“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
I just commented on another similar article! His reasoning for this move contradicts itself! How can he claim that the overwhelming majority of users (97%) use the official Reddit app, but the use of 3rd party apps is destroying their bottom line? That means that that the lost profit from 3% of users are the reason for the API price change?
And… if there are only 4-5 big 3rd party apps (like Apollo, RIF), why force them out of the market? If only 3% of users use them, are they really that big of a deal? Why are the prices so astronomically high?
This is Reddit consolidating their empire. I hope that folks are prepared for future roll-outs of new subscriptions and reasons that Reddit users need to pay.
I’m honestly shocked the redditors are so blind to this. Do they actually think it’ll just be plain sailing from here on out?
Maybe in just to old skool and remember a time when Reddit would have really stood up.
It absolutely will not be plain sailing - I think that the protest is an early warning sign. People that stick to Reddit are going to be bombarded with ads, Premium features, and new programs after Reddit goes public.
I am an Apollo user until the end - I think that after having such a good experience under Christian, I forgot how scummy a big corporation can be. Times are changing - we just saw some similar things with Musk taking over twitter.
Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.
Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.
Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.
I think this is a better place than Reddit already. It’s fairly new and people are excited about creating content. But I think in reality, sooner or later every sub will be forced to open, and everything will go back to normal. Of course some of the users would’ve completely migrated to the Fediverse or other platforms, and it’s up to us whether the Fediverse survives or not.
Reddit felt like it was going downhill for a long time. I think I just started scrolling it out of habit, only participating in a few subs for hobbies and games. This shitshow was the kick in the ass I needed to shreddit and delete my account.
Also. I think more users need to do that. Make sure you shreddit your comments and posts so reddit can’t keep your content.
It’s been pretty bad for a while now.
I used to go to reddit to learn something new, to see the news for the day, to find a cool new hobby or interest, to read deep discussions about topics that I didn’t know that much about.
But that was like 8 or 9 years ago.
Lately the entire front page is doom bait, vaguely disguised racism, political trolling, violence, memes, and reposts.
I used to browse /r/all about half of the time and my subscribed subs the other half.
I muted serial reposters / content farmers whenever I noticed them, but this past year I hit a breaking point and I changed my default feed to subs only and intentionally chose to avoid /r/all.
Sucks that I’m going to lose my niche communities on reddit, but I’ve been a lot happier here so far.
Thats a great word for it. Doom bait. I hated being surrounded by pessimism on that site
Exactly. For guys like me who joined 16 years ago, it’s felt like a steady decline for a decade already. This is just a convenient time to jump to another platform because others will join me.
A switch flipped somewhere to whenever i logged onto reddit I would leave feeling worse. It’s for the best that I stopped using it i think
I agree. Everything was so much more depressing. Maybe it was the subs I subscribed to but I felt it was more than that.
Reddit got so big it’s now the default, the masses are always looking for the simple default option.
It makes so little sense to me. They could have charged a reasonable amount and made some money off of the apps, but instead, they chose to kill them and lose their users. Some might migrate to the official app, but this uproar may have caused even more to leave the platform entirely.
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
At this point this seems intentional. This has definitely pushed me away from Reddit and I’m already seeing a lot more meaningful conversations on Lemmy. All I ever saw on Reddit anyways is people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes. Took a lot of scrolling to even get to people actually talking about the topic.
Agree it’s intentional. Normies don’t care about any of this and will just follow the memes. Most of us here are the users that had ad blockers and probably didn’t care about giving gold.
Giving and receiving gold was surprisingly, one of my least favourite things. Someone gave me gold once and i felt beholden to say thank you? I didnt ask for it, i didnt comment in hopes of getting given “gold”. I never gave anyone else gold. Why would i give a shit about getting it myself? Its a fucking forum.
Reactions are common in lots of forums though, gold is just a special reaction.
A special upvote if you will, its not really that deep.Waste of money.
Reddit OTOH was a good place to discover other things organically (not the enshittification attempt “other people liked that sub” interjections). But the only thing I miss is a way to group my subscriptions.
Currently Lemmy is getting up to speed, and the discussion quality has already started to drop; we’ll see whether communities can police themselves.
people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes.
Here, have an upvote on me =D
Ramen, exactly 💯 this. Every time I wanted to see what commentary was on the post I would almost have to scroll to the bottom to get any talk about the actual post.
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What it is Spez? How can people who use third party apps simultaneously be only 3% of the user base (I realize you proved he’s wrong) and significant enough to ruin Reddit’s profitability? Cause if you’re going public and only three percent of your users can ruin Reddit’s profitability you’re in for a rough ride. Investors don’t like too much risk.
really went off the rails there lol. I could tell when you mentioned Snowden/Assange.
you don’t think it’s nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?
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It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.
Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site… Huffman acknowledged that if those users instead browsed with Reddit’s own app, it would shore up the company’s bottom line.
Ok how the hell does 3% of users shore up the bottom line of Reddit. Something is extremely fishy.
