We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.
For reddit specifically, I have to disagree. It's a sad state the Internet has become, where you used to get coherent results from decentralized blogs when you google a sufficiently niche hobbyist topic. These days you just get content marketing spam. Append reddit to your search and you get subject-matter experts. The valuable conversation and folk knowledge is all siloed on social media.
Reddit successfully centralised forums and made it convenient because you didn't need 20+ logins. The other half is link sharing/doom scrolling (the addictive stuff), which replaced Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.
In the not-so-distant past if you wanted expert help and non-astroturfed suggestions (or even just memes), that's where you went. Those places still exist for a lot of fields and the experts still hang out (and often are better than Reddit), but you still have the problem of finding them and managing identities across boards. In many cases the moderation is superior. Reddit now suffers from the problem where it's so big that people can run very subtle advertising campaigns to push products. It's still much better than blogspam, but you can still only really trust the negative/critical reviews.
Therein lies the problem... We spent so many years crowdsourcing these curated knowledge bases on a variety of subjects for free to the point that it's empowered the controlling companies to firewall them now and then make our input a commodity that they can turn around and sell to us.
Walled garden sites and apps are the enemy. The only way social media works for certain people is if they are off the main exploited niches on platforms. They take our words and ideas and give nothing back in return. They lie to us about what they can do for us in terms of creating a brand, or company, and they exploit our input and hinder growth.
We have to remember that each of us has a different perspective and purpose for using the web and for using social media.... It's not just people pushing motivational content and drop shipping, it's promoting music, or promoting a restaurant, or even turning their pet into a personality for movie roles. This is why too many people have just the narrow view of the matter that suits them most of the time... We need to understand that one mega platform with only one script and template for success dimply doesn't work, and it actually opens the field for exploitation and gaslighting about how to succeed on social media... That's also exactly what makes social media toxic, along with scams, fake users, cheating for followers, and the manipulation of visibility to encourage users to pay to promote their posts.
It's long overdue for everyone to wake up and take back their individual power in creating personal web sites and not looking back at social media. The ideal that large for profit companies care about individuals is bogus, and by the time people realized they've spent years building communities of profit for others, it's far too late. Time is money. Work is money. Social media does not pay for what you invest into it.
The funny thing is that a lot of the stuff people on Reddit are clamouring for was easily supported by forums, and has been done forever. Admins were free to run their own ads or premium posts, they got sponsorship from companies, organised swaps and real-life meetups. I remember getting perks like free shipping from some places in return for being an active user. The communities were also more intimate. You'd interact with the same people frequently and the water-cooler areas were also interesting to talk about related interests, whereas outside the novelty/karma farming accounts I don't really recognise anyone I interact with on Reddit (though probably in smaller subs that's more common).
I wonder if it would work if there was a good aggregation tool that could talk to old platforms like phpBB or vBulletin (which I think is still a big chunk of the communities that are running). I can't imagine it would be that difficult and probably existed.
Tapatalk is/was an attempt at such an aggregation tool for old-school forums. In addition to aggregation, it offered better UX for mobile. I haven't used it in many years though, I'm not sure what it looks like these days.
Who is the WordPress of forum hosting on your own domain and customizability? Someone that can make turnkey forums for nontechnical people to create their own communities.
This may sound strange (and was equally strange to admit to myself) but I'm looking forward to "mamaging identities acrosz multiple boards" again. My brain seems to be wired to associate each of my hobbies with very different aspects of my personality, and visiting a little "walled" community for whatevet activity suits that current version of myself is a nice way to compartmentalize and stay focused on what I set out to accomplish in that moment. I loved Reddit for a time, but goodness, what a disjointed experience it was for me and my easily distractable attention span.
In addition to the login bit, reddit/hn style threaded comments for conversation is way better UI (imo) than pages of slow loading quoting forum posts.
Threaded conversations is the killer feature of Reddit/HN for me. Second is that I don't need to shift between 20 different forum interfaces/color schemes. Old Reddit always looks the same, so long as you disable the ability of subreddits to mess with styling.
That's basically the major paint point for me at the moment. Reddit made finding subcultures related to my hobbies and interests very easy. I don't know where to find communities about things that interest me now. I thought maybe Mastodon but finding hashtags has also been difficult.
Social media is great for groups to form, but there is a ceiling to the success.
You need a dedicated website/forum with people that understand the subject, to get though the ceiling. You get very specific advertisers, organize your own in person meetings.
There are some platforms like Discourse which allow you to use OAuth. That's a reasonable setup I think, if you don't care about linking your real identity (or you just make a dummy account).
I disagree. If you find the right communities, you really make close friendships with people - even if you don't know their real names, how old they are, where they work, or where they live. None of that matters, because you share and connect over a common interest. And you could never find so many people IRL with similar interests as you.
If this isn't how you're using reddit, discord, etc, and it's easy to disconnect from them, then yeah just leave them. But they foster meaningful interactions too.
I don’t think the argument is that one can’t find connection on Reddit.
But I think the recent happenings are a good reason to ask how good it is to invest so much in communities that can disappear overnight.
I’ve enjoyed my time on Reddit over the (many) years and I’ve made real friends who I now know in real life. But many of the communities I once valued have crumbled or no longer provide the same positive experience. What remains are those real friendships.
Social media in general is a gigantic experiment and we’re still just beginning to learn about the psychological and sociological impacts.
Shifting focus to local in-person interactions and creating solid and sustainable relationships that don’t depend on the whims of the latest social media platform seems increasingly important.
And I still think there can be value found there, but not as a primary form of social connection.
> Shifting focus to local in-person interactions and creating solid and sustainable relationships that don’t depend on the whims of the latest social media platform seems increasingly important.
I agree with this completely. I have formed many online relationships particularly in the music community starting during the COVID lockdowns and it has really struck me how ephemeral they are compared to IRL friendships. It’s so much harder to connect in a deep way. It’s also so much easier to walk away. You can just kind of slow down your online engagement and the relationship dries up.
I’ve also noticed how I tend to develop a certain impression of someone just based on their online artifacts (avatar, style of writing, emoji, etc) that often turns out to be gravely inaccurate when I finally encounter them in a “realer” format such as a video call. Sometimes I end up realizing that I’d likely not hang out with that person IRL. It’s disconcerting.
Lastly, I find I often feel uncertain about the connection I have in ways that I never feel with people IRL. For instance, wondering if my tone is off, wondering if the person isn’t perhaps as interested in whatever endeavour we are working on anymore, etc.
I am fortunate in that I have not been much of a feed-based social media user for many years, but my belief that community-based social media (eg Discord) might be better has been tested by these observations. As per your comment, I think RL is where it’s at.
Problem is an average consumer uses reddit for memes and buying recommendations.
The magic however is indeed as you pointed out discussing various topics:
- Gear in baldurs gate
- How to create a hardware clone of R2D2
- Books that you couldn't put down
- What is the best present I can give to my friend
- Summary of Hubermans protocols
- Etc.
I'm glad you found a consistent source of enjoyable and enriching interactions online.
That said, do not dismiss the need for long-term, in-person friendship. IRL forces you to confront the uncomfortable/mismatched parts of others. In other words, the whole person. It enables you to comfort and support in a way that is impossible online. This is all both uncomfortable and necessary to form the most meaningful and worthwhile relationships, not to mention vital social skills.
The Internet is an incredible tool to connect like-minded people, but it will not bring happiness in the same way the flesh and blood presence of consistently physically present people can.
I'm sure you can make friendships in any environment like, say, a prison. I personally find IRC servers and in-game chats to be some of the best places for discussion.
I love that feeling of deep, basically throwaway connection. I met a guy in a hostel once and we never exchanged names or anything, but hit up some tourist spots together, shared life stories and smokes.
In undergrad I once befriended and flirted with a classmate for a few weeks and only realized, when I was putting her number in my phone, that I had no idea what her name was. It’s like connection so intoxicating that you just enjoy it for itself.
I mean I get that for absent-minded browsing but even just...having a hobby and talking about it with people feels pretty much like Normal Person Behavior(TM) and Reddit's subreddits worked well for that in the same way that forums in the past did.
Not the end of the world but as a kid who only could find other people to talk about certain hobbies with online up until college sounds like a lot of pepole will be more bored.
The caveat to that is that the more time I spent typing about my hobbies, the more I collaborated with differing ideas within my discipline, and the more I ultimately learned about the hobby. Doing the hobby is one thing, but the social aspect is certainly more valuable than you seem to be giving it credit.
We’ve only had this communication capability for the last .01% of human existence. Even 150 years ago, if you wanted to communicate with anyone outside your town, you had to pay a horse based courier what was most likely a very expensive fee. Not to mention the millions of years before that.
Did all these previous generations find less satisfaction in life? Well who knows but I argue not.
We don’t have to structure our lives so that we are dependent on the internet for entertainment.
But also, if you have to pay a small $ fee, okay that seems like a good trade too, if the value is what you are ascribing to it.
>Even 150 years ago, if you wanted to communicate with anyone outside your town, you had to pay a horse based courier what was most likely a very expensive fee.
Last month was the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the first government "postal card", in New York City. They cost a penny each and sold 200,000 in two and a half hours.
If so can we just pretend I said 200 instead of 150? I feel like that’s pretty much the same thing given that both are but a drop in the ocean of total human existence.
> Did all these previous generations find less satisfaction in life?
Heck yes. I lived half my life in a non-Internet era. And I can say with absolute certainty, that it was horrible. Finding community, especially for specialized interests, was virtually impossible. Finding specialized information -- completely impossible, unless you had access to a University library. There weren't even efficient ways to find out what specialized information you could have but don't.
Encyclopedia Britannica is not remotely a substitute for Wikipedia. And the same holds for pretty much every other form of information, every other form of communication, and every other form of community except family.
If you want to go back 100 years... all my ancestors worked 18 hours a day in the mines, starting at the age of 6, and died young from Black Lung Disease. Which is considerably less satisfying.
People say this but it's patently obvious that life was more miserable 150 years ago! ~everyone's life was basically toiling away every day to survive. There are obviously examples at the margin that change things up but let's be real. Life is a bit better!
I am personally for some financial incentive changes (though I think that we can somehow figure out how to build communities that don't cost as much to run), so it's not like reddit in its current form has to exist. I just think that we can acknowledge that online communities are a nice to have for many people.
And to expand on that, online communities can complement offline communities in very interesting ways (See how chess has grown thanks to things like chess.com, and all that feeding into an increase in people participating in social chess events. Or things like board games being complemented by things like BGA)
I think this is a fine perspective for inconsequential (-ish) social interactions, but then I start to think about the political organizing that these sites have also facilitated. "The revolution will not be televised" and all that, but... man. I was all over twitter getting real-time information as I participated in Occupy and BLM marches. But, now Elon has it.....
Political organization on the internet definitely has its downsides too. In fact, as the activity has proliferated it's consumed the internet at times and that's been disappointing, to the extent that astroturfing occurs. On top of that it seems that politics has gotten more homogenous in viewpoints since it proliferated; people are now repeating talking points more than nuanced ideas. There's also a lot of harassment and bullying that occurs due to politics prevalence on the internet. When you go into real life the experience is generally very different and opt out by default.
I definitely agree, but I would also suggest that the need for social media companies to monetize on engagement incentivises them to exacerbate the issues you mention. Removing those incentives might improve political discussion.
I don't consider Reddit in the same league as other social media sites. I consider it a centralized collection of forums. I hardly use my Reddit account, but I have obtained tremendous amount of useful information by searching for a topic and landing on a useful Reddit post or comment.
This was the only use I had for reddit - usually some hardware specific issue.
Now I find reddit rarely shows up in DDG results. Searching directly on reddit is futile. Posting queries is also futile as many mods have implemented features to limit infrequent posters.
Or type "reddit xyz" in the google search box -- a trick that I learned only recently. Completely eliminated my dependence on StackExchange, which has evolved into a rotting cesspit of obsolete information.
I loaded Facebook for the first time in five years yesterday because there was a fire nearby that I was trying to track. That's about the only value it's provided to me in that time. So, not totally useless, but I certainly have no regrets being social-media free.
As a social network, it might be worthless, but it's very useful for me as a searchable information trove. During the blackout I have been bitten by this many times, just searching for something and then getting a private reddit page. I think reddit's system works much better than the god-awful traditional forums, where the informational comments and the one-off replies have the same weight.
I was on Reddit to talk about Math, programming, books, etc. There are several subreddits from which I was helped. And I helped a lot of other people, too.
Quora had a refined userbase. I liked it there. Got ~30mn views on my answers.
In these places, I didn't have to dumb myself down and could be myself.
There are properly moderated FB groups in which I have made connections, and have a community.
On Discord, I am in so many valuable communities- where I can discuss things I like- be a part of something.
And I depend on YouTube for learning things about programming, deep learning, etc.
So, internet is worthless if you watch cat memes. But for me and millions others, it is a lifeline.
And it saddens me very much to see how deeply I depend on these.
I dramatically reduced my social media time a couple years ago by getting some casual games on my phone. Current favorites are NYT crosswords and solitaire.
