“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”
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If it wasn’t hurting them they wouldn’t be doing damage control.
- Spez wouldn’t be doing (awful) interviews (going so far as to praise Elon Musk)
- They wouldn’t be publishing whitewashed versions of history
- They wouldn’t be changing the rules to silence dissent
- They wouldn’t be plotting to overthrow protesting mods to install compliant ones
- They wouldn’t be lying about trying to work with devs
- They wouldn’t be preventing people from deleting their old comments/posts
- They wouldn’t be forcing subreddits to reopen
- They wouldn’t be advertising on Facebook for new advertisers
- They wouldn’t be trying to smear Apollo’s developer
- They wouldn’t be posting propaganda notices on new reddit’s homepage
- They wouldn’t be censoring discussion about alternatives like Lemmy and kbin
It’s working, keep it up.
They wouldn’t be lying about trying to work with devs
Its fascinating watching him keep digging. He bullshits, gets caught out, so he bullshits about a different dev. Rinse. Repeat.
Thanks I’ve been trying to fill in those claims with links so this one is great :)
It’s seriously hilarious that the “damage control” has been more damaging than the blackout itself
Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community
Honestly I think every time spez says something stupid it convinces another wave of Redditors to check out Lemmy
I would have checked out Tildes as well if it wasn’t invite only
The exit didn’t start with the API announcement, just gained steam. What’s truly baffling is that Reddit seems to want data on where users’ final straw is.
Who knew the best “celebrity” endorsement for the fediverse comes from the CEO of Reddit…
Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.
They could have even gotten third party apps to pay for API access. They just needed to set a fair rate and a workable timeline for the change.
Instead, they said “we’re charging $20 million starting next month. Good luck trying to stay afloat with those sudden costs!”
Reddit could have increased their profits and kept users/moderators happy, but they chose Burn It All Down instead.
I don’t usually fault companies for messing up if they own up to their mistakes and make it right. Everyone is going to make mistakes and things will go wrong at times. It’s how a company handles events when everything goes sideways that shows whether they are good or bad.
In Reddit’s case, they could have acknowledged that their API plans were too aggressive and overpriced. They could have paused any API pricing changes and worked with third party developers to come to a solution where Reddit is paid, but third party developers don’t have to shut down due to immediate and insanely high costs being demanded. Everyone could have walked away benefiting and Reddit’s reputation (in my eyes) would have been intact. I’d likely be posting there right now instead of here on Lemmy.
Instead, Reddit decided to double and triple down. Their CEO decided to accuse the developer of Apollo of threatening Reddit and, when phone call audio proved this was a lie, blamed the developer for “leaking personal phone calls.” Then, that same CEO claimed that the API was never meant for third party apps (ignoring and trying to rewrite history) and said that any moderators who kept their subreddits blacked out would be replaced. All while claiming that the moderators should rest easy because Reddit would definitely provide tool themselves to replace lost third party tools despite no sign of this happening and trust being totally shattered. (And so much more that I’m not including because this comment is too long already.)
So Reddit messing up? That could have been forgiven had they done the right thing afterwards. But now, after completely botching the response? I hope Reddit withers away to nothing and the CEO’s IPO dreams die on the vine.
They wouldn’t be posting propaganda notices on new reddit’s homepage
I want to know more about this, i haven’t heard of this yet.
This appears at the top of the page until you dismiss it (at least for me): https://i.imgur.com/Uo3t2TI.jpg
Here’s what it links to: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
Yesterday they were linking to some much more blatant propaganda/history whitewash, here’s the link: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
I got a bunch of that propaganda the other day even when signing in on old.reddit.
Corrected headline: The Reddit API Cash Grab is Breaking Reddit
True! Put the blame on the one’s that earned it
Not trying to sound like La Palice but in all the articles and posts about this issue, they seem to miss the core of what is making users mad (the mods fight is different, although in the same direction, but solvable).
The thing to the user who’s generating content and not only swiping their finger is: they don’t want to experience Reddit as other users experience Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. They follow issues, not people. If you get in the middle of this relationship between the anonymous user and their discussion on an issue, with your tricks to track them, to show them your promoted content, etc. you’ll be told to fuck off.
There’s nothing to improve in the Reddit Official App. Everybody hates the principles it’s created on, much ahead of the poor design choices and lack of features. That’s what’s being taken from us, by hijacking third-party apps: the possibility to focus strictly on what’s being discussed.
“Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”
I’m looking at you too, Netflix.
stares at capitalism
Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public
Correction: Reddit’s plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.
Glad it is doing something.
What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).
The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.
Except that it already has been. They’ve already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.
They didn’t pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It’s no great loss.
Fidelity dropping reddit’s valuation by ~40% made me go “oh boy that’s bad news” when I saw it at the start of the month.
Imagine thinking you’re cashing out at 10 billion and now you’re only getting 6. The horror.
I honestly can’t believe he’s being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as “landed gentry” and users’ concerns as “noise” - those are literally the people that have created this “valuable dataset” he’s coveting so greedily.
That’s why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.
I hope Redditors don’t cave and cease protesting, clearly it’s working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.
I haven’t been on since the 10th and I was on it near constantly before that. If reddit sync isn’t going to be around 10 days from now then I have no plans to use the site anything like I used to. I literally have no desire to learn their crappy app and lose the curated experience I had set up for myself. The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.
The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.
Same, though you could possibly find some non Reddit answers to your questions
I went back on briefly today for the first time to:
-
Make sure I had read all my replies.
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Check the Boost subreddit to confirm it was going dark at the end of the month. (There was an update so I was wondering if there was some hope of it saying online.)
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Check is the two subreddits I actually still care about are closed. (One is. Another isn’t.)
I didn’t read any posts (except in the Boost subreddit to confirm that it was being shut down) and definitely didn’t comment or post anything. After that brief check in, I’m not going back for some time.
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I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they’re doing this now because they’ve run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won’t be noticed in a month.
Look, I am happy as long as there are enough people on lemmy and kbin to have a fun website here. I can go and visit reddit now and then to see what kind of stuff they’re upvoting, that’s not a problem. But I want the potentially better alternatives to grow.
Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It’s simply “If I’m a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!”
Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn’t mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.
I think that is true that most people will not leave reddit. I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore. It definitely feels like a niche thing, but I think it’s okay. Reddit won’t last forever, and in the meantime, we can be seeing if fediverse is the way forward. This isn’t the first time reddit screwed up and it won’t be the last.
They’re also I think trying to become like tiktok and give lots of forever scrollable content, but I think tiktok/youtube shorts already fill that niche
I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore.
I imagine that’s because they all jumped ship already.
When the “vocal minority” are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.
Power users maybe, but the last days have shown how little spine some mods have. The moment Reddit threatens to kick them as a mod they tuck their tail and say “We we’re all in until they threatened to take out mod positions. This sub now goes back to normal because there’s no world where we get removed as mods.”
On the one hand, this does seem to be a case of spinelessness. On the other hand, having mods who are aware of the protest and also in on it is better than having them replaced. All the subs going the way of malicious compliance (ie wellthatsucks turning into a vaccum cleaner subreddit) will need mods who are in on the protest.
I didn’t mean mods of subs that opened and continued to protest through malicious compliance. I mean subs like /r/livestreamfails or /r/pcgaming that opened and returned to normal like nothing happened. The mods of those subs were willing to protest only until their mod status was threatened, and then they backed down immediately.
