• Sun-Spider@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.

  • lhx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s not that you’re charging for API access; it’s that you’re charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.

    • Naja Kaouthia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?

      • Balthazar@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Main reason why I’m gonna try and stick it out with Lemmy.

        Hard to corporate greed a decentralised system :D

    • berkeleyblue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This! I’m happy to pay more for my Apollo Ultra Subscribtion, but their prices aren’t based in reality, they have the only purpose of driving 3rd Party Apps out of business. And then they also wanna limit NSFW content to the official App and nothing else, that’s affecting a lot of Subs I’m in (a ton more if I count my throwaway porn account) It’s just ridiculous.

  • penguin_ex_machina@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, “yeah, this is fine.”

    EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It’s still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)

    • NotYourSocialWorker@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we’re going black for two days. They should’ve just says “were going black until you cange the rules again”.

      • Spacebar@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.

        Reddit’s traffic might not recover for a while.

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          1 year ago

          Of course it’s up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it’s any other day. If I wouldn’t have known subreddits went private (and they didn’t sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I’ll just see posts from subreddits who don’t participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.

          The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It’s not easy and I think Reddit knows it.

          • Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Is this for real? I wonder if different people’s r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There’s like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I’ve never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.

            • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there’s indeed not much going on.

      • AustralianSimon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what’s going on.

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      There are, apparently, 2.8 million subreddits. About 8,000 are dark, meaning that’s just over one quarter of one percent of subreddits. Even with some of the largest subs participating, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no massive dip in traffic. There are enough subs still open with enough mass appeal that most people will just look at some other subs for a few days. And I’ll be honest, even though I’ve made an account both here and on kbin, I know I’ll still use old.reddit (with RES and an adblocker at least) most of the time, simply because I doubt any of the subs I actively look at will do any meaningful migration that would lead to a similar level of discussion.

      • KnowLimits@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hmm, 2.8 million subreddits, but how many are ghost towns? I wonder if anyone has a measurement in terms of monthly active users or something along those lines.

      • orclev@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Of all the subs I was subscribed to, there were I want to say only about 10 that didn’t take part in the blackout. I unsubscribed to all of them. I am now subscribed to only subs that either took part in the blackout, or in one case one that opted to remain public (due to the nature of its contents) but is blocking all submissions for the next couple days.

        For me, once RIF stops working, reddit will be dead to me. I will never install their official app, and 99% of the time I’m on reddit is on mobile. I have no doubt that old reddits days are numbered as well and that was the remaining 1%.

        • Tango@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          IDK, he said in the AMA that old reddit isn’t going anywhere, and even if he’s lying I don’t think he would immediately do a 180 and kill it. The way I see it, it will probably be around for the foreseeable future.

      • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Reading comment above yours i dont think the 2.8million is correct and it also states that there are only 100,000 subreddits with over 125 subscribers and only 34,000 with more tham 1000 subs. Of the roughly 8000 subreddits that went dark there are someof the biggests subscriber counts woth some having millions of subscribers. I think based on that that its actually quite a hefty number.

        • Tango@lemmy.world
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          It’s also worth noting that many of those massive subs, especially the default subs, have lots of overlap in subscribers. r/funny with 50 million and r/aww with 30 million does not necessarily equal 80 million people because there are millions, probably even tens of millions, of people who are subbed to both.

        • Tango@lemmy.world
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          Yeah, it’s kinda crazy. I support the blackout but deep down I know nothing of substance will come of it. Their dip in traffic is probably not much worse than when a major city loses power.

    • Max@lemmy.world
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      There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)

      There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.

      Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that’s currently dark so I can’t give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.

      • Nogami@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Why would anyone even want the job as a moderator on a dying site that’s going to be filled with trolls and spam? Heck, you’d be better-off just getting a job at McDonalds. At least that pays.

        • softhat@lemmy.world
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          Indeed - I think they’ll manage to find mods but the quality is certainly going to leave something to be desired.

        • unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org
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          In every situation in real life where there is a corrupt person on the brink of losing their position of power, there are dozens of people silently ready to give up their morals to be the next anointed person of power in that position.

          The next moderators will be the ones who innately want the new Reddit to succeed. I imagine the newly chosen moderators of the largest communities are those power users/top posters who have been wanting to be a mod for a long time. Here is their chance. They will be given free Premium Reddit and have no problem with ads because they won’t see them.

