The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.
I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
I totally agree. I’m on Android and never used Apollo, but I’m using the wefwef web app and it’s fantastic. People are saying it feels like Apollo!
wefwef is changing my mind about how good webapps can be. The UI is a copy of Apollo but the execution in web tech is absolutely top notch.
Try
phanpy.localphanpy.social for Mastodon! It blew my mind on how well designed, fast and efficient it is. It’s better than the Mastodon local apps - at least on the basic functions.Do you mean phanpy.social?
I did! Thank you.
Same, I just miss some of the interest based communities I was in, but they’re growing well on Lemmy right now. Optimistic for the future.
For real. Even though my groups on lemmy are smaller, they’re made up of more dedicated people that participate in discussion alot more. So it’s all great for me!
I was an early adopter of Reddit back during the digg days and I had over a decade of post history there and to see that go… I couldn’t care less. It was all ephemeral bullshit.
16 years and almost 300K comment karma here…
Same here. Liking Lemmy like I liked Reddit at the beginning.
The only thing that had me back on Reddit was searching for something on DDG and getting 99% Reddit results. I see why they are un-deleting people’s comments and posts when they close their accounts. Hopefully other forums take those spots.
That explains why I kept trying to purge my history and having some posts keep popping back up.
Get yourself banned. I don’t think they restore content of banned accounts.
Well said. Couldn’t agree more.
At the end of the day, Reddit is just a message board. The absolute hubris to think that one could seriously go public with a message board website… It’s baffling.
Honestly, Reddit missed the ship to IPO. They should have done it a decade ago if at all.
Without mods, Reddit will become overrun with bots, rendering the precious data Reddit so desparately tries to monetize practically useless.
I mod a small/mid size sub that is still blacked out. Should I leave it private or just let it get overrun with spam?
Sell promoted posts directly, admins have made it abundantly clear they’re in it for money over community, get your cheddar too.
Oh, that’s harsh but fair
You don’t owe reddit anything.
Burn it
Shift the community to lemmy and write a pinned post on reddit about the change.
Request members to delete their reddit post.
That would have been a lot easier before the API change. Not sure if that’s an easy task anymore (pegging old content)
I’m a mod over on r/NoahGetTheBoat and I haven’t even opened reddit more than a couple times since Apollo died.
WE made the content. The community. No doubt the majority of level-headed folk would have accepted ad requirements in 3rd party apps. Hosting isn’t free, something needs to be monetized.
But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about locking down content from the new wave of AI models and charging for it. Charging for content we created freely to be shared.
Ads? No, I would not accept ads. What I would have accepted was a subscription payment. Hell, I went so far as to purchase Apollo lifetime ultimate.
I am more than willing to support things I use. I am not willing to deal with ads though. Especially when they sneak in like they are posts, and take up entire scroll widths.
I don’t get how people put up with that either. My wife said that we were being over dramatic about the 3rd Party Apps protests, but will agree that the ads are annoying. Hopefully she’ll convert over here before to long and get a taste for how a message board should be.
Stockholmed into thinking ads are acceptable. They’re not. No social contract says that you have to put up with ads, they’re simply unregulated in the USA and people have mostly given up.
Reddit ads are way too intrusive and irrelevant.
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Yeah and it’s not like you wouldn’t understand that Reddit would 2-tier its API so that paying Reddit users can get served ad-less experiences while non-paying need to see ads for your app to use the API. That’s not even that uncommon from what I interact with at work.
I don’t understand why the CEO thinks this is some 4D business move. This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets. There must be records and archives proving that it is unwise to treat a community as negatively as it has … because it’s too easy for internet folk to just up and move to a new place of interest. Time is wrought with soo many examples:
For those of you who are ancient, there were the bad days of AOL and Yahoo, and then time moved on with ideas like social networks and board systems like 4chan. But how did they not know? Just look at what is in store for future Reddit by heading to the front page of Digg.
For one, I mean, look at this sad, sad, sad thing! Further, have you wandered to see Myspace… not sure who that audience is, but hey, to each their own. Hell, I can assure you that most of us only keep FB to keep some contact with family and old friends. I suppose the root of what I am saying is
I doubt spez cares about reddit. He cares about money. If he has to throw the site under a bus to make some more money he will gladly do it
If investors have any memory at all though, they aren’t going to give him tons of money, because he triggered the Reddit collapse before he sold out.
The Online Ad Game is not a long one. It’s about getting people to show up to your site when the ad is shown. No one is paying Reddit to grow brand recognition.