Playing devils advocate, I suppose some companies have an extremely tight window where they rely on that last 3% after costs…I believe grocery stores operate like this…but reddit is not a food store, and I don’t know wth I’m talking about. (:
Don’t get me wrong, reddit has been the worst for about 10-12 years now and keeps getting worse every year, but as long as we’re talking about this mysterious 3%.
How much traffic does that 3% account for? That’s the real metric. I assume it’s more than the avg user.
Also, what is an avg user? Someone that just wants a crowd-sourced opinion once a month is not. Is it someone that just looks at the front page and moves on? Does the avg user post? Do they lurk? Surely they’re not mods.
I realize all these questions are moot, as reddit has been utter garbage since a little before fatpeoplehate got taken down.
I don’t have a MBA, but that seems… off.
It’s expensive to run a company that constant wastes resources and is trying to grow beyond what it is.
I liked it better when they had one kind of Reddit Gold and displayed a progress bar on the homepage showing what percentage of daily operating costs were covered.
It’s the same reason people don’t show their pateron monthly incomes, they don’t want people knowing how much money and potentially saying to themselves wow 3x daily cost? Seems I don’t need to give money.
Yeah I get that, but I don’t respect it. I show my Patreon income even when it gets large enough that people might think twice. That’s their choice.
Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!
It’s one of the most visited websites and I don’t see that changing when 2% is leaving the platform
This is why the fediverse is so great. It really is really expensive to run a social media company. By spreading the cost over many actors and encouraging competition, this allows us to host content without being beholden to billionares.
*Chinese billionaires
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I am asking this in full earnestness: is any critique of the Chinese government assumed to be rooted in xenophobia?
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I feel that maybe you’re reading my question as ‘critique of China is inherently support for the west/US/etc’ which I absolutely do not mean. I think that it’s possible that painting all critique with a broad ‘xenophobia’ brush (while undoubtedly warranted at times) can prevent discussion in good faith.
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I think he’s referring to how Reddit used to operate on Tencent funding.
Tencent is partially owned by the Chinese government.Removed by mod
It’s well known and accepted that the Chinese government has significant control of Chinese companies, and Reddit is partially owned by Tencent. That’s not xenophobic.
The fact that it’s something like a 5% stake is more relevant.
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“a literal US military arm” is just as ridiculous. It’s neither.
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And you think there aren’t Russian and Chinese propagandists on Reddit?
pro-US imperialist propaganda
Right. Like all those school kids getting shot.
Sentence 1: Really, only 3 percent of users are pissed about this; It’s insignificant.
Sentence 2: These disruptions from 3rd party app supporters really hurt our bottom line. This is expensive!
Maximum cope
I enjoy how he’s still talking about this as if it’s purely about having 3rd party apps pay a fee, not about his incredibly piss-poor handling of it.
The irony is that at the fee they are charging, there is very little useful application for the API. So I doubt they will make much, if any, money from it. So they are just enraging and driving away their user base for a plan which won’t work anyway. Unless the API was just costing them so much server time that they are getting massive cost reductions by closing it.
I know right? I have no problem with a fee existing. It’s the ridiculously high fee, and the complete BS he tried to feed everyone that really drive me away. It’s only going to get worse. I hope lemmy gets big enough
I’m actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I’m sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn’t been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There’s a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
It’s been boosting discovery of fediverse and causing an explosion of both traffic and hopefully donations.
it’s expensive to run a company
well, congratulations - its your lucky day, steve! lemmy is here to relieve you of that onerous obligation. now don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Underrated comment. The best revenge is living well, and if we grow lemmy or any other fediverse communities, that‘s what we are doing.
😂 fuck u/spez
I like the Fediverse and I think I’ll stay.
Yes, it is. So charge a reasonable API price and this whole argument is over.
But that won’t happen. This is about monetizing Reddit’s content ASAP before Spez resigns ASAP with a nice big, bonus for pushing through those beautiful API changes oh so smoothly.
The more Spez speaks, the less sad I am about Reddit dying. Platforms come and go. There’s loads of Internet corners to discuss my hobbies. I don’t want to stay on a sinking ship with a hole shot out by the captain because he has ship insurance, actively throwing people off board as him and his crew climb up the still buoyant part whilst insisting THIS WILL BLOW OVER. I’m not going down with the Titanic of community boards as it sinks. It’ll die in infamy and I don’t feel like drowning alongside it.
However, I will now thoroughly enjoy watching Spez naively, single-handedly dismantle Reddit’s legacy for short term gain whilst thinking he’s being a super duper smart businessman we couldn’t possibly understand. Or possibly being a forced fallguy for share holder decisions which he has a choice in avoiding by quitting.
I’ve never in all my years of Internet browsing seen someone running an Internet-based company so blatantly indifferent to the customers they serve. There’s no Reddit revenue without Redditors.
I wish him luck on his inevitably piss-poor IPO when Reddit offers little content of value and more people get more angry at him as more ridiculous reasoning flies out of his mouth. Reddit’s gonna look like MSN News by the end of this mess.
It’s probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.
I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.
It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.
We can only hope.