          This streamlining of the mods is great for business – you don’t have competing narratives and you still have people doing cheap or almost free labor. It’s a thinning of the herd.

          Reddit replacing the rebellious mods with complicit mods is going to happen, and it will be good for investors. They want to drive out the unmarketable moderators and users. They want a unified, top-down Reddit to feed information to consumers. No discord, no discussion, no possibility to have a controversial thread or topic accidentally associated with your brand. Total consumption.

          The ads currently target people who eat at Taco Bell and worship Jesus (yes, one ad was really trying to get me to subscribe to a service that teaches me the “real” type of love that Jesus preached). This is the 100 billion dollar valuation Reddit that will exist in five years, and it will be successful.

          And honestly, fuck /u/spez, but we would all let our personal Reddits die if it meant billionaire status and guaranteed generational wealth for our progeny for the next quarter of a millennium.

          • qprimed
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            1 year ago

            dark, but totally on point.

            edit to say: this is why, in my mind, we have very few oportunities left to create alternatives and capture a non-trivial number of hands, eyeballs and minds. this is one of those opportunities.

        • ZappySnap@lemmy.world
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          I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let’s be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I’m sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy’s active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit’s monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is ‘dying’, Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it’s a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)

          Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it’s going to be a couple years off.

  • Overcast@lemmy.world
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    Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable

    It’s their own fault. They didn’t have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn’t have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.

    They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.

    I’m really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants

    • Hypersapien@lemmy.world
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      There’s this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can’t just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.

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      This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren’t. The scale of the two businesses is not the same… none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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        But Reddit doesn’t need these thousands of employees, they’re already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that’s way too open and won’t turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.

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            As someone who’s 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there’s definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there’s too many people who don’t seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.

            On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I’m getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career

    • Corhen@lemmy.world
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      and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.

      But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.

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        And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.

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      They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.

      THIS!

      Here’s your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.

      Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.

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      They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.

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      This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.

      • mst
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        This. Steady growth is basically considered to be failure when greedy investors want ridiculous returns on their money every single year. The “infinite growth” of any company is just so delusional.

      • macracanthorhynchus@mander.xyz
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        I’ve seen people saying “Lemmy can never replace reddit because the instances won’t be able to afford to host video!” …My dudes, I have never once asked my forum / social media site to host videos.

  • Aer@lemmy.world
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    Of course they aren’t going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.

    My expectation… Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a “we did everything we could” and then go back, business as usual.

    I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.

    • 0485@lemmy.worldOP
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      I’m team Apollo. When Apollo goes I’ll go.

      It’s Lemmy for me from now on!

      It’s been a good 10 years with Reddit but it’s time to be the bigger person and step away from toxicity.

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        I feel so bad for Christian. He’s been an absolute role model in handling this—calm demeanor, transparent communication and willingness to compromise (which Reddit obviously doesn’t have).

        He’s put so much work into Apollo and stayed composed so far during the shutdown process. What scares me for him is the risk of refunds now: whoever subscribed to a premium tier can have the purchase refunded since he won’t be able to provide the service. I hope not too many will go the refund route.

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          A lot of people claim that they bought the premium tier even after the announcement in API changes to support him, despite 3P apps shutting down in 3 weeks. I feel like most users will be supportive and not refund, myself included (Sync pro)

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      I think you’re probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don’t see another viable alternative.

      But I’m hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.

      • Aer@lemmy.world
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        Perfectly valid reason to do so, everyone needs a place to recover. Those who need reddit as a lifeline shouldn’t lose that. Be well friend!

      • Ozma_of_Oz@lemmy.world
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        I relate to this, I am in a number of support groups on Reddit. I ended up just making the knitting community here because I didn’t know what I was doing and now I’m a mod. I really want to set up a c/stopdrinking community here but that’s a mod role I am not willing to take on.

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        I think there is a huge difference from going to a specific sub that doesn’t have equivalents and just browsing aimlessly. The aimlessly browsing is where they get the real juicy user data on what people engage with.

        Fuck em.

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          I agree with you. I’m OK with keeping one foot in reddit just for that sub, but it would feel wrong to use the wider site.

    • lhx@lemmy.world
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      This is me. If I can’t use Apollo or Narehal, Reddit is dead to me except when web search sends me to a Reddit thread.

  • Ɀeus@lemmy.world
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    somebody else pointed this out, but it’s honestly bizarre he’s going in on the “we aren’t making any money” ploy in preparation for the ipo

    what’s the pitch to the investors? “please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase”?