Some innocuous mental stimulation to pass time that doesn’t come with the toxicity that social media can.
The only reason I maintain an Instagram is to have images to show on dating apps, and the only reason I use Twitter is to stay up to date with the tech community (and scream into the void).
> What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is.
I agree with this sentiment. I left Facebook and don't miss it in the slightest. Left Twitter long before it was fashionable and don't miss it. It's just a bummer that Reddit is going that direction as well. I've tried to leave Reddit a number of times and then remember it's the only place to get direct, responsive support from my ISP and most of my Google searches include Reddit to see what other people think about a product, service or idea. But would I miss Reddit a year from now? Nope, probably not.
We could do away with all the surveillance capitalism using us as a product and life would probably be fine.
This is why I think federated alternatives like Lemmy are important and I would like to see communities migrate there instead of some other corporate walled garden. Otherwise we'll just be having the exact same discussion about some other website in five years. It pains me to see even a lot of FOSS-focused communities move their discussions to Discord, for example.
Most of the criticisms of the federated platforms centre around how they are difficult to use for the average user and could never achieve the scale that Reddit has. The difficulty point is a valid one and work should probably be done on that. But at a certain point I just don't really care, particularly about the scale point. The communities that are valuable to me aren't the huge ones full of "average users", they are (mostly) smaller communities full of people interested in tech and FOSS in particular. I can figure out federation and so can most of the people I probably want to hear from.
I don't mean any of this to sound elitist, I just feel like people who browse /r/pics and people who browse /r/selfhosted (for example) are probably different user bases with different preferences. If Reddit were to keep the former while the latter were to move to some other, slightly less seamless but more sustainable platform, maybe everyone wins.
There are, of course, a few non-technical subreddits I like that would fall through the gaps here, in that their average user might not appreciate a federated alternative. In days of yore those communities would have inhabited forums; I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of those.
I'd love to see something without federation, but using a wikipedia style model to support it. I don't think federation will ever be sufficiently simple for the majority of people to adopt, and I think the world needs a world forum that is accessible for everyone, not just tech people.
I tentatively disagree here. The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance. Once you are using it the experience could be made frictionless.
I think a big problem people have had with trying to join federated socials is that they did it when everyone else tried it and thus the system failed. And so people think its really hard when its just been technical issues with onboarding people.
> The only required complexity for federation is choosing a server/instance.
This is a bigger problem than fans of federation acknowledge, though. Human beings have multi-faceted identities, and fediverse instances tend to be quite narrowly focused.
The average person is rightly going to assume that 'A collection of Marxist communities' - to take a real instance description from near the top of the join-lemmy.org list - is probably going to be mostly about Marxism, and not really about, say, knitting, or motorcycle maintenance. And even if a given person is in fact a Marxist, they're not going to see 'a collection of Marxist communities' as a replacement for Reddit, where they can talk about Marxism, motorcycles, and knitting.
You can explain to people all about federation and the ability to interact across different instances, but you're still asking them to make a home somewhere, and that entails choosing from amongst identities in a way that Reddit doesn't require, and that most people don't want to do. You're also putting them at the whim of their home instance in a way that they aren't used to and may not like (what if the Marxist instance defederates / blocks the users from the motorcycle instance, due to their insufficient revolutionary zeal?).
I agree with the problem of federation identity but suspect this is partly an “image problem” in the sense that less specific and broader identities are a fix.
As for being subject to the whims of the instance; that is no different to reddit/twitter admin who also push ideological agendas. In fact, federation allows you to at least migrate to a different regime, something that neither commercial site permits.
I don't think federated systems without something like urbit underneath will work outside of a hyper technical niche. You end up back at a handful of even crappier centralized servers with a worse experience and even more capricious mods - a worst of both worlds.
The reason centralized ad-based companies are so successful is the centralization solves serious UX problems that are unsolvable by systems that are not centralized. You need a unified platform where users share an underlying system that stuff can be built on top of that they can actually own, where the details of the system are hidden and it's possible to actually get UX/discovery/auth that is just as good as centralized systems. It has to solve for the problems that lead to centralization. [0]
This stuff will only work when to an average user they have no idea they're even on a system that isn't centralized, just looks like a normal app. You can't get there without solving bigger issues upstream from the app itself. [1]
> We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media.
There was no mistake. Some pre-goldrush Internet/online people could and did point out these things, from the start. Meanwhile, tons of money rushed in, the money deployed the systems that were available and promoted to people, and the massive influx of people were not hearing from the altruistic types who could see things changing.
I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled.
Even the language was changed: "social network" was no longer something that was yours, or between you and others you knew, but "social network" is something some billionaire owns about everyone else's personal associations (power to monitor it, to mediate it, to inject into it).
And when there's upset in one commercial property of power over people, usually the upstart alternatives (even some "decentralized" ones) that rush in are like a corrupt country's revolutionary -- who made grand populist speeches, until they gained power, and it turned out they only wanted to be the next dictator.
>I think the current Internet user base overall has mostly never known an online environment in which their associations weren't owned and controlled.
I think this isn't said enough (even with how often it is said). Switching to Matrix and setting up a fediverse node were big in realizing how used to controlled "sterile" environments me and my friend circle had gotten.
Especially early on we found ourselves often saying that being on those platforms brought back the old "early internet" feeling (for us this would be the early/mid 2000s).
Yet every time I point to the root of the problem -- that most social media web properties are privately owned by their respective shareholders, who just benevolently let you store your* texts and photos at their premises for free -- I get downvoted heavily here on HN. The community doesn't want to hear that here.
Yeah absolutely The problem here is the profit motive. What we need are sustainable communities that are not controlled by sectors of private capital and they treat their users like products or widgets.
I know some people are in America, especially above a certain age, refuse to think this way. Decades of Chicago school neoliberal propaganda has convinced them that anything good has to be driven by a profit motive.
I would have hope this community would be a little bit better than that but I'm fairly new to it
It's more than a profit motive. Profits can be fine. The bigger issue is the need to show unlimited growth on the books. That whole system drives the gradual enshittification of everything.
It's not troubling to me - seeing as I think that specific group of people are the saner of the two and less likely to punish me for my beliefs. I honestly don't know how people can think that things are "peachy" on the "left", they look positively Orwellian.
"these companies need to make money" is a very weird way of saying "Reddit could have been perfectly profitable years ago but we went and got a shit ton of venture capital instead by selling investors on the idea that we were gonna be as big as Alphabet". Surprise, their level of execution is roughly "press conference at the Four Seasons" as this little episode so well demonstrates.
No one is saying you are only allowed to maintain certain connections..
First of all, what you say is mostly true in the real world as well. I was in a bowling league for 20 years. I want friend with anyone but they were acquaintances. The bowling alley closed. I no longer see anyone. I could have taken the friendship outside the bowling alley... But you can also take your social media friendship outside that particular social media.
It wasn't a terrible mistake, and it isn't a problem self contained to social media.
I understand your point, but I think an assumption that a lot of internet users have, and a fundamental pitch of the internet, is that the internet is the tool you use to _find_ people to bowl with in the first place.
And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things.
They're TEXT and LINKS ffs.
Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run.
Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.
Text and links, but then also recommendation algorithms, spam filtering, image hosting, lightning-fast caching systems so that your main feed doesn't take hours to load fetching row by row from MySQL, geographically distributed data centres for redundancy and locality.
Then there's the ad engine, which requires user data harvesting, and all of that analytics and analysis and machine learning, and that all gets expensive, so you have to do more of it and do it better so that you can make more ad dollars so you can afford to do more of it and do it better so that.... and so on and so on.
You could just charge users, of course, but if you charge users then you hamstring your organic growth, so you have to find a way to only charge some users but charge them significantly more. Even if Twitter only costs $1/usr/mo to run, how many of those users will pay? You need to charge 1% of users $100/mo, or 0.1% of users $1000/mo, which means you need to offer them something tangible for their money, but none of these sites can really think of anything tangible to offer their users that's worth paying for so they're stuck with ad revenue and...
If you're a non-profit then you don't need a recommendation engine or an ad engine. You also don't need to self host video and images, at least initially. Reddit, for the longest time, relied on Imgur and embedded video players until they built their own infrastructure. Also, thanks to advances in AI, there is an opportunity for AI moderators for content curation. As far as caching and web scale in general, you don't need a full server farm initially. Even Google started with a single server rack.
The thing I would live in constant fear of if I were to host a Mastodon server is that sooner or later, one of your users' posts is going to end up being linked to in a Wired feature article, or a New York Times article, or goes viral for any of a billion reason, and your server is going to end up getting hammered with 10,000 requests a second for a week or a month, which means you're going to be facing a sudden unexpected $3,000 AWS bill. (Not sure what it would actually cost. Anyone?)
I've seen what being linked to in a Wired article does to a web server. It's ugly.
That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.
Q1 earnings (https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1...) says 383M daily active users and $1.3B in costs (including sales, administrative, etc), for ~$3.50/user/quarter or ~$14/user/year. So far above $2.50/user/year. Even just using cost of revenue is ~$4.50/user/year.
I clarified that I meant just infrastructure costs, and posted the source.
Even so - what's $4.50 per user per year - 40 minutes of minimum wage work? 45 seconds of a lawyer's time?
For sending, and processing, and receiving GBs and GBs of video?
For (not even) this cost, we give up control of political narratives? We let people like Huffman and Musk and Zuckerberg control what we get to see?
They take money from tinpot dictators and a selection box of wealthy grifters. We let our parents and grandparents get taken advantage of by every scam artist on the planet with a few dollars. Why? To save $4.50 a year?
I think the big cloud providers have warped peoples' sense of what these things actually cost (and also the massive scale of these userbases that allows the costs to be spread widely). Egress is one places where providers make their (significant) margins.
Social networks derive their value from their size. $2.5 per year per user may not be much, but if you have just 1000 users, that is already $2500 per year. 100000 users is a quarter of a million per year. Are you going to pay for that out of pocket?
It takes money to run a social network of meaningful size in even just a halfway professional manner. Who would do that while receiving nothing in return?
It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is.
I can't help but observe that for all of it being "just text and links," we sure do keep converging on monolithic service providers for... Some reason.
> It is entirely possible, even likely I would say given how often it has happened, that lots of people think it is easier to build a forum that scales than it is.
I'm an awful programmer and I could build a reddit clone pretty trivially if I really set my mind to it.
Then I'd have to figure out how to attract users, how to handle spam and abuse, how to filter content, how to age restrict things, what tools users need, how to host media content cheaply, how to hire people to help me keep the site online and scaled, how to.... probably a thousand other things.
Building a forum is easy, building a business around a forum.... difficult.
And not even a business, the other things you're describing are things you have to solve even if you want to provide the service for free (well, for cost at that point. Because if you're providing media content and hiring people, the whole thing costs you more than labor). And the other things you've described are table stakes... Filtering content and handling abuse in particular, if you get large enough for anybody to care you exist. No government is going to sit idly by and let a service just become the next CSAM haven.
At the end of the day, most people don't want to put the labor in. If they did, we would have seen fediverse take off ages ago.
Pedantically, that's not how cost per user works. Whether you have a billion users or 3, $2.50 / user is $2.50 per user.
And that infrastructure costs the same whether you riddle the platform with advertising and influence, or leave it pristine. In fact, leaving it pristine costs far far less to society, all things considered.
Anyway, 'at scale', $2.5 bn is a drop in the ocean. There are thousands of people who could pay that all on their own. The global economy is 100 trillion dollars (as of 2021). And there's this thing called taxation, which sorts out public goods and services (such as communication) at scale.
Youtube gives you the option. Do you want no ads? Pay for Youtube Premium. I do not need to engage in a hostile user vs platform agaisnt Youtube, with me searching for better adblocks, and youtube trying to figure out how to block the adblockers, cause they go and give me the option. I doubt that reddit would be getting the pushback they are getting if they had come out with some sensible numbers per user, that people are actually ok with paying.
The problem there is I think people are sick of seeing 15 small recurring charges on their credit card statements every month. It's death by a thousand paper cuts.
There needs to be some sort of universal pay per view model that works across any site.
Not until later in Reddit's history, when they (just like Facebook) wanted to wrestle some power away from the likes of YouTube and Imgur. (Smartly so, since these platforms had lots of leverage to be able to turn off embedding one day and sour the Reddit UX / drive users away from the site. But this change did not make Reddit more valuable to its users.)
There's a fork in the road. IRL socialization is selective, since someone needs to want to talk to you specifically; you decide who you talk to, instead of listening to random people.
For a minority, online socializing is mostly selective. One-on-one chats on WhatsApp, group chats, or small, selective online communities like tiny Discord servers among friends. Only venturing out to "the masses' social media" to promote a product or a brand (or out of boredom), but mostly staying away from the riff-raff and idiocy.
Then there's the people who lack IRL friends, and who can't get in these group chats or friends-only Discord servers, who have nothing but the riff-raff and idiocy for company. There's more and more of these people, as people get lonelier.
I guess the only thing you can do is make sure your kids are in the first group.