IPOs are all pump and dumps. No exceptions.
I worked at reddit during the Digg transition. We all were amazed at how utterly tone-deaf Digg was, how they had already taken some of their problematic features (higher karma users votes being stronger, votes being public, etc) to the extreme (letting companies literally purchase front-page space that wasn’t marked as an ad, etc).
Fast forward 12 years and reddit is somehow upping the ante and being even worse. At least Digg 4 ran well on the browsers of the time. new.reddit can kick up the CPU on an M2 Max fully loaded with RAM
This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets.
Some of us were there when Digg died, ended up on Reddit. This whole scenario is not feeling too different. I think it’ll take a little longer, the IPO might be the real catalyst, or the monetisation and cannibalisation of the platform that comes from new owners afterwards. But it’s going to come.
Reddit sat for a very long time in the shadow of Digg until it made its final blunder. Lemmy’s communities will do the same, a dual-power in the wings waiting for a catalyst to come.
I was there and felt the same way about digg. My accounts on these platforms are not connected to my real life so I don’t care about abandoning them.
But I’m really excited about Lemmy because it’s not just a new site, it’s a protocol and standard so no one instance can control it all and you can switch instances without being locked out of the platform.
Lemmy has a different kind of potential compared to Mastodon and some of the other fediverse projects too. In my opinion Twitter’s rise was created by corporations and media jumping on board with it. It was directly promoted in the media promoting hashtags and the like for the things they were doing. The issue is that these corporate entities and their supporters in the media won’t jump on board with Mastodon as it’s an anti-corporate project.
Lemmy on the other hand? A platform for communities? Communities existed before reddit in the form of forums and it was reddit that disrupted that market, killing off forums. There is no requirement for corporate involvement in the success of Lemmy and communities can emerge and succeed entirely on their own. As long as people dual-use it for long enough for reddit to repeatedly create catalysts that send users here there is an inevitable future.
In the meantime it’s very important for people to make it good here on its own merit.
Out of all the platforms to leave, leaving Reddit was ridiculously easy. There’s zero lock in. I don’t care about preserving my post history. My account is not connected to my real life. My conversations were with strangers. Deleting my account meant nothing to me and I was using Reddit since the very beginning.
It’s not like Facebook where some events are only there and there are some people I can only contact there, and it’s not like email where I have all my accounts connected to it and all my contacts have that address. Reddit had literally zero lock in for me. I’m not missing it one bit. Lemmy has fulfilled everything I got from Reddit. Only issues is that it’s unstable from all the new load but so was Reddit when I first switched to that.
The hardest part of leaving reddit is the niche communities it fostered. If you could think of a topic there’s probably a fairly active subreddit (or two) following it. But that existed before reddit in the form of BBBs and lemmy looks to have a great path to recreate that.
The only thing reddit has ATM is users. Losing them is a huge blow to their value.
Omg I just popped into dig for 10 seconds and it’s so bad.
I was an avid user of yahoo chats. Those were my peak ‘get influenced by strangers’ period. Was 10 or something in those and on basic neopets. Yup we move on.
I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn’t another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.
I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)
They had no lockin. Other social networks are connected to your real identity and real life friends and connections. Or they have content creators that you could only find on their platform. Reddit had neither. Leaving it was the easiest thing ever.
Of the places I’ve been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn’t just in the software but also in the community.
Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I’m trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.
The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.
Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.
reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.
the content is the people. that’s the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they’ll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you’re just a dick.
i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn’t a word. let’s make it a word.
The thing is, they COULD’VE monetized it and still kept it alive. What they’re doing instead is killing the golden goose for a quick cash-out.
Edit: I hate your username. A lot of trauma associated with that failed tongue-twister.
As crappy as it would be, charging users a couple bucks a month for ad free and the ability to use third party apps would probably have been the best move they could make.
It’s not defederated it’s federated and decentralized
oops. don’t drink and post, y’all.
I’ve hoped for decentralizing a lot of stuff over the years and every time the clunky nature prevented them from taking off.
Sadly, until there were centralized spaces the average person didn’t really get into the internet when it was IRC chats and disconnected forums.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
I’m glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don’t care. It’s a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can’t take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.
Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.
I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.
Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
I can’t wait for Slide for Lemmy. Always loved that app!
But it’s awesome to see so many developers already working on stuff for Lemmy. It’s simply bonkers to me that reddit looked at all these people who created so much for them and basically told them to go fuck themselves.
I have accounts on a bunch of instances, just in case the traffic takes some down.
