The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
For me, no matter what Reddit is dead. Lemmy is enough for my time wasting and has enough content that I have not missed it one bit. I feel like the communities are smaller, less toxic, and I want to contribute more here. They could completely reverse their decision and I will not return and I hope there are enough like me to make a difference. It just amazes me a site that exists to link to other content on the web and store text comments about said content isn’t profitable.
Lemmy is also ad free. Love that.
I’m always astounded at how few people use ad blockers. Fuck the entire ad-based system, it is cancer.
The whole internet can be ad free if you want it to be… even from your phone.
Any instance or community can include paid content, but the numbers are still a bit low for that now.
Thing is, if there was in instance or community doing ads, I now can simly block, mute or defederate them. With reddit I had to use an adblocker, scriptblocker and the reddit enhancement suite to be adfree. And I could not be sure it’d stay that way.
The only whiff I got of anything money-related that’s not a donation drive for hosting costs is a post by an artist asking whether there’s instances ok with them posting links to their patreon alongside their artwork.
…and when it comes to hosting I think things will continue to be donation-run as even 1/1000th of users making comparatively small, regular donations cover costs for the rest. There’s always going to be enough people willing to throw in a fiver a month.
I don’t see that continuing over time. There is no way that donations alone can sustain major servers as they see growth over time. You’re also going to get to a point where a server’s admin switches from being a hobby to a job.
There aren’t that many websites that can run on donations alone.
Unless you have a huge red banner across the top of your screen like Wikipedia lol
Well the decentralized nature of the Fediverse helps spread out the cost. For example you can rent a VPS (virtual private server) for like ten or twenty dollars a month and throw a Lemmy instance on it. That’s where many Lemmy instances are currently living. There’s your own time involved in maintaining the instance, but the cost should remain pretty stable.
Conversely, a centralized service where all users have to be supported by an individual or company owned cluster of machines can get very expensive. I can’t imagine the operating costs for a site like YouTube with the demand for data storage and bandwidth.
The cost gets spread out, but not completely. You are also going to run into problems if an instance takes off.
The costs are manageable now, but is that sustainable?
Well I think it depends on the balance of growth between nodes and users. If growth of users and growth of instances is proportional, it should be sustainable.
That leaves the question of how well Fediverse software can deal with increasing node numbers. I hope that engineering question has been properly considered. It’s like the available number of IP addresses when they initially designed TCP/IP, they never considered four octets might not be enough for future growth.
For now, but this isn’t going to be sustainable.
For potentially large communities or a large enough group of related small communities, it can be. A core of people could spin up their own server off their own back and/or through donations. Communities exist this way outside of reddit already, this would just be a way to tap into a common interface and interoperability that federation provides. Or is there some centralised thing that means that no matter what someone might impose restrictions?
But not video and maybe limited images to keep costs in check. Maybe video hosting through unlisted youtube videos if that doesn’t get curbed.
Same here. Reddit had me going only on inertia for the past few years. Whether they revert their API lalala doesn’t matter - the communities are broken and I don’t feel like getting up again.
And even if through some divine intervention they manage to repair the communities, I’m like… eh. I went to sit over here now and it’s comfy.
At the end of the day, they treat their volunteers and users with disrespect too. The value in reddit isn’t from spaz, but rather from the users. Yet Spaz is pretending the services are why people use it.
In fact, I almost wonder if spaz is purposely trying to kill reddit, or whether he’s just another narcissist who genuinely believes reddit doesn’t need users
If they allowed RiF to continue, I’d still use it. I’ll pop over on certain subreddits occasionally after July 1st. But I’m enjoying various lemmy instances right now, especially Beehaw.
I’m with you friend. I’ve used Reddit daily since it practically opened. Sure the people who don’t care might stick around but the people who really loved Reddit are scorned and I have zero reason to go back to someone after they already backstabbed them the first time.
Im pretty close to this as well. I think if they did a 180, and like, showed an ACTUAL attempt to right the ship, I would consider going back via Apollo.
But that said, I’ve been using Lemmy this week, and out of curiosity I’ve been comparing it with my reddit feed at the end of the day, and yeah. I really haven’t missed out on anything important.