I think anonymous social media as the mainstream is a fad, the end-point is going to be more like Snow Crash, minus the artistic flair. I think text-based, possibly anonymous social media will persist, but it won't be what billions of people are doing.
Most of the problems with social media come down to the ability of people to separate themselves from the consequences of their speech and actions. I don't think that lack of anonymity should be enforced, I just think it's the natural progression of people trying to gather in groups on or offline.
The problems of social media are largely already solved in the real world, where there are real consequences to bad behavior. Reputation is a thing in the real world.
We're still in the medieval ages of the internet. People are regularly waylaid and conned by digital highwaymen.
We need the digital equivalent of a reputation in the digital world. Will end up being similar to a SSN -- an identity that follows you around and can't be shaken. It's going to very unpopular with the libertarian minded, privacy focused, and religious mark-of-the beast types. But I see no other way forward.
Like China, in that users are identifiable in the real world, and held accountable for their actions.
Unlike China in that it's not about mass surveillance and mass shaping of behavior and political opinion.
Think of it like a drivers license, but for the internet. Keeps people from anonymously performing drive by shootings and hit-and-run type events, because the car/driver can be traced back to a real person.
Benefits:
- The user that seems to be acting like a troll has a "record", a reputation for being a troll on other sites. Dude is clearly an idiot, or out to cause trouble. Best if I just ignore his crapposting and strong opinions about politics or whatever.
- Person that posted private NSFW pics of me online turns out to be my troubled ex on the other side of town. I've reported the crime to the local police and prosecutors office.
- Person who posted bomb threat, well we can all see it's some 8yo kid who goes to that school. Follow up there first.
- That guy from overseas who wants to give me $1M if I first wire him $1000, well looks like he is a known criminal. Problem avoided.
- In spite of their online reputation and my better judgment, I screwed up and got scammed out of money by someone online. Well turns out he's Joe Blow from Arkansas and so I've filed a police report against him. Also I've contacted a lawyer and have filed a lawsuit.
I understand the concerns and comparisons to Chinese social credit, as I said the libertarian and privacy minded people won't be happy. They'll argue they have a right to surf/drive anonymously without a license, and that the government will use this for ill, etc.
End of the day I have faith that our system of government, with it's checks and balances, will make it harder for those in power to abuse the system compared to CCP. For example, here you'd need a warrant to look into a persons online behavior. Companies will not be able to track people without their consent, etc.
Still, the ability to track people at scale will be abused, as power is always abused. The question is "are we better off collectively as a society for what what we gain, knowing the background level of power abuse that we'll have to endure?"
Let me put it another way, would you rather that we get rid of drivers licenses and other identification like SSN used by say, your bank? Without that info, it becomes much easier for me to impersonate you and withdraw money from your bank account. As it stands, banks have to follow KYC laws, which means they have to know who their customers actually are, which makes it hard to scale digital fraud as all transactions can be traced back to real people which can get arrested and/or charged with crimes.
All I'm suggesting is that we need this level of traceability on any part of the internet that matters. Banks, commerce, retirement saving, all communications with minor children, and most public spaces communications (Facebook, Reddit, eBay, Tinder, etc).
I'm all for keeping parts of the internet anonymous. They'd end up being disused, like back alleys in shady parts of town. Only people with something to hide go there (4chan, etc). Maybe you can trust the guy you meet there, but I wouldn't give him any money. Who takes 4chan users seriously? Meanwhile the rest of us stay on the other part of the internet, where trolling and shitposting wouldn't be as much of a problem anymore.
I feel like those "libertarian minded..." types are ultimately just another brand of utopian fantasist. It sure would be lovely if we could have nice things, but we already know why we can't: human nature.
I've wondered about this, and what need it serves in people that they're not getting otherwise? Usenet was pretty popular from the beginning and maybe the first 'social media', and succeeded without marketing.
If I think of every community I was a part of during the 2000s, they've all shut down. In the end money played a part in all of them closing, or people who don't want to commit any longer to something that isn't making them money. In contrast, I've been on reddit since 2011 which is really good. I've spent zero money and learned and enjoyed a lot.
A few years ago, I came up with this idea: "...a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising." https://hliyan.medium.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netwo...
And "channels" or "pages" are really just email groups?
There was a time a while back where that sort of thing was thriving, and I believe it was mediated by Google Groups at the time (I can't recall the specifics). I remember seeing such amazing visual content back then, shared as plain old emails.
I question the word "mistake" here, because it puts the burden on us and implies that it could have turned out differently, in that we could have just decided to opt out. When it comes to products that prey on the dopamine system and have network power behind them, it probably couldn't have turned out any differently, short of policy that adjusts the incentives of the people who create these products.
Perhaps this is a more a reflection of our current state of development as a species than a mistake we consciously chose to make. As gross as Reddit's behavior has been, it doesn't change the reality that nothing at all in this scarcity-based economy is free.
Communist Cuba doesn't have a social network, but they do have a "sneakernet" [0]:
> El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans
Lol thanks for the reminder TechBro8615. I don't really want to argue about communism being inherently authoritarian on here :) I was just responding to the parent comment, who was (to some extent) dismissing the ancestor:
> We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.
I think we can agree that there are ways we could organize social media that are neither governed by the intense profit expectations of VCs, nor the work of Communist satan magic. For example, government funded!
I was not dismissing anyone. I was suggesting that it's not unreasonable for Reddit to want to be a profitable business even though how they're going about it is rather questionable.
There exists a reasonable middle ground somewhere between /u/spez's ridiculous terms and this idea that many seem to have that 3rd party apps and/or users deserve a free ride. You can blame capitalism if you like but I don't believe there is a superior alternative until we reach the point where we have a Star Trek-like post-scarcity economy of some kind.
I disagree. 3rd spaces are often profit generating businesses.
The problem is that these companies are VC backed enterprises mean to give many multiple return on investment. It's not merely enough to be profitable.
Reddit certain could have been profitable already but they've continued to grow in headcount and stupid ideas (nft.reddit.com) basically chasing an unachieveable goal. It will eat itself to pursue that goal.
Agreed. The nice part is that often those connections can be moved elsewhere, especially for us more tech savy people.
Having first purged my posts on reddit and recently outright deleting my account, it's been refreshing to realize that I can indeed go without reddit, even without the few subs I found particularly useful.
The few strong online friendships I've made have long since been "backed up" to Matrix and the Fediverse with self hosted instances after experiencing spurious bans on discord and realizing how fragile the centralized arrangement is.
You can move those connections to other channels. But yeah without a free market / progress driven system you aren’t going to have a phone, mail service, etc either. It’s a double edge sword.
>We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system.
I would absolutely take profit-driven moderation over the petty tyranny of your stereotypical reddit mod. These mods are not heroically channeling some sort of vox populi.
Some are harping on the sentence before this, but this is absurd:
> How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary.
You are definitely allowed to form connections outside of the internet. That's where many of the best ones are.
I agree with you. And in fact I have mostly removed myself from social media. But I can’t help pointing out the irony of sharing this sentiment in what is essentially a form of social media. Doesn’t dilute your point. Just made me smile a little.
This is a great point, and I’m curious to hear what would be better alternatives. Like obviously there’s something great about having online connections with other people, but how could we do it better without surrendering to some big platform?
We could make a public platform. In the US this all but guarantees a protection from censorship. Third parties could offer moderation services. The brave could suck on the firehose!
The funny thing is that Usenet is already a highly censorship-resistant platform, and tools like NoCeM would let you subscribe to third party moderation streams!
I genuinely forget Usenet is still technically around these days. I dabble in the idea of using it here and there, but the ease and convenience of the modern www has spoiled me quite a bit. If I go to a decentralized platform, it's more likely to be something fediverse.
I don't think it's a good idea to assume / hope that HN remains that way. Money is still an aspect of the existence of HN. It exists because pg has enough money to run it, and its existence aligns with his current desires. This community could just as easily dissappear in a way equivalent to what we're seeing with Twitter and Reddit, if pg wanted. And it could not be easily replaced, because its existence is dependent on pg's money...
We have always been reduced to producers of monetary value for an intermediary. We pretend we are in control of that intermediary, and maybe once we were. Much like the beginning of every social media site.
It's not really an apples to apples comparison. You're talking about taxation, governments can absolutely run stuff that is not profitable and do all the time.
Better example would be to not pay your rent or your mortgage... But we don't want to make the mistake of equating governments with private capital. If anything governments are controlled by private capital disproportionately when they are often the only defense we have to try to defeat centers of power on such a scale.
I think it is an apt comparison, since social media companies don't need to extract monetary value from every single individual, unlike rent, and do run their orgs for large amounts of time in the 'red' thanks to VC money. Which let's be honest, is another game of VC's leveraging credit/debt systems via financial institutions.
Perhaps you feel this way because you still think the government is individually on our side, when every announcement sounds more and more for a vague concept of good, that seems to enrich the announcers, while doing nothing for my life, or any real person I have ever interacted with. Which puts paid to the concept of government being on the individual's side.
Unfortunately sites the size of reddit can't exist without money. People gravitate to sites like github etc because they provide features, which cost money,that people want.
As opposed to recognizing these problems ahead of time, and instead creating a (public?) system for forming these social networks that doesn't need to monetize. One that wouldn't be corrupted by the needs for ever-increasing profits.
I don't mean for that system to necessarily be a full replacement for the social networks we have now, but I'd argue there's room for something like a public alternative to them.
Free systems always excited and and continue to do so. Commit to them. Correct the mistake. If committing to them doesn't fix the mistake, then the choice was to have the social connections you wanted or not to. And given those choices, and what you want, choosing social media isn't a mistake.
well said, this is an ugly part of capitalism, anything that can be turned into a product, will be turned into a product. And greed and the profit motive and the hunger for growth will usually lead to some corporatized version becoming the dominant product in the space while more idealistic indie operations operate smaller in the fringes if at all.
Not sure what you mean, about half the people I know are not on the web at all, or just browsing mainstream news sites occasionally. Then there is the group of people who use social media to some degree and are online a lot. These are 2 distinctive groups, both are parts of humanity but only one of them is related to the internet community.
> Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system.
I will point out that whenever somebody talks about a system where creators own and can profit from their own creations on HN someone responds with “crypto is a scam”.
Except, the lockout is self imposed. Reddit's "crime" is closing down their API... users just need to use the actual reddit app and they can keep their connection/communities going.
It does sucks for the people who've built their livelihood offering 3rd party reddit clients though. Sure it was always a risk. Big tech destroys entire businesses on a regular basis. Doesn't make it a bad choice on their part--the (american foot)ball simply bounced the wrong direction.
Except, the actual Reddit app sucks. And it particularly sucks for busy moderators.
So successful subreddits will be getting inexperienced moderators imposed, who don't know how the communities work, and who don't have the right tools to use.
>Care to take bets on how well this will turn out?
I'm betting many communities are going to turn very shitty, but ultimately it won't hurt Reddit's bottom line one iota. In fact, Reddit will probably be more profitable than before.
Just look at TikTok: you don't need communities with intelligent discussion to have a highly profitable company. Instead, it's better to chase vapid morons who want to watch shitty 1-minute videos.
It is my opinion that viewing oneself as a special light in a world of vapid morons leads to a sad, angry life. Just thought I'd weigh in, one vapid moron to another :)
The world isn't completely full of vapid morons. There's plenty of intelligent people here, plus there's plenty of intelligent people on various Reddit subs, who are interested in intelligent discourse. There's plenty of popular media that isn't vapid and moronic: just look at Star Trek: it's been a cultural phenomenon for over a half-century and it's rather intellectual for a series aimed at the general public, yet it's rather difficult to find anyone these days who's never heard of it.
There's nothing terribly special about people who are reasonably intelligent and are interested in intelligent discussions about various topics; we're not some vanishingly small minority. Civilization wouldn't have gotten this far if 99% of people were vapid morons. There are a lot of vapid morons out there, as evidenced by the rise of TikTok (and to be fair, not everything there is utter trash), but they're not the overwhelming majority of the population IMO.
I guess my point was less about relative population sizes and more about dismissing the humanity of others. What would einsteins life have been if he had grown up in an abusive, food-insecure household? What about yours (not to assume ofc). Life is hard, conditions are hard, people have subtle undiagnosed disabilities all the time, and I just bristle at dismissing them as more-or-less worthless
Except the official Reddit app makes it impossible for people with disabilities, or people that want a reasonably well moderated community, or people that just want a usable app.
Enthusiast community that makes up probably 80% of the content on Reddit are going to see other options if they can't use third party apps.
I mean would you continue to use the internet if you could only use AOL?
Anytime your community is dependent on staying on one centurally controlled for-profit app with no alternatives, it's doomed.
Reddit made a choice to first misinform, then pull the rug from under bunch of people (not just devs, it’s the Reddit users as well), and THEN chose to lie about what happened to deflect blame.
> if they are no longer interested in moderating that community
They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies.
> [if] at least one mod [...] wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over the subreddit for yourself? And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.