Sorry, another newbie here, what’s the point of having accounts on different instances? Can’t I post on any instance with the same account?
Where did you see an announcement about RIF for Lemmy? That’s awesome!
As far as I know, talklittle is focused on making a Tildes app called Three Cheers for now, and had been working it even before the announcement from Reddit. As much as it would be nice to have a Lemmy successor to RIF, the closest we’ll probably get any time soon is an app that’s just inspired by the RIF design.
Thanks for the info!
I was apprehensive of moving over to Lemmy, but I’m starting to get the feel of the fediverse and finally made the switch over.
I think the community can grow over time. It honestly feels like early Reddit, I’m quite enjoying Lemmy!
While I want to it be a little bit busier, I’m pleased that we’re not at the low-effort comment point e.g. every other comment being a pun or a shitpost or “this”
“Came here to say this”
^^^ THIS X 10000000 xDDD
🤣
I’m old enough to remember the Eternal September on Usenet when AOL allowed their users to access it and there was a huge influx of people just posting “me too,” often in replies to replies to replies to replies of someone saying “me too.”
Let’s hope Lemmy never reaches that level.
Actually, I like the small community vibe of Lemmy. It’s the dead sub vibe I have a problem with. There are lots of really interesting communities, but you don’t see people posting anything yet.
I like a lot of the tiny vibe but I miss girl Reddit. It was such a unique social media atmosphere and I haven’t managed to find it here. I hope more of the women from Reddit come here
I miss GirlGamers, honestly. It was such a refreshing perspective compared to the constantly angry/circlejerky dudebro vibe of 90% of gaming communities
Took a long time for that to become a thing.
It’ll come here though for sure. I think most people are trying to filter into whatever communities exist right now to get a feel of how federation works but once everyone has a decent idea I think you’ll see an explosion of communities.
Are you looking for more girly communities? Maybe consider starting one if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo’s perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don’t seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut “unnecessary expenses”.
It’s worth mentioning the article said prior to the blackout ads saw ~14,500 clicks so they’re currently down 40-50%
That’s significant, and it doesn’t surprise me. Even if I wanted to keep using reddit, the content has taken a nose-dive and the mood sucks now, so I bet people have cut their usage down.
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it’s nice to see!
So they really are following Twitter’s example. Twitter’s lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It’s stunning how stupid companies can be.
Just noticed today that Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts. It’s like these two platforms are competing on which one can destroy their reputation first.
Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts
I’m actually kinda liking this. Maybe it’ll encourage people to stop reposting “Tweets”. Folks need to think about Twitter the way most of us think about Digg: Rarely.
Same here because of a Lemmy post. Truly 2023 is the year of rapid enshittification for the large websites that have dominated the internet for the past decade or so.
Google right there alongside, going from useful results to sponsored ads and replacing the useful basic sections in their nav bar (i.e. “News”) to whatever random categories their algorithm thinks fit your query.
Honestly, I’m worried that people will be put off by extra level of complexity but I really hope the fediverse takes off, this feels like the only part of the internet moving the right direction at the moment.
My 2¢
Lemmy will never be ‘reddit’. The simple act of having to choose an instance (and taking the time to understand instances + how they interact with one another, something even I’m not crystal clear on) is not something your average Joe Schmo will be willing to spend the time on. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc are all one massive endlessly scrolling feeds of ‘content’ whereas lemmy asks you to dedicate your account to one instance. You can make another account of course, but even the process of choosing an instance will be enough to stifle growth and keep lemmy smaller in the long run, in my estimation.
Wether that’s a good or bad thing depends on how you view the internet and what you want from it, to me it’s a little of both because I bet I won’t see any of the niche communities I subbed to on reddit pop up here for a good long while (ex a community for the model of car I own, smaller videogames, hobby work, etc). But also it means that there will be less low-effort content - theoretically. You win some you lose some, I’m interested to see the state of both Reddit and Lemmy in a year from now.
Also hey its my first comment ever
People have had no problem choosing email providers.
A few dominant servers will emerge, just like with Gmail, and there may even be an ebb and flow of what the dominant ones are (remember @aol emails?). But it seems to already be hitting the magical critical mass of adoption. Will be interesting to see if it continues
I agree that the extra step of having to choose an instance is a hurdle that will turn some people away. In my own experience with it I had to apply to the first one I tried to join (never got a reply), had a timeout on the second one, and didn’t successfully create an account until my third attempt. That’s more effort than some would be willing to put forth.