I mostly used Reddit as a way to waste time, or get info on the latest big things, like all the Trump stuff for example, and Lemmy is doing just fine getting me that kind of info.
I’m currently refusing to visit Reddit on principle. If Reddit relented, I would stop actively avoiding them, but I would not go back to it as a primary social outlet.
Lemmy is filling that void for me nicely. My only complaint is some bugs and lacking features, but that will get ironed out as Lemmy matures. Being wholly community driven is a hugely more solid foundation. And yeah, no ads. I see them rarely anyway because I mainly use a browser with an adblocker, but it’s good to know there’s no profit motivation for the Fediverse and never will be.
Right now it looks like it’s a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article’s title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren’t clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
Or it becomes mostly unmoderated, near a major election, at the same time as twitter turns into disinfo central.
I burned my account to the ground and sent them a GDPR request.
This will happen no matter what.
I think we’re gonna see another huge blow to Reddit in a few days when all the third-party apps go permanently offline. I’ll bet that a lot of people who haven’t been paying attention so far are definitely going to start having something to say about it very soon.
I’ll bet that a lot of people who haven’t been paying attention
At least Apollo put up a huge honking alert dialog about the situation, it was impossible to miss.
Maybe, I’m certainly in that camp. Once RIF stops working I’ll stop using Reddit. I don’t know that there are a lot of people like me though (and the ones that are are probably here already).
When RiF dies, I’ll stop using reddit on mobile.
I’ll probably check-in occationally when I’m on desktop, but that’ll signifigantly reduce my time on the site.
I’ve already stopped using reddit altogether on my phone. I moved Apollo off my homescreen.
And I still check reddit on desktop here and there, but that’s mostly to check mod messages. And to see what that latest admins are threatening me with. I got 3 small subs that are private. And reddit doesn’t like that.
This will be when the true test for Reddit begins; if the outcry is large enough that spez ends up relenting in some way then he will have already alienated a lot of users. If the outcry is minimal then I guess he won, but the prize hardly seems worth the drama that has been spun up.
It isn’t going to be outcry, it is going to be drop in traffic. Spez is gambling that third party app users will switch to the official app. I won’t, and I hope most others don’t.
Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
I, for one, just signed up on this website specifically so I can leave reddit
Why isn’t Lemmy viable?
Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
- After going through the list of servers, I had to pick one of them. As someone who went through that whole situation with XMPP, I know that this alone is enough to make most people turn away.
- Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
- Since the page told me that if I didn’t hear anything back after 24h, I could consider my application rejected, I wrote another account application at feddit.de after waiting for about 48h.
- The feddit.de account was approved, but I only noticed by my login working a few days later. I didn’t get any notification. That’s what I’m using right now.
- After more than a week, I got an email that my beehaw application was accepted.
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
Bro this is a skill issue
To reiterate what I said in the last paragraph;
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
That’s not true from a technical point of view. A remote subscriber is way more expensive than a local one, so on the technical side it’s better when everyone signs up on the server where most of their communities are.
Not everyone is a writer.
You misinterpreted what the application form is for. I have accounts on 3 instances (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org and lemmy.one) and for each of them my application message was “came from reddit.” It’s just a way for them to reduce abusive signups; even with that, 2/3 of those instances don’t even require email verification. It literally takes 10 seconds to sign up and somehow you spent 86400 of them.
I’d just like to say sorry for the experience you’ve had with Beehaw, we’re trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it’s been a really hard time… We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there’s about 2k left)
Maybe change the wording on the site to say one week to assume rejection, not 24h.
Or you can just figure that out from the fact they are swamped? This constant need for instant satisfaction is unreasonable to expect from others.
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
It was not difficult for me to sign up. I had to give some moments of thought to each step except the form application which I gave a couple moments of thought. I was kind of glad it wasn’t instant-simple because I’d prefer thinking people be here.
That prolly sounds smackish but it’s just my directness. I really didn’t have any problems.
I was kind of glad it wasn’t instant-simple because I’d prefer thinking people be here.
The thing with federation is, that this isn’t really the result. The application for the server I got in was way easier, it was “convince me that you’re not a robot”.
The text field itself isn’t even that big of a problem IMO, it’s the delay of several days. Most people will have forgotten about it by then.