Right. I don't really care how the API thing ends. Lower the price, grandfather in some of the big clients for a longer sunset date so they don't have to issue refunds, work out rev-share or per user licensing agreements... whatever. These are solvable problems.
But these antics have me thinking I should find alternatives to the very few subs that actually matter. So if anyone knows a good web community for cooking... so far I've learned I'm too old for Discord.
Damn. I didn’t know it was gone. That hits hard. Obviously I hadn’t been in a while, but back in the day chowhound made eating my way through Chicago such a blast. That’s really too bad. Thank god the home brew digest still lives.
>They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies.
The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. Seems reasonable enough. What does it mean to be "interested in moderating" if the outcome is that you do no actual moderation?
>And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.
For the sake of grandstanding you might want them to come out and say "any of you scabs want to cross the picket line for us?", but only spez would be stupid enough to actually do that.
> This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over the subreddit for yourself? And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence
It's transparent, sure, but it doesn't mean it won't be effective. They're counting on a few people's greed plus most people's apathy.
reddit seems happy to go all in on the low-effort content mill market, and those users are the kind to get more upset over the protest than losing nice third-party apps or tools.
Wager more care about corporations pushing around a volunteer workforce, though. I'm genuinely surprised by the fatalistic / why bother attitudes expressed here on HN, as if those attitude aren't the dominant factor enabling those outcomes.
Reddit has already said moderator APIs and disability related APIs will remain free. They are keeping their subreddits closed because they don't want to be inconvenienced. Mods don't have the moral high ground.
A lot of folks here will commiserate with reddit's position - Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's, and they didnt have to provide reddit with a single penny in return. Reddit has to do something to prevent the gold rush of data mining that is bound to occur from other companies building their own copycat LLM's.
Reddit wants to make money off user-generated content. To my mind this is like a paper manufacturer claiming it has a copyright interest in any printed matter than ends up attached to its product.
that analogy only works if reddit were charging you for each comment you post on their site. A more accurate analogy would be times square selling advertisement billboards because lots of folks congregate in times square.
They're trying to get money from people using their API, which is like demanding a cut from people selling maps of Times Square (which are better than the official ones).
27k people packed the Oakland Athletics' stadium yesterday (compared to the more usual 7-8k home crowd attendance) to exhort the owners to sell the team rather than move it to Las Vegas in return for a stadium boondoggle. I suspect few of these baseball fans know much of financial engineering or other technical business considerations, they just consider the team owner to be a greedy douchebag who doesn't care about Oakland or indeed baseball, and recognize that the owner has been engaged in playing different municipalities off against each other to see who will cough up the largest subsidy.
Many of the proposed changes directly impact moderators and aren't something that average users will experience immediately/directly, so of course they care more than the average, non-mod user.
> if they are no longer interested in moderating that community
The mods, as GP stated, are interested in moderating that community, they just disagree with Reddit's changes. They wouldn't be taking the path of shuttering their subs in protest if they didn't give a damn.
That is absolutely dishonesty on the part of Reddit.
Note that the Relay dev says that there's no way for him to offer a free version of Relay and make it financially viable. That means that user acquisition is going to tank, hard, because no one is going to be able to try the app before paying for it.
> Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 10% conversion rate and charging $2.00 a month
In other words, if he's willing to tell 1.35 million people to get fucked, he could turn his app that's widely beloved by many into an app that barely anyone knows about and new users are barely willing to consider trying.
These apps live and die by the same model: the paid users subsidize the free users. Who knows, maybe Christian could just tell those 1.35m people to get lost and it would be instantly profitable, but maybe that's not the app he wants to make. That seems entirely fair.
> To me it sounds like Christian just doesn't want to do the work.
Or, alternately, Christian feels betrayed by Reddit, because even though he's worked very closely with them for years, Reddit suddenly decided that yanking the carpet out from under third-party devs with thirty days' notice is the best way forward for them, and then the CEO turned around and slandered him all over the place, criticized Christian for having receipts, and then just continued to trash talk him everywhere.
Reddit has shown repeatedly through this ordeal that they don't actually want to work with people. Tons of other devs have reported that their e-mails are going unanswered. Christian asked about extensions or some other way to make things work and got no response. Reddit's goal here isn't to be profitable by charging 3p clients for API calls, it's to kill 3p clients and force them into their own terrible app.
Why would Christian want to jump through hoops to work with a company that's gone out of their way repeatedly to treat him like shit?
It's painful to post a comment that otherwise reads as low-quality flamebait. But I tried to defend his actions, and was dragged to the conclusion that he tried to damage Christian's reputation by making up a lie. He even acknowledged it was false during a phone conversation with Christian, then continued to tell the lie publicly.
It shattered my faith in him, and to a lesser degree in YC's "don't be evil" philosophy.
Christian isn't the only person with a dog in this fight, and none of what you just said at all negates Reddit's dishonesty throughout this entire situation.
From what I understood, the problem is less the change itself but more the short notice. 30 days isn't much to redesign your app and monetization, especially if you had many users on year-long subscription plans.
Do try to remember, that they gave him 30 days to adopt this new pricing structure, which also includes trying to figure out how to reneg on the subscriptions he has already sold.
Why should I trust the CEO who was just recently caught in a lie about blackmail despite evidence to the contrary and in the past has straight up edited people’s comments without any notification that Reddit is responsible for the edits?
I haven't been paying close attention to all of the spez/Apollo stuff, was there actually any evidence from either side? Last I saw it was mostly just each party posting contradictory text in replies.
Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
If by "majority of users" you mean users that do not contribute any content and only view the site, sure, you may be right. But a content aggregator that is devoid of content doesn't exactly make a great website.
> Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
The vast minority polled the users, from what I can see. None of the subs I visited that went dark had a poll. I just decided to check some others - /r/funny and /r/gaming because they're listed as some of the biggest subs that went private, /r/askhistorians because people often use it as "the best of Reddit," /r/outoftheloop because I used to visit it. None of them had polls, either.
People keep trying to push the narrative that this was a democratic decision, but every piece of evidence I can find is that most mods did this without consulting the people that use the subs.
I think the argument is that the impulsive API change will harm many, many subreddits. Does Reddit care about quality content? Or do they care about becoming profitable? I think the mods make a lot more sense than Spez here. And I don't think you can say Reddit cares about keeping subs open if they're willing to watch them all shrivel away in a sea of spam and clickbait bots.
Right. If the users of the sub want to continue the boycott, they certainly can. If the removed mods are beloved by the community, it's easy for them to open a new subreddit.
But I think most people realize that most of the users, who actually create the content, don't want the boycott to continue, and don't have any particular love for the current mods.
[I stand corrected, redacting the rest of the comment]
In a small defense of Reddit:
If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers. If the moderators don’t moderate the really bad stuff, Reddit has historically replaced them. I would think the same applies here.
It’s hard to argue that people who are not subscribed to a sub are community members. People had plenty of warning to join subs before they went private. Going private alone shouldn’t lead to mod replacement.
> If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers.
No, this is not accurate.
A private subreddit is only accessible to "approved users", i.e. those on a list managed by the moderators. Subscribing is completely different; it's a private, user-settable flag whose only significant effect is to make the subreddit's content eligible to show up on your home page.
If you can't view a subreddit's content because it's private and you're not approved, then subscribing makes no difference. In fact, subreddit mods can't even see who's subscribed, nor can they prevent anyone from subscribing, even by banning them.
subscribed members cannot access a private sub, only approved members. Approved member is not quite the same thing as subscription, there are some subs you can't even see without being added, like r/CenturyClub. And being on the approved list (sub visible) doesn't mean it shows up in your home either, you can be added or banned by any sub at any time independent of action from you. It's just literally a pick/ban list for that sub and they can build it off your posts elsewhere etc.
Subscription is about curating your homepage, news subscriptions (ugh), etc. Subscription means you want to see and know about popular stuff in that sub. And you can still view stuff you're not subscribed to, if you're an approved member.
The access levels that are allowable are: approved only, public but only approved can submit links, and public. You can also set access on items individually, and lock comments on those items, etc. So it's also possible to just blank or remove all the old posts with a bot (API!) and leave only a "fuck u" thread that's uncommentable.
At that point reddit probably reverts it and calls it vandalism and puts in new mods and starts banning anybody who's tantruming. Like, be disruptive get banned. You have less freedom here than with a TLD registrar (better ask nicely to get a .edu or .mil or .gov cert issued). Their system, their rules, their call. You already agreed to license your content to them. Shreddit could probably even be undone if they have history etc. And there already is a public dataset already on the internet for like... 10y+ now? how does that work exactly?
Who wins in the argument of GDPR vs users having agreed to a perpetual irrevocable license and several other parties already having used those API access to republish those comments under CC (fh-bigquery:reddit-comments, pushift, etc)? Can you revoke an irrevocable license under GDPR as the originator, and if so how does that leave IP licensing in general, just "fuck it GDPR it, it's mine, I don't want a licensee to use it"? I mean probably all social media licenses include something like that, if it's durable then GDPR is relatively meaningless and nobody has to respond to GDPR if they publish their dataaset/API output (interesting outcome perhaps). If it's not durable it kind of fucks up IP law and subassignment in general, everything was always done by an originating creator(s) at some point, then sublicensed to their employer, etc. Can you just be like "patent license revoked, boss, I did the GDPR?".
The idea of Google/etc being forced to publish their codebases under permissive licenses to avoid random "nah fuck you"'s from departing engineers would be an extremely funni legal outcome though, like that would have massive implications for knowledge/creative work in general. Maybe the same thing would happen to social media providers... maybe that paradoxically makes the incentive to publish fh-bigquery:reddit and pushift stronger, because now it's irrevocable. And that's the minimum ask for 3PA tooling more or less.
On the other hand if the CC sublicense holds in any way, most likely it's legal to say "ok this is the vandalism reversion dataset, it's CC, patch it over the api response inside the client" both for the vendor and the others.
I guess to put it another way: would wikipedia have to edit out every line and commit a user has interacted with, if they filed a GDPR? How do you begin to back that out on a word by word basis? Every redditor knew their words were going to be public (for the definition of that subreddit, and potentially public according to future changes of that subreddit). They put it on "wikipedia" knowing the organization ultimately was driving there.
Reddit chooses not to unwind history and revert. But does Reddit have a license to do so? What about Wikipedia? It seems like in this case the answer may be "probably, if they want to, it's just normally not a problem but we can do it if people get disruptive". People licensed their posts to the community, that's why they're outraged that the community is being torn away from them, it cuts both ways unfortunately. But it might also be legal to reboot Reddit using that data, assuming it's all really CC etc.
> Most subreddits doing polls have people voting to remain open, so it really isn't in the interests of the communities to keep the subs closed.
I've seen this oft repeated, but never backed up. The only poll I've seen results from[0] was overwhelmingly to stay shutdown indefinitely.
On top of that, you're probably going to be getting into sampling bias with larger subs, since most users that care are purposefully avoiding the site trying to "starve" them and wouldn't even know about the polls.
I'm a frequent visitor of /r/soccer. The only poll they did[0] had a staggering 88% in favor of the blackout, with 80% in favor of keeping the sub private as long as it takes for reddit to change their mind. I would be surprised if other polls had such different results, as I'm not sure what would make the /r/soccer community so drastically different from the rest of reddit.
I wonder if many of those most upset about the changes (and therefore pro-blackout) have also stopped visiting Reddit in protest. I know I fall into that camp.
I sure haven't seen that. The subs that I participate in regularly which have remained closed, have had polls and/or discussions about it, and the members overwhelmingly agreed with the moderators. Maybe it depends on how strong the particular community is.
That's all fine and well. I mod a couple of large subs but I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected.
I just don't think mods should be ending the communities, most of which they didn't start themselves. Let other people who don't share their issues take over.
> I mod a couple of large subs but I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected.
You might be a desktop user (I am too) but Reddit is more than just you and me - it's the communities of people who choose to socialize there. And I have a hunch that Reddit chasing away the kinds of people who tend to use third-party apps is going to have a ripple effect on the quality of the communities contained on the site, not to mention bots that aren't covered under the various exemptions.
> I just don't think mods should be ending the communities
Those communities will only end when Reddit does. The only question is how long it will take to reopen and if there is a new moderation team or not.
One thing I don't quite understand is how the CEO first claims that only 3% of the user base is using 3rd party apps, and then later claims that "And the opportunity cost of not having those users (3rd part app users) on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant" (from https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-h... )
Is that 3% of the user base really having such a big impact so it's worth all this drama and continue to alienate the users of the platform?
I have never used any third party apps, and I primarily used old.reddit.com on mobile to browse Reddit.
Yet this whole brouhaha got me to delete all my posts going back years, delete my accounts, and block reddit on my phone. To start, I think reddit management has just acted like total douchebags throughout this whole event, and I'm not interested in supporting that.
More importantly, though, the majority of time I spend on reddit is just a bad habit that I'm happy to now be breaking. All these social media companies are basically just "the drug dealer planet" from my favorite episode of Star Trek TNG: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis_(Star_Trek:_The_Ne...