However I really don’t think the confusing nature of the Fediverse is that big of a deal. I don’t think I understand it at all, and it doesn’t seem like I need to for now. Download Jerboa, make account, switch feed from ‘Local’ to ‘All’, and oh look it’s basically my RIF experience again.
Over and over on Reddit I saw people say “Lemmy will never take off because it’s too confusing for average users,” but I just don’t think that’s the case.
Also hey it’s also my first comment ever
Yeah this shit is easy. I made an account and also use jerboa. No problem.
Sure it will put off some users, but those are the lowest effort type of users anyway. I think most people who were online enough to be heavy reddit posters will not have much of an issue grasping how Lemmy works
It needs everyone to be part of it. I’m no idiot (arguably), but I still don’t quite get why I need an account for Kbin and for Lemmy and… just to use it properly. The concept was that I needed one account which linked to everything, yet that’s not the case. I’m in the process of deleting all my reddit posts with Power Delete Suite and it’s taking a while, but this needs to be better if it wants to get people like myself (and those who aren’t so tech-savvy) across.
It’s early days. Who knows? Maybe in a year or two, when the Federation aspect is a bit more developed, we’ll have a seamless, less fragmented experience.
In my case, whenever I tell one of my friends about Lemmy, they feel like they’re going to be isolated on their own little island (instance), and that they’ll probably be missing out on a livelier community somewhere else. This misconception is probably the result of relying on centralized platforms for decades. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but Reddit is the perfect example of what can go wrong when you put all your eggs in one basket.
I had better luck showing them the Memmy app in action. Hope they join the community soon.
Once people come around to it being reddit but the accounts look and feel more like email, it’s going to take off (or continue to). It’s not such a great feat that it’ll be insurmountable for average internet users.
Ultimately, if the content is here, people will follow.
I don’t think one need a good idea of what an instance is to use lemmy. It js just like reddit but without reddit mods and decentralized.
By easing the access through abstracting some of the more complicated ideas like instance but focus on the aggregated part, it is possible for your regular people to access.
I totally agree regarding Google. I work in IT and the entire reason I got into my career is because I grew up with Google and I was good at it.
Google’s search results suck now. It’s actually incredible how much clutter and algorithmic nonsense it shovels at you now instead of legitimate results. Once there became companies that specialized in SEO, it was just a race to the bottom and now it’s all bots fighting for the search rankings instead of real content.
Honestly feels kinda like the pre 00’s internet. Barely any bells and whistles.
Kind of like how reddit used to feel
Reminds me of Usenet. In a good way.
enshittification
Now there’s a lovely new word to add to my vocabulary.
It’s like they never learn. They’re trying to turn the internet into cable TV… I guess they didn’t get the hint when a lot of us said “Fuck TV”
Also, Youtube and Twitch have been fucking up a lot lately, helping out sites like Rumble and Twitch.
Tbh I kind of.understand ads: you have server costs that needs to be paid. What I absolutely do not understand is charging ridiculous api prices when they could send those ads like the desktop website does. It makes me really think that the main issue here was to kill 3rd party apps more than monetization
Different takes I’ve heard was the API was setup in such a way it was going to a massive legal liability in the near future especially for EU regions. They no longer have the know how to fix it and close the gaps, they needed a way to cut off the API. And since legal terms of how that API was setup they can’t simply turn it off, they instead resorted to unrealistic demands and costs on the third party to get everyone to stop using it so they can quietly turn it off.
enshittification
That needs to be the word of the year.
Wiktionary calls it a hot word
I first saw “enshitification” used in a blog post by Cory Doctorow about TikTok. Love the term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys.
They hope to monetize the content by selling it to AI companies.
To be honest, if this field really picks up, they(Reddit, twitter) might not even need the users anymore. That level of classified content is the real good mine
They’ll need the users if they hope to keep generating new content though.
Scraping the data becomes less relevant the older the data gets
I don’t think that matters much if the purpose is LLM. Not for years anyway. Sure, the information might be stale, but the language part remains the same
Just noticed that today too, fucking bullshit.
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I’d just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn’t realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn’t seem to work anymore 🙁
Nitter no longer works because sign in is required now.
hm, do edits not propagate through federated instances? I edited that comment an hour or two after posting when I realized, but I’ve had several replies today that seem to be based on the original version, all from users on different instances.
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I’d just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn’t realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn’t seem to work anymore 🙁
Edits, comments, etc can take a bit to shuffle through
No worries though, thank you for the clarification
How does nitter work? Does it scrap the data, or use an API?