All of this is fairly reasonable for the kind of project it is. Sounds like you and those users don’t understand what signing up at any site really means and you’ve been so separated by the front end, you be have no ability to show grace when basically using a website for free hosted and manages by free people what takes money donated by others?
Why is this anyone else’s fault but you? You’ve gotten spoiled. Maybe everything isn’t for you if you cannot even do the bare minimum to participate?
How do you think I came to be here if I wouldn’t be able to do the bare minimum?
I’m very well aware of how it all works on the technical side, but the basic problem is that social networks only work when there’s a large network of people connected to each other. If you’re satisfied with the maybe hundred people that are active in this community that’s great, but the whole discussion in this thread is about why Reddit can’t be replaced by Lemmy.
I’m not trying to be judgemental about the process itself, I’m just saying that all of the points I made are dealbreakers for the question of Reddit replacement.
It’s obviously not Reddit numbers, but been a lot of posts about how much lemmy/etc have grown in the last week, largely due to the Reddit fallout.
Clearly it’s not going to replace Reddit overnight, but it’s made large strides very suddenly, and can def close that gap over time. Especially for people like me who enjoyed Reddit, but were just browsers, not really power users
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn’t even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they’re 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
Not all of them use the application process, many are just captcha plus email. Then Beehaw is failing to send confirmation emails.
The sign up process has to incorporate security to protect the Lemmy federation from spambots and other exploitation. Yeah it’s a hassle, but it’s not there to annoy people, rather to provide the best possible user experience. But still an application is something that can dissuade a potential user. That’s why many don’t use one.
Beehaw is one of the most heavily laden instances probably second only to the originating lemmy.ml instance. An overloaded instance can result in hangs and sluggish performance. Also true for one with high latency such as one located overseas.
It’s true the chore of finding a good instance can dissuade some people. If you don’t know any better and sign up on a bad instance it can unfairly soil your opinion of the whole Lemmy federation.
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
I disagree that there are not enough people here. Beehaw is busy enough for act as a reddit replacement imo. The federation setup is complex, but given how many bugs and technical issues it has right now, it’s probably for the best - only people with patience and a lot of interest in Lemmy should be joining right now.
and why isnt it easy? (to op). It took me less time to sign up for lemmy than it did for reddit back in the day and I’ve had no issues at all. Some confusing back end stuff and relearning all the formatting for urls and etc but it’s no more complicated than reddit was to first get into.
It’s not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won’t spend the time to figure it out.
Depends, on what you call winning.
Sure, he will get his way. He will make his changes.
But- I do believe the original goals were profit-motivated.
I’d be willing to bet- the mass exodus of users, is going to hamper his plans pretty significantly.
I think we’ll see a exodus of experienced mods. Maybe even older (account age), more active users. I doubt we’ll see a mass exodus of general users. The site is too big. Even if a million people left, there are still millions more.
Yeah an exodus of mods and more active users will hurt, but not enough to kill the site anytime soon. The site culture will change because of this, but the site culture is always changing. Reddit’s not the same as it was 5yrs ago or 10yrs ago. Not saying it was better back then, just different.
If there’s anything I’ve learned about social media users – AKA everyone – it’s that people don’t usually care too much about the platform and the company behind it, as long as content is entertaining. That they can keep consuming.
TikTok is the perfect example: the Chinese govt is potentially get all that user data. It’s concerning enough that other governments have or are considering banning it. Have people left en masse? Nope. My coworkers still share TikTok videos all the time.
Or how about Facebook and Co.? Facebook has made all sorts of terrible UI changes over the years. That people got angry over. Hell, it’s sold user data without user consent. It pumped out enough fake news that it swung an election! It’s still probably the largest social media platform in the world.
Or about about Twitter? I’ll admit, I’m still on Twitter as a lurker. And my feed is still just as active as it ever was. There’s no mass exodus, even with that crazy CEO at the helm.
YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.
While I’ve been on reddit for nearly 13yrs, I didn’t come from Digg. So I don’t know why people did leave wholesale for reddit. But I’m starting to think that that was an outlier. And there is something to be said about Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok not really having good alternatives. Twitter does with Mastodon, but it’s still nowhere near Twitter’s userbase.