Truth be told, we don't need it, and in many ways are better off without it.
He also claimed most mods don't use 3rd party apps:
> Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. He said "the vast majority" of moderators also do not rely on third-party apps.
The big issue is you can hide a lot in statements like that.
I can't find super trustworthy numbers (and I can't verify this due to that), but if there are about 3.4m subs and only 140k of them are active, every single active sub could have a mod that uses a 3rd party app and you could still claim "the vast majority" don't use them.
I also find it fairly interesting he would quote a percentage for users, but not for mods.
I suppose it depends how active that 3% of the userbase is.
If those 3% of users are responsible for e.g. 20% of the page views, and therefore potentially 20% of ad placements, maybe they are really having a big impact?
Isn't most of the income (or all?) for reddit from ads and awards? So the people actively adding value/content gets punished, while the amount of people seeing ads remain the same? Seems even more crazy if true then.
It's just pure corporate BS, Reddit never even tried to make ads available from the API in the first place. If that was such a problem, they would at least have tried something.
Then ads are half abandoned even on their official platform itself, they polished the avatar NFTs instead... Reddit has probably the most outdated ad market of all the social networks and they cannot blame third party apps for that.
> One thing I don't quite understand is how the CEO first claims that only 3% of the user base is using 3rd party apps, and then later claims that "And the opportunity cost of not having those users (3rd part app users) on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant"
People lie. It's really that simple. They give no data to back up their statistics, and we're expected to believe it as truth since they are in a position of power.
I guess because future plans could be negated via 3rd party apps. Getting rid of them now will ensure future plans can be enacted without risk they'll be circumvented.
Reddit clearly doesn't understand the product. When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.
All but new users are aware that subs are governed by mods. Installing a corporate-approved mod panel because a community isn't acting in Reddit Inc's financial best interest is to light the whole product on fire.
What's the point of starting a new sub if it'll be repurposed as reddit sees fit? What's the point of joining a sub and contributing if upon gaining popularity - it'll be taken away and controlled by "the adults".
Imagine starting a discord group for your buddies and then corporate decides the group should be controlled by some outsider. At least perform a sham referendum to maintain a facade of authenticity. "Do you want to remove the evil stinky mods with fun cool ones? Vote now!"
> When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.
People don’t choose subreddits because of mods, they only leave subreddits because of mods. One of Reddit’s larger problem’s really is that some subreddits have better names than others, and the moderators have to be extremely bad for users to get mad enough to migrate to a new community with new mods and a worse name. Or Reddit has to replace the mods (seldom happens).
It’s not at all the case that the most popular communities correspond the best mods. Reddit also not only doesn’t want to provide their own mods, they can’t, it’s not even close to fiscally feasible. They will more likely appoint new community mods or remove some of the mods and let the remaining mods continue to moderate. This will likely lead to a general decline in the quality of moderation, especially in the short term, and especially in terms of neglect as it might surprise people how many subreddits have NO additional volunteers to do actual mod work.
I take your point, but to a large extent the value of the subreddit is in the name since it makes it easy for people to organically find the right space for the content they want. Domain names are the same. For example, for content local to New York City, going to /r/nyc was my first guess.
/r/UncleBens can claim to have developed their own thing, but not the obvious ones like /r/Apple, etc.
Seems like survivorship bias considering you wouldn't be familiar with well-named poorly moderated subs that never took off.
But also you searched /r/nyc instead of TheNewYorker.com because what you're after is community curated content instead of the views and opinions of Condé Nast and their vast network of quality publications that are already available for subscription.
Following /r/nyc and /r/newyorkcity during the mayoral elections was what made reddit useful. You could see how moderation could create an echo chamber and distort a users perception of reality. Having reddit install "community leaders" is a hilariously bad idea.
So long and thanks for the fish! Looking forward to see what replaces Reddit.
>Reddit clearly doesn't understand the product. When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.
How can this "tacit approval" be applied to mods but not the admin policies that constrain the mods? I participate on plenty of subreddits where the mods are clearly despicable; however, there are simply no viable alternatives in terms of the actual community content.
I'm super angry of all the mods who are taking the subs prisoner. If you don't like to pay reddit back, then let us use it. I'm a premium user and I pay reddit because I like the content, freemium users pay back watching ads, I was a freemium user of other platforms for decades. Why is letting them charge so bad?
In this case, the specific concerns were benefiting from third party developers for well over a decade to grow their business, and giving them a month of race before rolling up the carpet. The devs were working on code they thought they might have years to earn money back on, who sort of got screwed.
It was also the whole “poor us, we can’t make a dime, we need this money” routine Reddit was jawing on about when if they lowered that API pricing down to the point that the pricing was affordable for consumers, or locked it to Reddit Premium users, to me there seems a clear path to profitability or at least sustainability. Again even if they ultimately priced things high enough to slowly strangle these apps, I wouldn’t care as much.
It’s that Reddit fucking lied to everybody’s faces to push false public narratives to bolster its PR.
No doubt the admins, the freemium users, the paid users, the third party devs, and the moderators all contributed to what Reddit is today. However if the moderators don’t punish a decision by the admins thru gutting the profitability of this scheme they just pulled thru disobedience, in future conflicts the admins will be more empowered, and fuck everybody harder. So people collectively behave in this way in solidarity almost by intuition, at least for awhile.
Reddit mods are often terrible and exploit their position of power.
A sub's popularity is invariably because it covers a topic that is popular outside of reddit and through whatever reason (often fortuitous or unrelated to current mod behaviour) that incarnation of it got the most users which lead to monopolisations.
They understand, the issue is that in the long term, this is unlikely to harm the quality. Eventually, everyone will get used to the new world order. If reddit really hurts from the loss of "talent", it won't take too long to replace them.
Idk why. We should be able to have a civilized, intellectually curious discussion about this. The future of Reddit (and its implications for the future of the Internet) is pretty on-topic to me for HN.
There's really no reason for them to be honest about this sort of thing and I've seen plenty of shady shit from moderation here to make me distrust them.
Which isn't me asking for an explanation/stance. However trustworthy you find the moderation to be here, any explanation they give is inherently biased towards an obvious desire to remain employed.
From my perspective - this is a forum/social media site that is popular and _not_ infested with ads. It seems obvious to me that what they do gain is influence with a certain group of people (investors) and as a filter/brain-drain/funnel for entrepreneurs.
It’s quite possible that people are just flagging these stories because it’s not interesting enough to facilitate 20 discussions without it turning into threads with 500 comments rehashing the same arguments.
Reddit might be a big deal to you but many people over here just don’t care and they don’t want to see topic after topic about a site they don’t care about. And it’s going to have the same impact on the ‘future of the internet’ as the demise of Digg. Not a whole lot really, sites come and go, in a year nobody cares. Remember MySpace?
Reddit is a big deal to me, I moderate multiple subreddits with 6 figure subscriber counts, from a third party app. With that said, the discussion on HN is basically played out. There isn't a lot new to say.
There are likely hundreds if not thousands of users who would be willing to become mods of each of the subreddits that are still in private mode. I know I would mod some of the subs I find useful.
How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse?
What's the ratio of the former to the latter, and does Reddit have the manpower to tell to the difference on a time frame that keeps the subs alive?
What's the impact of a bunch of people who know how the sausage is made being essentially coup'ed by Reddit? Are they going to shrug and move on? Swear eternal vengeance?
> a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is,
I think it's probably worth splitting this category into two, with one of them being the kind of user who would like to help keep a sub running, but has no idea of what's actually involved or how much time it takes or what a grind it is, and just isn't a good fit for the work involved.
> How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse?
Same way Reddit admins have always done that; by ignoring all but the most egregious violations.
>How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse?
Reddit has replaced mods before. This isn't a new problem, the only novelty here is its scale.
>How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse?
This one is me: I'd love to be a mod in a large community, so I can ban the best contributors randomly and then get them permabanned for questioning me, all so I can destroy the whole thing from within. If Reddit doesn't like the way I moderate, then maybe they should hire employees to be moderators, and set up management staff to oversee them. Of course, that's going to cost a lot of money...
They can sure try. Getting a mod team that gels well and keeps the community functional is non trivial though in my experience especially for tricky subs like politics
Dropping a couple randoms in is at best a roll of the dice
I personally wouldn’t want that roll across a large number of subs if I were ceo but I’m not so maybe we’ll get to see how that plays out
>They can sure try. Getting a mod team that gels well and keeps the community functional is non trivial though in my experience especially for tricky subs like politics
Are the current mods of /r/politics even doing that good of a job?
I don’t frequent it so can’t comment specifically. There is likely significant work going on behind the scenes just to keep it from going all lord of the flies. ie a large part of the “job” isn’t visible so hard to tell from outside how challenging things are
To be clear when I said politics I didn’t mean r/politics but rather any sub that has contentious issues like politics as topic
Little sad that this is how you interpret it. But yeah mod team being on the same team while having diverse views is an even harder thing to pull off and narrow the pool of people suitable even further
Great, then go create the sub and get it to the size of the ones in question. Creating subs takes seconds, if you think mods are so easy to replace, I'm sure you can achieve the same thing they did, no need to wait.
A community is an organic thing it's not just the people who like to hang out at a place. A substantial chunk wouldn't participate in a community run by someone like yourself manifestly at odds with the community.
You would end up spending the majority of your moderation shutting down dissent not merely against reddit but against yourself. You would end up presiding over a shell with the original name where even the people who stay don't like or respect you.
I think there's a lot of people who like the idea of being a mod but don't actually like it once they actually have to do it. It takes quite some mental fortitude to do effectively.
Reddit leadership and the mods are replaceable cogs of a machine. The machine always wins. How many times do we have to repeat the cycle to learn the only choice is - to be part of the machine or not. Beyond a point controlling the mindlessness of the machine is not possible. As these systems get larger chimps with 3 inch brains only have an illusion of control.
One thing that I was unaware of, that seems even more dire than the api pricing changes, is that Reddit apparently intends to IPO in the near (< 1 year) future.
This signals to me that the service is guaranteed to steadily worsen until it's unrecognizable & forced into (deserved) irrelevance.
This was why I decided to delete my account last week.
I no longer trust Reddit. It doesn’t matter what leadership wants, once Reddit is in the hands of public shareholders leadership will have no choice put to continue the squeeze on users. One of the easiest ways to do that is start selling data.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can someone please explain what this reply means? It isn't the first time I've seen "* * *" and I'm wondering what it's significance is?
I believe @dang has addressed this before. You see it when someone has configured a "delay" (see the input field at the bottom of your settings page [0]) which is an integer value representing the number of minutes before which your comment is "published" (visible to other users) - it's meant to be a short window of time where you can edit your comment before anyone has seen it. Once the delay has expired, other users will see the comment.
I've personally never observed it, but I use the HN website, which I think just doesn't render the comment during the delay period. IIRC, you'll see the asterisks when viewing comments in alternative clients that fetch them from the API.
First (step?) of the IPO filing happened back in 2020 if I remember correctly, but they backed out as they didn't think they & the market wasn't "good enough yet" or something in that vein.
I suppose this will be a litmus test on how valuable long-established moderators are to the platform.
At the end of the day, they are volunteers who are now boarding themselves behind the property of their digital landlord so the risk of eviction isn't really all that surprising.
I've seen endless complaints from users who feel personally offended by being muted/banned from a community and a common response to their complaints is "if you don't like it, go to another site". If the moderators are not happy with the direction of the platform, they are free to vacate the property willingly or have an admin spend :30s removing them.
The relationship has always been unilateral in favor of the people who actually work there.
The relationship is skewed in favor of the owners, seems like a more accurate description to me. The mods do do real work (absurdly, they just do it for free).
The community is the only worthwhile thing about reddit. Their IP is simply awful garbage that could be profitably replaced with their own old open source code and their leadership is full of the kind of folks who think they can hire a sex offender then silence community outrage.
The last thing they own is hardware not valuable enough to pay severance if a substantial portion of the community leaves.
Worse the folks they are threatening are the tiny minority that are most liable to walk away with that value.
Can you explain why you believe the mods are toxic? Reddit allowing autonomy created an entire army of unpaid mods in order to create communities that pay 100% of managements salaries despite current reddit management being basically bad at every aspect of their jobs. They absolutely can crush them if they want to but if they do they stand to crush those communities and end up owning the shell of what they wanted to control.
Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges. For a case study consider freenode and look how that turned out.
I think the median mod deserves almost zero credit for "creating" the communities that they oversee. The welfare of the mods and the communities are usually not tightly intertwined, and scenarios where the mods are committed to destroying these communities should serve as a counterexample to this idea.
>Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges.
The idea that Redditors had some sort of prior affection for moderators is laughable. At best this is just tribalism where a vocal minority of Redditors is so upset at spez that they're opportunistically creating a narrative of heroic moderators being oppressed by evil admins that's reminiscent of an inverted Ayn Rand story.
> If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Moderators exist to moderate a community, not to shut it down wholesale. Reddit's response is the only reasonable one they could have made. If the majority of your userbase likes sub X and some mods (fewer than 10 for such a sub) want to shut it down, then of course Reddit would open it back up.