Here’s hoping spez keeps following in his idol Elon’s footsteps!
why did it have to be aaron swartz
why couldn’t it have been huffman…
Good people do good things and get punished by bad people.
Bad people do bad things and get rewarded.
I have an article Aaron wrote about the Freemont GM plant business case that I read every few months to remind me of the point he was making. And every time I read it, I am reminded of the ridiculous sequence of events that took him away. Sometimes, it really does seem like only the good die young.
" A policeman beats up a protestor and we think “what an awful person,” not “what terrible training.”
Yeah… that aged like milk.
oof. Kinda dark and morbid. But I get it.
Conspiracy theory time. Huffman murdered Aaron and made it look like a suicide because he didn’t want Reddit to sell out.
Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol
We even used to run “thanks for not using adblock” ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there
Yes, that was funny and kind of endearing. Back then it also seemed like the goal was more to stay as kind of a community service, but of course the servers needed to be paid. Now it seems like they want it to return huge profits like Facebook and YouTube. It seems like a completely different mentality, where the ideals have vanished. And this is very clearly reflected in the userbase IMO.
During a part of that, reddit was a loss-leader subsidiary of Condé Nast. The magazine side took care of all the “corporate” stuff (legal, hr, marketing), letting reddit itself be lean and fast; it was all engineers more or less, and they all used reddit all the time.
Dude, I paid for Reddit Premium or Gold or whatever the fuck it’s called for 5+ years just to support. I wish I could claw it all back.
11 year account…makes it pretty easy to imagine. It was a very different site back then.
Proof that people will gladly support a good product.
Same curve with Netflix. Pirating went down when they started. They themselves, but all the other Streamers as well have gone so greedy that the good product is no longer supported. Reputation ruined, war with customers ensues.
These guys aren’t happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
It’s not just tech companies. It’s any company with greedy owners.
Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that’s true, I dare say they’ve achieved the opposite result now.
Spez explicitly said in his AMA that third party apps were profitable while reddit wasn’t.
Which isn’t mutually exclusive, plus he can’t really talk about any planned sales before they are actually announced anyway.
Yeah, at this point, they could completely reverse course and it still wouldn’t make a difference to me. I’m glad they took it this far actually because I didn’t like the way the site was going long before this but there weren’t any decent alternatives that I was aware of. My addiction kept me there, but this has made it pretty easy to leave with the glances back just being curiosity about whether the whole thing is on fire or becoming a steaming pile of shit.
So, shall we start calling this ‘the Reddit Effect?’ We haven’t had anything new to supplant the Streisand Effect for awhile, I feel like something like this is overdue
So the Reddit Effect would be a company trying to do something to raise it’s value or make it look good that has the opposite effect?
I don’t think there’s another name for that, so sure, why not?
Might be the digg effect ;)
I was a paying premium member with ads enabled until recently.
The enshtification of reddit has reached a head.
I feel like old af now that I’ve watched two huge sites implode due to mismanagement. I was a Digg refuge way back, and now here I am on lemmy…
3 sites if you include Twitter . Twitter and Reddit seem to be in a mismanagement competition right now. Not sure who’s winning
We’re all losing, sadly.
Tumblr also kind of got ruined a few years ago too for some people if you were into that platform.
I was in art school when Tumblr was at its peak. Looking back it was dumb, just resharing pictures and gifs but I had so much fun. I met so many people through Tumblr that I’m still in contact with.
I really enjoyed tumblr in a way I don’t really understand now. I think I enjoyed creating something to share of my own out of bits and pieces of everyone else. Idk.
Heh, I go back to Usenet. Architecturally, Lemmy is closer to Usenet, but Usenet did not have an authentication mechanism.
Same.
That’s how I got my username…
Myspace, digg, tumblr, reddit, twitch, could maybe count 9gag and places like gfycat
I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Newsvine -> Reddit -> Lemmy
I spent the most time on Reddit, but I think I had the “best” time on Newsvine. Their website was extremely slick, and the fact that they encouraged long-form articles from their users was awesome
Yes. At the end of the day it is always corporate greed and shortsightedness that does them in.
Crazy that even Google seems to be realizing that it’s search really leaned on Reddit for decent results nowadays… I’m curious to see if a bunch more things start to implode over time
Google basically monetized user-generated content and discussion (those obscure FAQs and technical discussions), now Reddit wants to get it on it, too. The only ones getting truly shafted is the average user.
I remember the day that Slashdot sold out.