I don’t know how much Beehaw and the Lemmyverse as a whole has grown in the last month, but something tells me it’s still orders of magnitude smaller than reddit. I’m on Tildes – which does have a restrictive registration policy – and it’s only grown by about 7000 new users in the last ~3 weeks.
I think this could be the beginning of the end of reddit. But it’s still way too soon to tell and any results would be far off. It could also be nothing like Spez says. And historically, a massive social media platform dying off hasn’t really happened unless the company pulled the plug themselves (Google+). Or it’s Digg.
I think the content creators who have a lot of the technical information that reddit has been used for, moving off site, it’s at least going to become a cesspool.
Is Twitter a success now, as it is? Is money with no reputation or morality, success? Facebook is still around, but arguably is is successful, useful, and relevant?
You have lots of very good points here.
I suppose in the end, the only real change will be- perhaps the quality of content goes down.
Or- maybe us that came over here to lemmyland will just be reddit’s competition now.
YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.
Don’t get me started on YouTube. lol. They have drove away a lot of the content I used to enjoy seeing.
It looks like it is going to be a pyrrhic victory for Spez. You’re right in that we don’t know the knock-on effects of this decision, including if Reddit can get long time users to jump to the official app and if moderators will continue volunteering time.
I suspect a lot of subs are now going to create contingency plans for leaving Reddit, even if they don’t implement them.
The time frame up to the IPO (I don’t know how that timing works) seems to be what is critical. Right now Reddit has been unprofitable. The CEO took on massive new levels of expenses via staffing with no real plan (or it didn’t work?) for how to pay for those expenses. This bad faith “negotiation” on API seems aimed at… I guess trading 3rd party utility and to some extent the community for the ability to sell data to AI industry?
I guess we will see but pick a time frame and none of it looks good for Reddit.
There has already been a relatively large population that has left the site (myself included) in a short amount of time. I doubt the rate will stay that high, but even though, integrating over time I see this is as the beginning of the end for Reddit and spez. The guy is a greedy jackass and I hope he loses it all.
A Pyrrhic victory. If he loses a large portion of his moderators, the whole platform will turn to shit. The whole thing was held together by passionate people in key places. Remove and replace with paid goons and the whole site suffers.
This article has so many inaccuracies… I haven’t talked with a single person that thinks Reddit shouldn’t charge for api access. And the final comment about being legally obligated to pursue profit is just factually incorrect. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
You can find plenty of other sources just like that one saying the same thing. I’m pretty sick of this myth, because it gives all these companies a bogeyman to hide behind.
This point struck me too:
Reddit is under no obligation to make its API free. But, it seems, the company has overreached in enforcing the new policy. If its target is the largest AI firms, then it should focus on curbing their parasitic proclivities and not going after beloved and useful software its users and moderators depend on.
This is my feeling. I understand that it could cost something. But the eye-watering rates for the small fish and the speed of the extortion is the issue.
Reddit knows the rates it proposed are extortionist. They don’t have the nerve to honestly state that 3rd party access will be stopped from July 1 and accept responsibility, so instead they tried to find a way to blame 3rd parties.
Because the point isn’t the costs of the API. Reddit wants all its users to go through the official access points, the Reddit app and the redesigned web. This will allow them to hover the maximum data to sell and ensure ads flow.
They should’ve just been effing upfront about it instead of trying to scapegoat API creators. Did they think users are too dense to understand what they were/are really up to?
Have corporations always been this dishonest and they’re only know getting caught? Am I old enough to see when a corporation is lying, or are corporations blatantly lying more often now?
Think of it as killing two birds with one stone: they monetize users by getting AI firms to pay for all the valuable content redditors have posted over the years, and they kill off app competitors who are giving redditors alternatives to the mobile app.
That’s really all it’s about.
AI firms will just scrape anyway.
Which, somewhat hilariously, will be more resource intensive than the API. It’s a part of the reason why companies have APIs, to dissuade scraping.
Hrmm, I wonder who would benefit from perpetrating such a myth
I didn’t originally think that reddit shouldn’t charge at all for API access, but after spez’s recent interviews I wouldn’t go back to the site without a promise that API access will be free forever. Is that reasonable? No, but fuck spez.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders, and after announcing his plans to purchase Twitter for the inflated price Elon couldn’t back out due to the same threat however I am open to the idea that I could of been misled on that situation.