People here on HN and Reddit decrying this as the end of Reddit likely don't remember all of the controversies of Reddit over the past 17 years since it's been active. Hell, most of the current userbase came in after the most recent blackout in 2015 due to Ellen Pao firing Victoria. This has all happened before, with no effect to Reddit, indeed, much the opposite, seeing their user growth numbers.
Worth noting many subs actively voted for the shutdown. It's very much a case-by-case basis.
Also, shitting on your userbase only works for so long. You keep consuming people's trust and you eventually reach a tipping point where people are actively looking to move to alternatives. It would not surprise me if there is a sudden exodus if a suitable alternative to reddit became clear.
I don't understand why reddit has taken such an adversarial stance on the whole matter - it's stupid and shortsighted in such a community-driven service, and if I were an investor I'd be very concerned about management, personally.
Just as in real life, voting may not be representative of the whole story. Selection bias can occur where people who care very much about a topic would vote for it while most casual users won't even care enough to vote. The polls I've seen on Reddit are a vast minority of overall votes compared to the subreddit size in subscribers, keeping in mind that many lurkers also don't even directly subscribe to a sub but may simply follow them on /r/all, like /r/pics or /r/politics for example. I know I don't follow them but I see them on /r/all and will sometimes click into the comments.
Fair points. That being said, I'd value the participants more so than the run-of-the-mill lurker. One creates the content for the lurkers to consume.
Reddit makes money on the lurkers, but the NEED the commenters and mods to maintain the website as a whole. A straight count of users does not at all reflect who contributes the most value to the website.
If Reddit wants to return to "business as usual" the moderators of the considerable numbers of blacked-out subreddits need to be replaced with a fresh crop of moderators as good or better than the current crop, but who also swear fealty to the administration and are willing to overlook the dire state of the moderation suite.
I don't know about you, but I think the odds of that happening without significant bumps in the road are pretty slim, and are likely going to alienate even more users in the process.
The mods merely have to meet a minimum threshold of quality, they don't have to be as good or better than the current ones. The original mods were also regular users, with all of the averageness that comes with that.
At the end of the day, if you don't care enough to participate you are obliged to accept the outcome that results. If you don't like the results, it's time to participate, continue to watch, or pack up.
Sure. At the same time, if you hold a protest on a platform you don't control, don't be surprised if the platform owners seek to remove you from the platform. A private entity is not obliged as a democratic government is to support the will of their users.
Upvotes/downvotes are not good for democracy. Especially if the upvote/downvote history stays in your account. Think of the yes and no stickers in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian countries on the front of their government buildings. Even, moderators can pin their thoughts. It is not easy to express a different kind of opinion in the first place.
Mods have always been told that subreddits are their spaces to operate and that as long as they're not breaking any of the site-wide rules, they are free to do whatever they wish. This is a violation of that trust.
How can anyone sincerely believe that being a user, even a mod, on another platform by a corporate entity lets them have their own space? I mean, of course the company owns everything one does or publishes on said platform. There is no trust because the premise is faulty in the first place. The fact that people actually believed that is not really the problem of the platform, there is always inherent platform risk.
It is an issue of trust precisely because a third party controls the platform. If mods actually owned the infrastructure for their spaces, there would be no trust involved, they'd just own it.
In this case, mods trusted the company making a promise about the platform, breaking that promise breaks the trust in the company, and makes the platform risk plain to see for all.
I don’t think any mod could possibly have thought Reddit was making such a strong promise. The moderator community has repeatedly asked Reddit to take an active stance in moderation disputes; the most recent blackout protest before this one was asking Reddit to prohibit Covid denialism.
One should never trust a corporation, who only acts in the interest of money, is my point. That they even trusted them in the first place is a gross misjudgment. It's not about what words a corporation utters, it's about what actions it takes that determines its value.
Maybe they shouldn't have extended that much trust to Reddit as the company grew and changed, but that doesn't change the fact that Reddit admins are now lying. I don't really like this carte blanche idea that everyone is going to do bad things, so when you trusted them in the past it was your fault ideology.
> I don't really like this carte blanche idea that everyone is going to do bad things
It's not about doing good or bad things, it's about following the incentives (cui bono?). Corporations are amoral entities that seek to maximize profits, just as living organisms are entities that seek to maximize reproductive success. There's nothing wrong with either incentive, but it's crucial to recognize that those are the incentives present instead of thinking that entities will instead act against their incentives for the sake of others (indeed, even cooperation and sometimes self-sacrifice, as in the case of ants, can lead to greater genetic dispersion of the individual).
Therefore, in this case, there was no reason to trust Reddit admins on what they say, since at the end of the day, they will simply say whatever they want in order to pursue profit, which they are currently doing.
> Corporations are amoral entities that seek to maximize profits
The steps they take to obtain that goal matter a lot. If they went around literally stealing money from peoples wallets, we wouldn't just hand-wave it away and say "oh, they're amoral entities"
> just as living organisms are entities that seek to maximize reproductive success
We still consider it unethical to obtain that goal by any means necessary.
> There's nothing wrong with either incentive
I have nothing wrong with either incentive. Making a profit and reproducing are both great things. Doing either of them (or anything!) in unethical ways is the problem.
> Therefore, in this case, there was no reason to trust Reddit admins on what they say
What they have said in the past and what they have done WRT treating subreddits are "your space" is pretty consistent. We didn't just take their word for it. Their actions over the last 10 years in almost every circumstance has led us to believe this is the policy.
> they will simply say whatever they want in order to pursue profit
The public NEED to combat these kinds of problems by holding companies accountable. I would much rather live in a world where a company has to worry about lying to consumers because they will be held accountable than live in a world where anything a company says is ignored because we threw our hands up and said nobody can be trusted to any degree.
Just as a lion eating a gazelle has no moral qualms, a corporation does not either, so long as it's legal. Expecting ethical behavior in a corporation when such behavior is not encoded in its fitness function is misguided. You may not like this answer but it's true. If you want corporations to act ethically, encode it in their fitness function; make there be legal or monetary consequences to acting unethically because until then, they will simply do what they want to do.
In other words, even if you may feel that corporations are acting unethically, without any consequences for their actions, they'll just continue to do so, that's just the reality of it. You can try to change it, as you mention in your last paragraph, but that will be exceedingly difficult.
So maybe it's naive to think reddit wouldn't just seize control regardless of the "rules" (although I've seen plenty of posts from mods that mention this possibility). But that's not relevant to the question which is whether or not the moderators are moderating - as reddit is still using the rules as a pretense. I say to the mods, make it an easy answer, re-open the subs and remove every post that isn't a copy-paste of a stickied statement, something like that. Make them admit the rules were a convenient excuse for something they'd do anyway.
> Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
I actually take issue with polling to shut down communities as well. Linux and many other huge FOSS projects effectively can't change their license because they are composites created from contributions of many people so you'd need to get _unanimous_ agreement from all those users to actually change the license. In fact, if a sub goes private, that content is still there, but even if you created the post/comment, you cannot edit/delete it without nuking your whole account!
Private subs are a feature mods have access to under the existing system.
Private subs existed before this protest.
Setting a sub to private is moderation. And likely mods are still moderating just a much smaller amount of content from users already in the community.
Its not reasonable to kick out mods because they are protesting, and reddits response is a massive stretch.
Destroying a community is not. There's plenty of obvious precedents where mods that attempted to destroy their own subreddits or merely hold them hostage have been replaced. These were considered obvious decisions, but now that people are angry at the admins we have some weird Mod Rights movement bubbling up.
> Reddit's response is the only reasonable one they could have made.
You're saying Reddit was backed into a corner and had no other option but to knowingly defame the author of Apollo with false public accusations? And that this was a reasonable action?
How is "stop moderating" defined? Is an r/widgets sub that decides the only future discussions topics allowed are "why spez is harming the r/widgets community" still a moderated sub?
Wow, they really did their research to come up with the worst possible responsive. First, declaring in response that they don't care and won't budge, then when that inevitably resulted in an extension of the blackout, threatening the mods, their mouse valuable resource. They must have consulted Musk to come up with this.
Another day and another nail in another awesome online community that has terrible leadership. Where will the communities move to? What new areas of the Internet will be created?
does federate with each other mean you have one account and can log in into lemmy and kbin with that one account? or is it you can use lemmy with a kbin account and vice versa?
You log in to your home instance (kbin or Lemmy, doesn't matter which) and you can follow and participate in communities hosted on other servers, which can be kbin or Lemmy, doesn't matter which, because they support a common protocol (ActivityPub).
In fact, you can even interact with communities hosted on a Lemmy instance from a Mastodon instance, or Misskey. Heck, probably Pixelfed, though I haven't checked. Such is the beauty of the fediverse and protocols over platforms.
I think we need to start referring to Lemmy, Kbin, and presumably the dozen or so other 'ActivityPub with a Reddit-like interface' projects which will inevitably pop up collectively because while they compete the dynamics of that competition are in theory quite different to what you'd expect with centralised platforms as I can interact with communities on Kbin just as well from my 'home' Lemmy instance.
I quite like the term 'Threadiverse' that's been going around lately.
The concern I have with these federated instances is I don't see how they resolve the long term problems of stability.
Content on instances can disappear at a moment's notice if it goes down. My favorite part about reddit is the amount of information it has that is well-indexed by google.
These Lemmy and kbin alternatives might fulfill the moment-to-moment chatter, but it worries me that there's no guarantee of continuity for information. The best you can do is be discerning about the instance you pick. If there was a mechanism for distributing information across instances so it's saved, or some other assurance it'd make me happier about it.
Information is distributed across instances. If instance A hosts community C and a user on instance B subscribes to that community, its posts will be duplicated on instance B.
Really? That's very interesting, and good to hear. I'll have to look more into it, because that's really my main concern long term. Not that I have any real control, but I'm reticent to support platforms that could still go dark out of nowhere if I can avoid it.
The current paradigm will be a learning experience, and more of an ethereal result than archival. It’ll itch some Snapchat rub. Lots of experimentation and destruction.
Until identity transcends instances (shared identity databases between all the fediverse), communities are portable, and data peered across mirrors/nodes, it won’t work in a way that promotes longevity.
The fediverse in its current incarnation benefits those that use social media more like a chat room than a wiki. But losing your account to the entire fediverse when an instance goes down seems way worse than an unused community disappearing. It’s like taking an email address from an email host that spun up yesterday for fun, and hoping you’ll keep access to it.
That is my prediction as well. It's unfortunate as we'll enter the unindexed web where all that helpful content you can find by appending "reddit" onto any search will no longer be getting produced. All of it hidden in discords, out of sight.
Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.
Discord is "where information goes to die", so for that reason I think there's relatively little risk of lock-in from discord. The history there might as well not exist, so there's less reason to stick around instead of jumping to a new platform when discord is inevitably enshittened.
I do wish discord were federated. That's my main gripe with discord, it's not federated and I can't bring my own client like I could on IRC. Oh well, with luck the enshittification will happen soon to put people into the mood for trying something new. Advocating for something like Matrix to discord users now is hopeless, just pissing into the wind. I've tried it, but nobody cares about problems they might have with discord in the future when it's working fine today.
The content being out of sight also makes discord communities harder to grow.
I bet that a considerable fraction of Reddit users became users by googling something and finding an interesting Reddit discussion about the topic in the first results of Google.
Honestly, email lists are better than Discord in a lot of ways. There are standard ways to make them indexable via Google, you can use whatever app you want to, threads are a first class feature most people use, and since it's so open filtering can be very powerful. Bots are also extremely easy to write since basically every programming language has the ability to send email (and usually also to receive it via at least one email server protocol which isn't controlled by the distribution list, but by the bot writer).
https://squabbles.io is the best alternative I've seen. The Fediverse is a cool idea in theory but I think at this point in time it's not ready for primetime. It's too complicated for casual users to figure out, plus federation invites drama all of its own - e.g. Beehaw, a major Lemmy instance, has defederated with lemmy.world
Uh... I'm just went there and the first thing I see is "Welcome all sinners! This is a place to talk about your sins in a braggadocious way. Repent if you feel like you have to but no judgment shall be made here about the crazy shit you've done." What the hell? So, it is basically dropping me into the equivalent of one of Reddit's more trashier subreddits, but on the front page?
The homepage shows activity from basically the whole site, so kind of. With an account you get to choose which topics (i.e. subreddit equivalents) get included on /home.
The best part of reddit, for me, was that it focused primarily on the content, which had to be able to stand largely on its own. Usernames were attached to content, but they were secondary.
Other social media platforms are largely about the individual, the personality. The content, while present, seems to be secondary. Influencers run amok and are an advertisers wet dream.
Squabbles, self-admittedly [0], tries to combine these approaches.
When I look at their home page, as well as a few communities, the only thing that really stands out on each post is the "title bar" with someone's name and a follow link. There's no quick way to see what the content is about (unless it's an image), without actually diving into the meat of the content. I can't make a quick judgement call of whether I want to read the content or not, unless I base it on the person's name.