    • TeaHands@lemmy.world
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      “We’re not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds.”

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        Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.

        Cats -> 🥰 News -> 🤔 Injustice -> 😡 Helping others -> 🤗 Cool gadgets -> 🤯

        No thinking just liking

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          This is exactly why I don’t like traditional social media. Doom scrolling + validation fishing + content designed to illicit a response (good or bad), is a no for me fam. Reddit desperately wants to be one of those, and it’s clear as day, and for that reason, I’m out.

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      In Reddit’s defense (I’m team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable. It’s weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he’s had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it’s clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.

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        Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would’ve made more off those users than if they’d moved to the official app.

        Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.

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          The reason Reddit doesn’t want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.

          • taj@lemmy.world
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            Yup. I get it too. ‘We’ll lock down and get rid of the 3rd party apps, just give us a couple of months.’

      • PierreKanazawa@fedia.io
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        I’m also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.

      • Lemming@lemmy.world
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        That’s the reason why I edited all my posts/comments and deleted them afterwards. Also requested all my data with a GDPR form, will also request deletion it they don’t budge

    • MachineTeaching@feddit.de
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      It’s not actually about the money in that sense. Don’t be fooled.

      No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That’s the real investor pitch, they just aren’t saying it out loud.

      If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?

      If it’s about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can’t possibly be met? Why don’t they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?

      They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can’t pay.

    • chrundle@lemmy.world
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      I thought companies going into an IPO are often unprofitable/losing money, but still attract investments in the hope of future profits.

  • Tangent@lemmy.world
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    Well Steve, it’s not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you’ll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that’ll be leaving.

  • kinther@lemmy.world
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    They really should have just found out what the 3rd party apps -COULD PAY-. If it covered the cost of their usage and there was some profit on the top, it would at least bring in some money. Based on what I read by the Apollo dev, there was back and forth communication about pricing for a while until he broke the news.

    It astounds me that they chose to cut them off entirely by offering impossible pricing. Isn’t some money better than no money?

    • Rhabuko@feddit.de
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      It’s because the planned IPO. Allowing third party apps, that are better designed, show no ads and don’t collect the same amount of telemetry data (seriously the official app spies constantly for user data), doesn’t look good in the eyes of potential investors.

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        Also, the API feed doesn’t push ads, so 3rd party ads don’t have anything to show. Reddit should have redesigned their API so ads could get pushed out.

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      Idk I use relay and he thinks he can do it for 3 dollars a month, but that’s still giving into reddit. I’d rather then switch and start making Lemmy apps, or adapt their app over, might be unreasonable but just a thought

      • Risk@lemmy.world
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        3 dollars a month for a lesser experience, mind. What with reddit stopping access to NSFW/explicit stuff via non-official apps.

        But honestly, even if my app of choice - Sync - could do it, I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us. The whole thing stinks of the slow slide of social media into the gutter. Happened with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit is no different.

        Federated social media might take a little while to take off, but it will be so much less toxic and much more enjoyable without the ever expanding need of a corporation to deliver more and more profit at the expense of the user.

        • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I’m not about to pay a corporation for content generated for free by us

          That’s actually a good point. I don’t mind paying for access to an app, since it costs money to maintain, but our posts draw people into the site to read advice, news, and funny stuff. If Reddit is going full-monetization, there should at least be some payment for… upvotes? Views?

          • viimeinen@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.

            • Yankeebobo@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              This. For those that understand that standing up the infrastructure costs money, I don’t think paying a reasonable price would be out of the realm. Even the Apollo dev was stating that API should not be free, but reasonable.

              • MightBeAlpharius@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.

                For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.

                For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.

            • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.works
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              Right, but the content is also what draws people in. Not just the infrastructure. So if some of that money made its way back to mods and top posters then they would be feeding the community instead of charging them for the content that brings in more viewers.

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      They are over-valuing the content that the users generate, and under-valuing the value the mods generate.

      They also don’t think that anyone will actually jump ship.

      The only value ANY of these social media sites have (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, whatever) is that they already have users there. None of those sites are worth anything without the people bringing content.

    • ultimate_question@lemmy.world
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      Others have speculated that the API pricing model is built around customers who want to use the data for AI training, not customers who want to build apps for public use. The $20M price tag is what they’re hoping a mega corp will pay for data access and don’t care about anyone who can’t afford that much. Some money is better than no money, but for a lot of people the “chance” at BIG money is better than some money lol

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        If this is the case, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just separate into tiers, where mass data usage to feed into a language model is priced differently than people legitimately using and contributing content to the site.