As for the why of a myth like that circulating I doubt its due to malice and more due to misunderstanding as Ive always understood that any wording made on a legal case could be used as precedent. It could also fit well with people rationalizing why companies seek record profits while underpaying workers for their labor.
If anyone could clarify the Twitter situation without sucking off elon it would be appreciated
The rule is that a corporation is primarily organized for the benefit of shareholders, but it’s not exclusively organized for only that purpose, and the corporation has no obligation to maximize the benefit for shareholders today versus tomorrow, in cash versus in future equity, in certain profit versus uncertain risks, etc. So the company can choose to pay out dividends to shareholders, or reinvest profits back into the company. It can give money to charity to improve public goodwill, and it can give bonuses to non-shareholder employees to keep things running smoothly, and shareholders can’t sue that their money is going to non-shareholders.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders,
The article actually talks about that specific scenario, in the Revlon case. If a company is going private and buying out its shareholders, then there’s not an ongoing set of broad interests to balance. The shareholders are being forced to give up their shares in exchange for cash, so if that transaction is going to go through, the corporation has an obligation to maximize the price for those shareholders. There’s no today versus tomorrow, dividend versus reinvestment, etc., because that one transaction distills everything down into money for shares.
With the Twitter case, it’s a bit in between the two: were the Twitter shareholders better off between taking the cash for shares today, or declining the cash to keep the company and see if that is better for them in the long term? The directors were obligated to negotiate a deal and submit that deal to a shareholder vote. So if the shareholders decide “hey this is a good deal for us,” then that pretty much simplifies the question into a clear answer, rather than a complicated set of countervailing interests of uncertain weight.
You’re right. Would you recommend I take the post down?
no haha, I like the title. and it started a good conversation! leave it up! hopefully people read the comments though :D
Fuck u/spez
(That was missing from this post.)
They did say he’s “the Kmart version of Elon Musk” which I thought was quite funny.
wish.com version, of elon musk!
Fuck u/spez and fuck reddit’ board of directors.
Reddit ceo Steve Huffman is an idiot, and also a massive prick.
It’s his site. He will always win. Fuck him and greedy capitalists fucks like him.
PS: Enjoy Lemmy
Dickbutt is here?
It’s official. Lemmy is the new it place to be.
I mean he always has the power to strongarm everyone else.
But the consequence is giant boycotts and decay. Idk if winning is the right word. It’s like going to war and declaring a win because both nations are destroyed.
It hasn’t been his site since 2006, that’s when u/spez & Ohanian sold reddit to Conde Nast. rn, u/spez is only an employee in reddit.
Wasn’t lemmy created by tankies? Avoided it for kbin (I’m aware of the federation) due to this.
And Reddit has been backed by Tencent - CCP supporters by default - and Peter Thiel - a white supremacists and actual, literal fascist.
The politics of the people behind for-profit endeavours that the public has no actual control over regardless of stake seemingly never comes up. The politics of people behind things that challenge for-profit endeavours and gives control of things back to the public is often under the microscope.
We don’t know ernest’s politics. What if it came out tomorrow that he was an anarchist? Or that he was also a Leninist? Or was a white supremacist? Or that he liked Nickelback?
Or that he liked Nickelback?
I’ll see past many things, but Nickelback?
Not even once.
When I see people say what you’re saying, I know that they don’t have a basic handle on how the Fediverse or Lemmy works.
They developed the platform and currently run Lemmy.ml. The whole point of federation is that they cant control other instances.
You’re safe from the big bad scary communists on Lemmy.
You’re safe from the big bad scary communists on Lemmy.
Kbin.social doesn’t defederate lemmy.ml, so either way we’re playing by their “don’t say Uyghur genocide because we don’t think it’s real and we will ban you based on that belief” rules if we accidentally stumble into there.
This is where I would like to see individual-level instance blocking so that it doesn’t show up in the home feed, same as how I can block everything that pops up in a language I don’t speak.
Edit: Turns out we have that! Just found another thread showing how. On kbin, it’s possible to view entire instances separately, and there’s a “block” button similar to individual magazines/communities/users. To see lemmy.ml, the link would be
https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.ml
but replacing the lemmy.ml part with any instance should take people to that instance just the same.