For some, that may be great. For me, it misses the mark and falls too far on the Twitter side of the hybrid approach.
If people find it a useful format, then I hope the site thrives. But I don't think it's the right fit for the niche that made reddit great.
I think both support the use cases of browsing, sharing, and discussing content pretty well. They just have different ways of categorizing and moderating content.
I'm not overly familiar with Mastodon (hence the typo in my comment), but my understanding is that it's a place to browse, share, and discuss content. The UI does appear to be more like Twitter.
And the Slashdot migration before that. I we really compare what happened to Slashdot and then what happened to Digg, the parallels to what is happening to Reddit are obvious. I assume the result will be the same.
I think this is by far the most important issue. Reddit killed online forums en masse. Where else can people go? There needs to be a viable alternative.
Great startup opportunity btw, but hopefully whatever the new platform is will be foss and federated, ideally like email so you can keep in touch after the platform dies
I heard some people suggest rss based tech as the glue to bind people together
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's sort of a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform. It feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
A couple work-in-progress sites have been posted here that seem, like yours, to be aiming for a business model that isn’t 100% ad funded.
I think it is really cool that people are trying new businesses models, ad driven social media has all sorts of awful incentives, hopefully one of you folks can win the next round.
I was originally inspired by Reddit & Slack to build https://sqwok.im, where every post has a built-in chat room instead of threaded comments. The real driver was in talking about current events such as this one, where refreshing the page became burdensome.
Q1) Sure, why not. Plenty of power tripping people out there wishing for a turn at the banhammer.
Q2) No. The communities are already failing just because the exodus of power users is causing a lack of self-moderation via up/down votes. Add to that random tyrants who haven't built the community, and there is no way for them to survive.
They are likely planning on eliminating external apps from using their API. Upon doing that, it no longer becomes feasible to delete your content. They get to keep it forever since they make it so hard to go post by post and delete it.
You also won't have any new features that you actually want, because they haven't listened from the get go and have never been responsive because you are the product not the client.
Hey TIL I am a "whining idiot" because I do use a 3rd app, refuse to use the official reddit mobile app, and see this API access as a prelude to killing off old.reddit as well, which is the only usable web based UI, the new UI is trash.
So if old.reddit goes, and 3rd party apps go, I have no interest in suing reddit.
I guess that means I am a whining idiot
//for the record I am not a mod anywhere on reddit at all
Maybe it’s too harsh that I used the term “whining idiots”, but if you’re going to make a retort you shouldn’t play into “whining” by being sarcastic. Sarcasm doesn’t win anyone over ever.
Popular communities already had a lot of people who wouldn't engage in positive discourse, only offset by those massively downvoting and reporting the "noise" comments.
Now that they're the only ones left, all discourse is disappearing, getting replaced by cheap quips and memes.
Seems fine to me. I’m still on it. It’s still active, I still see content. So some community is dark? Who cares. If i wasn’t subbed to it I don’t really care.
A real "neckbeard" would not be caught dead doing anything in a GUI on a tiny Cell Phone. neckbeards use USENET, which seems to be what REDDIT cloned years ago by putting lipstick on a pig.
If the current unpaid mods are in it for the wrong reasons then the new unpaid scab mods they find to replace them will definitely be in it for the wrong reasons.
Funnily enough, the whole thing was posted because a mod of a dead-ish sub (last post was a week ago, 9 posts including one about shutting down in the last month) was complaining that it was "clearly harming the community."
One gets the feeling that the Reddit leadership is "feeling themselves", and have lost sight of the fact that people can just walk away and suffer no ill consequences. In fact, it might even be in their psychological benefit to do so! Take a break, and maybe come back in a few months, a year, and see what distributed forums people have started. Sounds like a great thing for the internet, tbh.
(I finally deleted my Twitter account early this year, and apart from massimo I don't miss it - and turns out he's mirrored on mastodon.)
I’m far more addicted to scrolling on reddit than instagram. As good as modern social media algorithms are, my curated feed of niche interests and communities I’m a part of, is just a lot more addictive to me.
The format of mostly text based content (even if it’s an image on reddit, I’m mostly there for the discussion below) is a lot easier to open and look at for a few seconds than the mostly-video instagram/TikTok feed.
Reddit has handled this pretty terribly but I also think people are being unreasonable. This is no different than me creating a third party YouTube client, charging for it and displaying no ads. Why would YouTube allow me to do that? And why should Reddit allow third party apps to do that? Reddit screwed up in the first place allowing third party apps that they have zero control over to build a full frontend replacement.
They already have Reddit Premium, they should just say that you need Reddit Premium to use third party apps. The technical details would be pretty straight forward. If you look at the features of reddit premium the only one anyone cares about is ad-free browsing, which third party apps today get to give users for free. So reddit was having to compete with these third party apps.
I think it would be more comparable if YouTube had an API that the developers had built their apps on, that mods and power users had come to rely on, and YouTube shut the API down or demanded ridiculous fees for the use with a 30 day notice.
The Apollo dev initially sounded okay with the idea of changing to a paid API access model, but when the pricing and timeline came out, things went from a reasonable change to a swift boot for a lot of apps.
The issue, as I've come to understand it, is not that they're requiring paid access to the APIs needed, but the rate that they are charging. It's quite a bit higher than comparable social media sites, and was high enough that one of the more popular 3rd party clients (Apollo) decided they would close up shop rather than operate at a loss.
IF they'd charged a more reasonable rate, that would have kept the entire thing out of the news and there wouldn't have been a blackout.
On the other hand, I'd be curious to know how much the other rates people bring up (facebook, etc) are subsidized by those company's ad revenue. I suspect that reddit's advertising doesn't make them nearly as much money as Facebook, but I could be wrong.
It's possible that they need to charge a higher rate, overshot what they thought people would stomach, and took the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" approach when people threatened the boycott.
If I had to guess, most non-niche users will find their way back. In particular, consumers of low-effort meme posts, pretty pictures, funny videos and especially adult content don't really care where they get it from, and will likely be perfectly happy with continuing on with new mods.
> It's quite a bit higher than comparable social media sites
What site besides Twitter even has paid API access for something like this? I haven't seen anything to indicate Facebook charges for API access. Even then, you can't build a full facebook replacement with their public API's. I agree that the execution in terms of timeline was awful by reddit. But the pricing makes sense when you realize their goal is to kill off third party apps. Reddit charges $5 a month for Reddit Premium, so allowing a third party to charge less than that and deliver the same feature set is silly.
As I understand it, mods are mostly annoyed because they've been using the API to compensate for features lacking in their official mod tools. Making the API cost money means the unofficial mod tools cost money, and hiding NSFW content in the API means they can't moderate (or remove) that content though those tools.
I think the blackouts have got wider support because users are also annoyed about losing the 3rd party app experience they know & love (and I speak as one of those users).
It feels like Reddit could have provided a few compromises here: improving mod tools before the API changes, opting moderators out of API charges and NSFW restrictions and providing a reasonably-priced per-account subscription allowing API access (so us old farts could keep the experience we know and love, at a reasonable price for Reddit) would all be welcome.
The timing of the changes was another major factor. Most of the app developers I’ve seen comment were more than happy to pay for API access (assuming Reddit set a good faith price point), but 30 days is not enough time to make that transition.
Yes, if they let me pay to get rid of ads and continue to use Apollo then I'd not be upset. People are not being unreasonable, however, because reddit did not do this. And thus, no I will not install their app, and with this stripping of the moderators, will no longer even use their website.
I also agree. I was using the rif premium version. third-party apps removed Reddit's ads and offered a paid version instead.
I'm not saying rif is a bad app. It is uch easier to use than the official app. However, it is self-evident that it would have contributed to the deterioration of monetization on the reddit side.
It is not a civilized way to blow up huge communities by inciting people and setting fire to their seats because their means of earning deteriorate. Moreover, if the alternative is discord or a service hosted by some random person on the internet.
That's not really true. 3P apps don't strip out ads. The API never included them in the first place.
I think it would've been interesting f reddit let the API exist in an ad-supported way and had a TOS that would prevent apps from removing the ads for non-premium users
I think there is a real difference in the ratio between consumers and producers of content on the two sites.
The vast majority (99.9%) of YouTube users contribute no content to it. The proportion of users who comment/submit on Reddit is much higher.
As an analogy, a third-party app for uploading YouTube videos efficiently, without ads, seems like a much more reasonable proposition, because that app is tailored towards content producers.
The problem is reddit hasn't had competent developers in a decade and the market for third party tools exists because in a decade reddit hasn't been capable of providing a useful first party experience.
If old.reddit.com and apps went away I'd leave reddit instantly.
Offering the only competent developers they have a reasonable price isn't unreasonable.
I agree. Reddit has behaved very badly, but the kneejerk people demanding a cheaper than opportunity cost API have distanced themselves from sanity. It's one thing to say that one thinks reddit is making a miscalculation against its own financial interests, but it's an extreme form of selfishness to demand that someone else sacrifice earnings to provide perpetual unfettered platform access to things that were put on the platform of posters' own accord without coercion.
It's a true shame that your approach was not the chosen one. It would have been the right call in my view. But it's not anyone's right to get a particular outcome, and so many people commenting seem to think otherwise.
> but it's an extreme form of selfishness to demand that someone else sacrifice earnings to provide perpetual unfettered platform access to things that were put on the platform of posters' own accord without coercion.
In that same sentence you highlight why it's not selfish. Reddit wants content and moderation, they're not paying shit for it. It's only a fair trade for people to keep their tools and clients in exchange.
I've said this before but yea, Reddit can do both all by themselves as well. Not sure how profitable that'd be though.
Reddit benefits from content moderation, but reddit didn't make any mods be mods. Mods did that to themselves entirely on their own.
> they're not paying shit for it.
This is a nonsequitur. Reddit doesn't need to pay anything for the mods to experience compensation. The compensation that the mods get is having the subreddits be moderated in the way they want. It's possible (and unknowable) that, if mod were a position compensated in other ways, there would be fewer complaints about power tripping, but that's neither here nor there. Mods are already compensated by having exactly what they became mods for in the first place, moderated subreddits.
> It's only a fair trade for people to
It's the opposite of fair to expect payment for doing something that nobody asked you to do. If I come and mow your lawn because looking at a mowed lawn makes me happier, you don't owe me shit. I have already received my reward.
> Mods are already compensated by having exactly what they became mods for in the first place, moderated subreddits.
Basically. And now that Reddit takes that away from I don't know how many, what motivation or incentives does it leave for both current and future ones? Sense of duty (LOL)?
Reddit didn't take it away from them. They decided to stop. People were moderating subreddits looong before any of these apps were available.
And it's fine that they decided to stop. People have to move on from things eventually when they decide that they no longer feel sufficiently rewarded.
I could likewise not mow your lawn anymore. I don't owe you the mowing any more than you owe me payment for mowing that I did for myself at the time. You might have come to rather enjoy having a mowed lawn, though, so maybe when I stop you'll hire someone else to do it for more than it would have taken to keep me doing it. But that's at most a miscalculation.
I don't think you understand capitalism. Reddit offers a service for a price, and if I don't like the terms or price I won't use it. That does not make me selfish. Thinking that I'm somehow obligated to pay them is the bizarre take.
You're making up a position that I haven't taken. Maybe you did it on purpose, maybe on accident. Either way, you're arguing against something different than what I said. Nobody is obligated on either side. It's selfish to assert obligation.
You’re asserting users are selfish. I don’t know what you think you are saying, but in a business the customers can demand whatever they want and leave if they are not happy. That does not make them selfish.
You have twice now fabricated an argument that I am not making. I'm not fazed by this, but I think you should be aware that this is a thing you're doing.
I've multiple times said that neither party has any obligation to the other. The people who do assert obligations for others after the fact for self-perpetuated labor are selfish.
> but it's an extreme form of selfishness to demand that someone else sacrifice earnings to provide perpetual unfettered platform access to things that were put on the platform of posters' own accord without coercion.
I urge you to read it again with the newfound knowledge that, now three times without any attempt at course adjustment, you've so far been misconstruing it. Sidebar on preventing this kind of situation in the future: asking questions clears confusion faster than repeating the same mistaken statements again after learning that they're mistaken.
At this point I can only assume you are gaslighting. You keep accusing me of claiming a falsehood, even when I quote your very own words, and you make no attempt to actually explain your own words.
I don’t take kindly to gaslighting. This conversation is finished.
Four times. I can't (won't?) help a person who doesn't ask clarifying questions about things they don't understand and instead just digs their heels into the ground dying on the fallow hill of "I never misunderstand anything, so you must have meant this thing you did not say, and here let me blandly quote this thing I did not understand without asking any clarifying questions about it to address my misunderstanding".
Despite not being a Reddit user I'm quite enjoying this episode as it's revealing corporate despotism for what it is.
Nobody goes to Reddit for the great infrastructure or (ha ha ) the user interface. they go there because there are interesting people having interesting conversations. The owners and managers provide very little of the value that people derive from it; as Adam Smith said 'As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.' Here's hoping he site collapses and the residual value of the assets is frittered away on litigation.