What happened to Slashdot? There wasn’t really one particular event that made me stop using that site, I just sort of drifted away. Was there an “enshittification” moment there, too?
1999, Malda & Bates sold it to Andover.net. It didn’t become terrible, but there was a sense that it went corporate. It’s been sold and resold since then.
I guess I mostly used it after the sale, then. I started in 1998 or 1999 (when the hype for The Phantom Menace was building up) and used it until the early 2010s.
Now this is the real nerd cred here lol. Yea. Same. We’re old now. Has its benefits and disadvantages.
I rarely go to slashdot anymore, but still do occasionally. What did they do?
They were independent then they weren’t. I don’t recall any deeply controversial scandal beyond that. But the content and vibe was never the same after they “sold out”. They are a shell of their former self… they used to be “the thing”. Now they’re just something some people know about.
Exactly. It started feeling corporate.
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Understand that Spez is so out of touch he even managed to piss off gigantic pacifist nerd-communities like r/startrek to leave and switch over to the open source side! These subs inevitably take dedicated users and quality memes with them. The users and mods create the value. Honour to you and your house Lemmy. Qapla’
I think moderation and community will be much better on Lemmy. On Reddit you got some power tripping mods because they’d control the only sub with a clean name that got all the subscribers. There’s no such monopoly on Lemmy so it will be the best communities that win. Monopolies corrupt in all their forms.
yIlop! wa’IeS chaq maHegh!
Outnerd me! I dare you!
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It isn’t even about the API drive out anymore of why I’m not going back to Reddit. It’s the CEO though and though
Because the goal was never to get some kind of fair price for using the API. That’s why they priced it at “Fuck You.”
Ultimately what they want is for people to stop using 3rd party apps entirely because 3rd party apps either don’t show advertisements, or they show advertisements that give ad revenue to the developer.
They want everyone using their app because the valuation of tech companies directly correlates to the number of eyeballs they can serve ads to. Old.reddit will be next, and I bet they’ll try to start blocking ad blockers after that.
The only thing stopping 3rd party apps from showing reddits adds though was reddit never including them into the api. They actually HAD an agreememt with the rif author to take a cut of rif’s ad revenue but as soon as spez took over as ceo he quietly axed that.
Investors wanted to see “app growth” for multiple quarters not underatanding that the app isn’t what maked reddit, and so
spezspaz is doing what he is in a desperate and stupid attempt to claw up some numbers so he can cash out when the ipo hits.Reddit app use DID see some grown during the pandemic, but can’t sustain that because its app is shit. They haven’t improved it ever. It began as a 3rd party app and they purchased it from the original dev. The only changes were to add that pathic coin shop and some sticker/avatar crap to sell you.
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Imgur has fair API prices and they serve images and video. Reddit serves goddamn text (or at least that’s their core business and if they can’t afford picture and video they shouldn’t do it).
Sure users would have had to pay some money and/or the 3rd party devs would have had to funnel some of their ad revenue to reddit. But if it was a reasonable amount, I doubt many people would have complained about it (there are always some). Everybody knows Reddit has to make money somehow.
This wasn’t designed to make money though. This was designed to kill all third party apps. I don’t even see the upside from a business perspective. This seems like a petulent manchild move by Spez, just like his idol Elon would make it…
thoroughly agree that the api stuff is just one symptom of a broader underlying issue
Yeah I was trying to convey this feeling to my wife the other night. It’s not just that I won’t be able to use my favorite app (rif) anymore, it’s that the CEO has been lying and gaslighting about what they’ve said. In that AMA thread where he said they want to work with devs who want to work with them and like three devs were like “hey we’re fine with paying but you haven’t answered our attempts to contact you” (not to even mention Apollo’s Dev’s bombshell recordings lol) really shows they don’t give a shit.
I feel like they want that AI money and are furious all these models scraped their content. I get it but it’s not even their content. Regardless of how you feel about artists being mad about their art being used to train models I think we can all agree that a site that merely hosts content being mad that the content was used is laughable.
And the NY Times article that among other silly things just forgot to mention Aaron Swartz as a primary founder of the site, who would be right there at the gates telling us all to fight this bullshit. Guarantee spez specifically told them not to mention him as the optics here would be completely terrible.
Reddit used to have values, but it’s been turned on its head.
Absolutely. I was waiting it out to see how it would pan out, but after spez’s AMA I dropped Reddit immediately. That was before I even found Lemmy as a replacement. Now that I’m here I’m not missing Reddit in the slightest.
Just vile
