push I needed to remove one more attack vector from my life.
How hard if it to offer a nominally feed as free experience?
There seems to be a misconception by a lot of corporates that shoving ads down users throats will make the users want what is advertised.
Personally, I go out of my way to avoid anything that are shown to me intrusively.
The reality is that ads work. That’s why they even exist and companies pay so much for them. The safest way to not be influenced by them is to not see them.
Block them, skip them, use ad free media
Corporations haven’t been paying millions for superbowl ads on a misconception. Ads work. Obviously.
I think it just depends on how it is served. If it is something non-organic, like shoved in between every other post it would have a negative effect.
Superbowl ads work because people are willing to watch it. It’s part of the game and made to entertain. But when’s the last time you actually bought something advertised on the Superbowl ads?
I don’t think there are a lot of people that enjoys an ad on a YouTube video one minute and fifteen seconds into the video you are trying to watch.
Well I just spent the last hour deleting all my old Reddit posts from the last 7 years or so and then deleted the account.
I will be no part of this continued data mining and making money off users hand over fist, making billions of dollars from data and the actual data source gets nothing.
#ragequitreddit
I guess in your case it’s already too late anyway, but if someone else reads this: you don’t have to delete everything by hand. There are tools available like shreddit or Redact.
LMAO giving r/BuyItForLife as a good example of where to put ads.
I know, right? I hope BIFL will rip advertisers there a new one by suggesting alternatives.
It is already infested with covert ads posted as content, anyway.
Dang, after reading that, somehow I’m even more glad I overwrote all my past comments and posts with a protest message. You do not get to monetize my speech down to keyword targetting, reddit!
The way that’s written is so blatantly and shamelessly “all these people volunteer and provide an amazing service for free! :D look how much money we can make off this free labor without giving any of those volunteers a single cent, and while sabotaging the service!”
If you want to auto-overwrite your comments and posts, or just delete them, check out Power Delete Suite or Redact by June 30th, before the API change breaks these tools.
Even if the fediverse didn’t want to monetize on the userbase money are still needed to keep things running
No way. I don’t care if Lemmy doesn’t succeed I’m never going to tolerate that shit. I stopped using Twitter when they killed third party apps and forced even more ads into their piece of shit app.
Even if lemmy stays small I don’t care, the community is better here, the apps are open, I don’t see any ads, fuck Reddit, fuck spez, this is what a community should feel like.
And no ads for bags of fucking water either.
Agreed. Beyond just no ads because I go out of my way to block them on my network and devices its nice to browse new and be able to have discussions instead seeing complete shit posts or popular ones with 1,000+ replies already.
Replies like “This is so fucking stupid” with 50k upvotes.
That summarises the reddit commenting and karma experience for me, any comments I’ve made that blew up over 1k were just incredibly stupid comments.
I think that’s actually what I’m noticing most of all? like right off the bat the news/politics communities are actually talking instead of making puns and tweet length comments
almost like Reddit actively encourages blind rage for clicks
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Ya that sounds fkn horrible.
The sad thing is there’s a right way to do everything they want but this ain’t it. Spez is litterally digging a hole using the bricks he could be building with.
I would like to say that “future of reddit” image is really egregious, but I suppose its in line with other social media hell-holes.
The goggles, they do nothing.
Well Spez is a greedy little pig boy, so I’m not surprised
The bright side of all of this is finding out more about the Fediverse and how cool it is
Well ok then, fuck you and goodbye :D
That sounds a lot like what happened to Google with SEO getting abused. I almost always append “reddit” to the end of my Google searches to find actual answers and discussions, but now that’s going to be ruined too. I don’t understand how they’ve taken what’s so valuable about reddit, honest and real discussions and answers, and decided to do the opposite of that. It doesn’t even seem financially smart, it will just drive more people away from their site.
I wonder if uBlock Origin and other ad blocks will work against that crap. Not that I intend to use Reddit anymore anyway.
That is why they force you to use first party apps, ads in them can be almost impossible to block.
They’re free to shape Reddit as they see fit. Although I mourn the loss of the past states of Reddit, I’m also free to extract myself from that ecosystem.
Just goes to show that they were intending to kill 3PAs from the start.
That’s the only logical conclusion. Wouldn’t really make sense otherwise.
You would think that more users means more money for reddit. But I think that might be wrong. I can only assume that 3rd party apps make up a small portion of their daily active users (a metric they likely use to sell ad space). And 3rd party apps aren’t giving reddit any ad revenue. On top of that maintaining the API and support for 3rd party apps costs money. From a business perspective it probably makes a lot of sense to start charging for use.
Most of the 3PA devs has already said, they are not against paying for API usage, as long as it’s a reasonable price. The pricing Reddit wants is definitely to kill 3PA.
Yeah the calculation made by users, based on Reddit’s general estimates, was around $7.50 per user per month. In this case, a $10 per month subscription for every user would likely fully cover the API costs.
Judging by the “$20 million a year” calculation the Apollo dev made, Reddit’s charging around $1,666,666.66 per month.
Any 3PA would need over 222k users a month (with average-to-heavy usage) to justify that price. Ain’t no way any single 3PA has that many users.
From what I heard 20% of the userbase was using 3PA. Not an insignificant amount at all.