I’m glad you found a solution!
Kbin.social doesn’t defederate lemmy.ml
Again, kbin.social is just one instance of kbin. Go find another if it doesn’t suit you. See https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
Lemmy the software vs lemmy.ml the server.
And Thomas Edison electrocuted animals to death. Yet we still use lightbulbs.
Doesn’t matter since they don’t and also can’t retain control over the network, and the network by and large all defederated lemmygrad.
Lemmy kinda belongs to its users now.
Lemmy kinda belongs to its users now.
Not until its users actually start developing Lemmy the software.
I mean they are?
You can host an instance, and if the instance is doing something you don’t like, you can certainly change it and prevent it from doing it. If the main Lemmy devs put stuff in most people don’t like, the software will just get forked, and most instances will use the non-shitty version.
Lemmy is what the majority of users want it to be, since everyone can just start a competing site that’s not suffering from the “outside-the-walled-garden” effect, with a different featureset. Users will move to the instance with the best featureset for themselves.
It’s open source so who cares
It doesn’t really matter who created it. If you’re using an instance not hosted by by creators, then they can’t in any way benefit from it. That’s the beauty of federation.
Feels like Spez won’t be taking this one to the chin. Let’s just see how deep the ship will sink with its captain.
I don’t think the ship is doomed yet but they’re definitely in ‘what is that ominous noise coming from the bilge’ territory. To carry on the analogy they’ll plug the leaks as best they can and try and make it to the safe harbour of the IPO (where she can sink at her mooring for all Spez cares) which they could still well do, but it’s also likely the captain and his officers being half-baked sons of lubberly farts will smash into several reefs on the way and sink their already damaged vessel.
I mean, Digg is still around. It didn’t go under, it just lost a huge chunk of users, which is Reddit’s most likely fate.
I think that is what counts as sinking for a large social media site nowadays. They’re technically still alive but they’re empty husks of their former selves and will never return to their heydays.
Judging by the recent less big brand advertising, I think he was trying to shore up the IPO but failed. At the very least Reddit is still alive but it’s going to be valued less.
Didn’t Reddit already drop at least 40% in valuation from when they started the IPO process a year or so ago?
Yes, but almost all ad-based business models in tech fell, too. There’s less advertising money on the internet today than in 2022 or 2021, so investors are more skeptical in business models that primarily rely on internet ad revenue.
Throw in the fact that Reddit’s advertising platform is actually difficult to use and not particularly effective, and you have the problem where Reddit simply can’t charge the same rates that Facebook and Google can. That’s what’s going to kill the site, when advertisers decide it’s just not worth advertising on that platform.
How platforms die aka enshittification : First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
sauce : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I do fee so much better now that reddit is dead to me. I check lemmy few times a week.
Remember the house always wins. We can play at our casinos today thanks to fediverse.
I’m curious why this is classified as “losing battle”… seems pretty successful so far to me.
Only if you define mods winning as ‘things go back to what they were’.
The CEO is only ‘winning’ in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.
His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His ‘victory’ will be pyrrhic at beast.
Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they’re locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).
We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it’s not ours. The space isn’t in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.
Well, what’s happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they’ll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.
Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don’t need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.
Huffman will still have most of Reddit’s chickens, and that’s why he thinks it’s worth it. But the hens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who’ll produce nothing for him other than noise.
Mods are losing… but so is he.
agreed but i woudnt call it won just yet lets see what happens after the 3rd party apps stop working and people who may not have been paying attention get affected
Dude runs one of the world’s most popular websites and he can’t turn a profit with 20 years of free content and free labor.
You tell me who’s the fucking loser…
Battle’s not over until the third party apps go offline. That’s when the real damage is bound to start.
In what way? Reddit’s outlook was a lot brighter before this thing started. Maybe they’re not losing as fast as one would like but they are losing.
Reddit still has hundreds of millions of active users per month. They may have lost some people, but this many eyeballs has a huge potential for profit.
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. We’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. In the long term we’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
Those are just users numbers, which didn’t dip all that much even during the blackout. The doomscrollers will keep coming until it sucks.
We love to see :3
reminding me I need to manage to archive my data off reddit. XD And ready the kill script on June 30ths to delete my posts.