        • ultimate_question@lemmy.world
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          they still have a lot to gain by killing the 3rd party apps and forcing the remaining users to the platform that will benefit their valuation the most. the pricing is to court the big whales to sell data to and the forcing people to use the native app is to improve the quality of the data they want to sell.

          • 777
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            Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.

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          I think it’s simply that they want to funnel all of their users to official channels. All of this “discussion” is a poorly veiled attempt at public justification. 30 days notice at the quoted price tag was very intentional. My hope is that Reddit seriously miscalculated the amount of damage this would cause. My suspicion is that /u/spez doesn’t care and is willing to nuke the site for a one-time payout at maximum valuation.

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      The folks at Reddit seams not have done proper research regarding ongoing situation, will all parties influence etc. Then just decided on their own. Their actions, is like they are s private company. Organization culture. But Soon they have an ipo? Will definitely crash in the market.

  • Hypersapien@lemmy.world
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    Digg used to be king. People abandoned it in droves when they went a step too far and there was an alternative. Reddit is not immune to the same thing happening to them.

    • Bowen@lemmy.world
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      The irony is reddit was that alternative to Digg.

      You’d think Huffman would have the wherewithal to realize that no king rules forever.

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        He’s too into himself to think people would leave… Yet here we are… Over here and not there

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            Keep in mind this was decades ago, ancient history to many. They bought Alien Blue almost ten years ago, when today’s new adults were in third grade. I think he’s counting on us forgetting, as if the enormous momentum Reddit has generated is due to his leadership and not two decades of user and mod curation, half of which without an official mobile app.

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      The problem is that Reddit is much bigger than Digg ever was. They are entrenched. Getting people to switch will be difficult when all we have to offer is ”Its like Reddit but way more of a clusterfuck.”

      Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?

      That’s the biggest problem that I see for Lemmy’s future. We should be asking ourselves ”What can we do that other platforms cannot?” We cannot survive if we’re just a clone of Reddit.

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        Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?

        To be honest, I (as a techy myself) thought the same when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. Once I realized that most of the big instances are already federated anyway and that I can see all their posts when I browse All, my doubts were gone. It’s really not that much of a hurdle, even for non tech savvy people.

      • Cuddly Cactus@lemmy.world
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        Give us “normies” a little credit. I’m not technical minded AT ALL and I’m still willing to stick around and figure out how this shit works. Do I understand it? Hardly. Does the app I’m using (Jerboa) work? Barely. (Although today’s new release has improved it greatly, thanks guys!). But I’m still floundering around here and it’s a bit frustrating. I’m still going to give it a go though. I’m confident that improvements will come that make it easier here for everyone like me that uses the internet a lot but doesn’t really understand the internet that much.

        But maybe I’m just willing to stick it out because I was only looking for an excuse to leave Reddit and the means to do so. I admit I don’t really care about the recent debacle, I just miss the old Reddit of 10-15 years ago and I don’t like what it’s become (a place full of memes, TikTok videos, dumb jokes, and hardly any real conversation anymore). It took this most recent fiasco for people to start talking about alternatives and that’s when I finally learned about the fediverse and made the move. It has been a lot easier to leave when I knew where I could go.

        • 777
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          Precisely, you don’t have to be deeply technical to understand this, you just have to be willing to put in a little bit of work.

          I also found it a little complex and daunting at first as it was my first contact with the fedirverse, and I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start.

          We’ll make it a great place to be, and other people will see the benefits and put in the same work too.

        • Senicar
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          A techbro shitheap where the confidently incorrect huff each other’s farts all day.

        • 777
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          Hacker News, a link aggregator similar to oldschool reddit before subreddits were introduced. I find it often has some interesting discussions but it’s not for everybody.

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        User education will be key. Let’s face it, old time “Redditors” will look at the simplicity of creating an account, and looking at sub-reddits and say “I’m too old to learn a new way. This is too much”.
        The seniors won’t leave, and the younger who don’t follow basic tech will be in the same boat. Just look around some of the subs there - they are entrenched.

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    “We are not profitable”

    Says the one who wants the money of 3rd party developers.

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        Not at all. Most tech startups (if not all) are unprofitable at IPO. Plus they have to make their finances public, so it’s not something that was a secret before.