Note that these are just quotes from the disastrous AMA he held last week, not new comments that have been made.
“Hold on, dear investors! I’m confident that we can simply steer our ship straight through the middle of the massive iceberg!”
Ironically, had the titanic hit the iceberg straight on it probably would have survived. Swerving at the very last moment was what made it sink.
Be gone with your counterintuitive realism, getting in the way of an entertaining metaphor!
“There is no danger that Reddit will sink. The site is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the user bases.”
" The site is unsinkable. We’ve simply decided to spend some time underwater while we work out some tech issues. "
We’re sticking to the Fediverse as well so
I’m not going back despite reddit sticking with API changes.
I wasnt going back anyway, but now it’s an even easier decision!
At this point even if they run back their changes, I’m not going back.
and here i was, truly believing that they would reconsider. as of right now ~4000 of the planned 6600 subs have gone private, if that isn’t enough then oh well
Bear in mind this article is from a couple days ago right after the AMA happened and before subreddits started closing.
oh okay. so i guess its still to be decided then?
Yes. This isn’t breaking anything we didn’t know from the AMA and previous events.
And if nothing changes, I would imagine a new, possibly more severe protest to be organized.
I’m hoping that a lot of the subreddits that has gone dark would remain dark indefinitely. Granted, the Reddit admins might try to replace the mods on a lot of the subreddits - but at that point the community may not be the same anymore.
there are a few, such as r/196, but most are only doing it for 48 hours unfortunately.
r/witcher has gone dark until further notice as well. Granted, most of the content was stones with holes in it and moaning about the Netflix show, so nothing of value was really lost.
There (likely) won’t be any reconsideration. Reddit’s concern right now isn’t the health of its communities. They’re focused on taking the ball of data they’re sitting on and selling it to AI platforms while the AI gold rush is still happening.
I don’t think that makes sense as an explanation for killing off 3PA/API access. 3PAs would increase user base, and so collection of data, by virtue of providing more channels by which users can contribute and improving the experience for those people would likely increase their engagement. The mod tools that make use of the API would also help with curating that data, which increases its value to an AI consumer.
Cheap API access was letting the AI platforms pull Reddit data directly via API. That’s why the “fix” was making API access expensive, so that buying the data from Reddit instead becomes the more cost-effective solution.
Reddit’s not (as) worried about gathering more data to sell, they’re worried about selling the years of data they already have.
Make that 4500
It’s already over 5000!
theres a new one going private every like 5 seconds, and the list of how many are supposed to keeps growing. up to nearly 7k as of rn, so thats 400 more in the past 30 mins
I find this post at a moment when the show has already started (as can be seen on https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ and https://reddark.untone.uk/ )
But the article is 3 days old. It seems many did not expect that much unity from subreddits going dark. 2.5 billion affected subscribers is quite something!
I’m still in hopes they change their mind in light of recent events. Don’t think they will though.
2.5 billion affected *subscriptions
Many are overlapping people’s subscriptions of course.
Probably 95% of that is overlapping since one person being subbed to 20 participating subs is counted 20 times, and since some default and massive subs are participating there must be a ton of overlap.
Doesn’t matter.
Each user doesn’t visit reddit once.
I will be subscribed to more than one subreddit which means I will visit all of my subbed subs and thus reddit will lose all of these interactions.
They weathered the fatpeoplhate tantrum, I’m not really sure why anyone thinks a blackout would faze them.
That said I hope lemmy can grow into a mature social content aggregator.
Honestly, a 3 day, partial shutdown is less than 1% percent of their annual online time. The strike has got to last much longer imo
I am super happy about the subs going permanently dark
They’re just reporting on the AMA, they don’t know anything we don’t already know.
That article is terrible, incidentally. It didn’t cover what really happened with the Apollo dev and just parroted spez’s talking points as facts.
Also, fuck u/spez.
Just saw on Reddit there are 300+ subs going dark indefinitely. That is what needs to happen. Sure Reddit could come in and find new mods but damn might end up being a decent amount of work/chaos. They should screw up their automods and delete the backup logs. Still probably wouldn’t be that hard for an admin to rollback but still the more pain the better.
Who would they even find to moderate subs with substandard tools free of charge? Especially right on the heels of this fiasco. Maybe they’ll put some bots in charge and just allow pretty much unfiltered moderation in those subreddits.
It’s actually more like 8000+ at this point.
They really want the fediverse to grow. I appreciate their dedication to the cause.
My thoughts exactly.
What does reddit plan to do with all these communities going dark?
They should remain dark until changes are made. A strike with an end date is pointless.
Chatted with the moderator teams for the subs I am a part of. Two of them agreed we’ll go dark indefinitely, and we have joined in on that via ModCoord’s post.
The largest with just under 1m users is still thinking about it, but I’m fighting for it.
We need to push them where it hurts: active users for their ads to be used on.
Hopefully you don’t have any rogue mods. Apprently r/adviceanimals got the head mod replced by someone that seems to be more inline with the admins-reddit. (u/legweed -> u/CedarWolf)
If you really want to hit Reddit where it hurts: Shut down the subs forever, delete all posts and comments in said subs, put up a sticky post redirecting to Lemmy.
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Deleting everything without archiving is a pretty destructive thing tho, atleast archiving the comments in some other website would be better