Unfortunate, but it was pretty obvious this would happen. The blackouts lasting only 48 hours was a mistake anyways. The only way I see them changing course is if enough people:
1. Delete the official app
2. Stop buying reddit awards, subscriptions, etc.
3. Mass delete their comments (Ideally after backing them up so that they can restore them later)
4. Stop visiting reddit all together
From reddit, this could easily be solved by offering "Reddit Pro", where you pay X per month, get perks and gives you an API key that you can use in any third app you like. Everyone is happy.
9 out of 10 days most Reddit mods are considered the scum of the earth, it's a literal meme at this point how bad a lot of them are. They are the heroes this week because it fits their narrative.
Censorship, power-tripping, running subs with a iron fist, etc
Nobody knows or cares who they are.
As much as they'd like to think they are, the mods are not the community. The community is the people. The people are not there for the mods.
Sounds like you may need to find some different subs to participate in. Majority of experiences with mods in mine have been between very okay and positive.
I’ve literally never had a bad feeling towards any mods. The only ones that seem to have negative sentiment are those running massive subreddits (which come with insane challenges).
I don't know if you know this, but mods are not a monolithic group. Each sub is going to have a different set of mods, some worse than others.
That said, if you thing mods are not the community you are more than welcome to try and run a community without mods. In fact you should do so right now. Go create a subreddit without mods and link it here.
Mods are the stewards of the community. Not the community itself.
They help foster a good community, but once again - they are not the community and can usually easily be replaced by someone else in the community who is passionate about the topic.
> Each sub is going to have a different set of mods, some worse than others.
The problem is that the main group of people driving this 'protest' are the Reddit power mods.
Smaller communities with great mods have been strong-armed into this protest and have no idea why they are actually participating, because as per usual, Reddit power mods need to control the narrative and want people to believe that "Reddit is nothing without them".
They took the ball and went home. Some went through the motions of having a poll to try to legitimize it, as if the community would rather just shut down their subreddit for good because the mods feel disrespected.
No idea if it is common, but for two or three communities the community threads became rather more interesting than the rest of the sub, so there I actually know some of the mods.
I appreciate the work good mods put in but I'm only loyal to the concepts of my favourite subs, or to the people who post on them. I don't know of anything online like /r/signalidentification, for instance, and I'll continue to go there in the future even if the blackout has given me a chance to move back from Reddit as a whole.
I don't know why this is a problem. Moderators are intentionally "sabotaging" subreddits, and there are many who are against it. I also don't like Reddit's recent move, but moderators' powers are neither permanent nor innate.
What do you mean? How can this end poorly? Most people browsing Reddit are addicted with no viable substitutes. Breaking their addiction through continued blackouts would end badly. Replacing some mods no user cares about will hardly have an impact.
Yes, let's be realistic. Most people browsing reddit are not addicted. This isn't 2013. The site is massive, and, the most important users aren't just random "terminally online" people. Continuing to antagonize a key "constituency" in what makes the platform so incredibly valuable is a TERRIBLE strategy. Even replacing mods of small / unimportant (alone) subreddits is not a good idea (right now).
That said, I do think Reddit Inc. can solve this without having to "give" too much ... in fact, I think Reddit Inc. could come out BETTER off if they go about this the right way.
Fundamentally, that way is relatively simple and should be easier for them, as well - basically, showing communities, mods, etc. some basic respect. No more dissembling, no more misleading / outright incorrect communication, no more "royal edict" tone in decisions - and, ideally, just the most basic overtures to involving 3rd parties that have HELPED the platform grow and thrive (regardless of whether they've benefitted directly financially or not) ... some basic cleanup of PR and decision-making processes would be very helpful for all. Hell, even a simple apology for some of what has happened - no one needs to be "wrong" for that to be the case. And, I don't think there is any particular person or party that is right or wrong, here. Just terrible communications and decisions, probably "distributed", realistically.
If not, the platform likely isn't going off a cliff, but it'll be a shell of its former self and likely enter a classic decline a la LiveJournal, Tumblr, etc. This may be likely in any case, but they hardly need to guarantee it before they've even IPO'ed.
Many people using scroll sites are addicted and do it compulsively.
It does not mean they are “terminally online” or dysfunctionally addicted, but they are addicted and relatively unable to drop scrolling regularly as a habit.
Also, mods are volunteers and it’s completely normal for volunteers to be dismissed. There are no laws that grant them any entitlements from, claims to, or ownership of Reddit.
Reddit won’t become a shell of itself if mod dismissal and replacement happens. Most of the users don’t know the moderators nor do they care. A vocal minority will be upset and very loud for two weeks and then continue using the site as normal.
There is some value in not rocking the boat and keeping existing mods, but Reddit can easily survive replacing them.
This does not mean that I champion, condone, or endorse how Reddit has been acting. But I’m just stating that these platforms don’t fail as quickly as some people claim they would.
Groups of vocal users have been abandoning Facebook for years, and it’s still tremendously popular. Reddit is similar. A critical mass of users carries a lot of momentum.
Replacing these volunteer moderators with paid moderators is obviously not in the cards, which can only mean Reddit wants to replace these volunteer moderators with other volunteer moderators. Assuming anyone volunteers in the first place.
Given that moderation is a thankless (and, in this case, unpaid) job, do you really think that many people with good intentions are stepping forward to take on that responsibility? Or is Reddit accidentally gonna recruit a bunch of trolls who turn r/apple into a hentai and piracy forum?
>Given that moderation is a thankless (and, in this case, unpaid) job
And a shit one, too. Years ago when i was moderating "not too big, not too small" subreddit about certain game, i was routinely receiving death threats and stuff like that for deleted comments, bans and etc.
Yes. Yes I do think people will volunteer. There's never been a shortage of mods, in fact reddit has been way over-moderated for about 5 years now. I don't see why there would suddenly be a shortage now. People love having power.
What's better? A site where people love your service and aren't looking for alternatives?
Or one where you've pissed off a decent portion of your userbase, encouraging them to be on the lookout for alternatives to move to?
Reddit could be like, say, Valve, universally liked (or at least, not disliked), making it virtually impossible even with gargantuan effort to take market share.
Or they can be like Digg, their predecessor, or any other number of dead services over time who kept turning the screws on their users and found out there is indeed a point at which it is too much.
Digg and Tumblr are some clear precedents where users walked away and a seemingly robust network effect collapsed. Moving on to "the next thing" on the Internet is a lot easier than some people seem to think.
Some small percentage of Reddit mods and users quit in disgust, some come back, and the rest of the normies hang around until it inevitably dies post-IPO.
This is like a farmer's livestock protesting. At best when the hogs are marching around with their picket signs it's irritating. Most of the time it's just comical. By the end of the week, they'll still be pork chops.
The last 10 years of reddit history has been the mods teaching everyone that they're not special and no one will miss them. Now that the admins have turned around and say that the same rule still applies to the mods and even "everyone as a whole"... people are shaking they're heads and whining "no, you're wrong, we are important".
But the reddit IPO will go through, spez will be a billionaire, and a bunch of strangers will be moderating that subreddit you thought was so awesome. Which will be full of cat pictures and facebook memes, and the comments will be five thousand deep nested reply chains of bad pop culture jokes.
They remove the moderators and replace them with different moderator, then hope that people don’t care and stay on the site like what happened with Twitter. It could happen, the main Reddit alternatives seem to be actively trying to keep most users out of the site with archaic interfaces and site owner/moderator drama
My guess has been that Huffman is just following Musk. My further guess is that he has actually either seeked or been given unsolicited advice from Musk about standing firm. Despite all the whining and complaints about Musk's handling of Twitter, the masses still use it. I see Twitter links on most sites I go to. Huffman thinks reddit is too big for a loud minority to shout down and he is probably correct. Reddit will become a pariah for some, but still used by the masses and Huffman and his investors will get their money. I'm on the side of the strikers and don't personally plan to use reddit daily anymore, but I view that as my personal stance and don't think it will have an effect on anything. I'm OK with that.
These things are fairly simple to game out, I've got some money on reddit surviving but not without taking damage. That being said, I don't agree with it, but as people are well aware there is no good alternative.
The game-plan as I've found, (dons being Reddit mask, and I'm not associated with them in any way).
Was always, we own this data (not the community) we bought this when we bought out the founders in 2015/2016, we need to monetize it before interest rates cause an IPO to evaporate, we're going to do this no matter what. We don't want people being able to delete their content (Shredder App), and we can charge for access to this valuable corpus data, and we have all the control because we control the infrastructure. That's where they are coming from.
Now, If you look at which protests were successful in history, and which protests were not, you see that it really comes down to whether at the end of the day the authority making the decisions is responsive to the people demanding change.
Reddit has never been responsive in any of their actions towards external non-employees requesting changes. They've only ever provided illusory promises, or things they were already going to do (but didn't announce), and they had to fake the first communities until they could get enough people interested.
So, they'll let the protest occur for two days because it was planned, and if you crush it you look bad, and you can just ignore it because it doesn't affect the bottom line, people will grow tired and if it lasts longer they would have an automated way to replace the mods.
People will whine in their corners when that happens, and the people that didn't see what was happening, or didn't have an easy alternative will go back to their habits using reddit and supporting their overall decisions mindlessly because its habit. Click-whirr, fixed action pattern, no change happens. Its repeated over and over and over.
From what I've seen, None of the mods actually gamed out how this would go down and took pre-emptive measures to have a fallback and move their communities off the hostile platform. Some are scrambling to get Lemmy to do that, but Lemmy has been tested by who? I hadn't even heard of it until earlier this week so I doubt its a big project, let alone one that can scale to tens of thousands or above.
>Unhappy mods are free to leave, there's no need to pull the rug from under everyone else who doesn't care.
You are assuming that Reddit mods are mentally sound, unbiased volunteers who do it to improve the world.
That's simply not the case for a great deal of them. There is a LOT of agenda pushing, a LOT of powertripping and a LOT of mental illness at work. If that wasn't the case the blackout would have been completely site-wide without a time estimate.
I don't think that was a preference. I read it more as a statement about how Reddit's actions seem to be going against their own interest, and their motives are unknown....
u/spez is not yet at the FO level of FAFO, but he is getting close. If he keeps doubling down, he's going to find out just what happens when a "startup" like Reddit begins to act like twitter does. Specifically, Must can juggle lawsuits and lose money hand over fist. Reddit cannot.
Like, I get the naysayers, but VC funded companies only have so much capital. I have worked for startups most of my life, and the last time a CEO/CTO acted like u/spez in my arena? The company went from near profitability to bankrupt overnight. At that particular startup, I was actually let go because I asked a lot of questions. Then, customers started asking questions...then investors. Then, the lawsuits started.
Probably best for reddit just entirely kill 3rd party API access and restrict the power of mods. Arguably they should have done that anyway like Twitter did rather than just set prices high to sort of get to that outcome anyway.
You can't change the behavior without fixing the incentives, you can't fix ad-model incentives by being a user within an ad company, the users should just accept that when operating in that space and try to operate in spaces where they can actual own the platform. If you build a company on some other company's owned API you're on borrowed time the moment keeping you around no longer benefits that company.
1. Reply to as many Reddit posts as possible with irrelevant, low quality answers that are wrong and do not make sense. It should be purposefully bad and poor training data for LLMs.
2. Begin your replies with the word “This”. It lets others know you are in on the joke, but doesn’t reveal your hand fully. If Reddit starts throttling replies that start with the word “This” it will be embarrassing for Reddit to explain.
3. Upvote every nonsense reply. Downvote real replies.
Without taking sides, the main insight of this whole debacle is how incompetent Huffman and his team are. Dude failed an AMA on his own platform, how he could not know what that AMA was going to look like? He was absolutely not prepared. Absolute dolt.
"Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust."
This seems like a totally reasonable position. I don't want subreddits that I care about held hostage by some moderator with a vendetta.
Unpaid volunteers are a great deal for Reddit. Unless they’re rebellious of course
Legal no, but it does outsource modding decisions and blowbacks to a third party which solves a bunch of problems for Reddit. Eg having two diametrically opposed subs both run by Reddit staff would be tricky. If it’s 3rd party then problem solved - no conflict.
So they really want to hang on to this mod setup both for financial benefits and above. Just with more compliant ones
Voluntary moderation isn't free labor. It's paid in power, influence, or moral gratification which may work with small platforms, but will eventually cost the platform more than a salary. Reddit just seems to be figuring that out now hence the frustration.
I used shreddit to delete all of my comments a few days ago. I was shocked to discover today that they are all back. I'm deleting all of them again, but clearly Reddit is doing things on the back end. I've also read of people having their unsubs reversed.
When a subreddit is private, I don't think you have access to your comments to delete them. So depending on your timing it may have been unintentional.
For someone kind of out of the loop, can someone explain what they think reddit should do instead of charging for their API access? After all Reddit is a business right? What alternatives do users want reddit to do instead?
The issue isn't actually reddit charging for API access, its how much they're charging. $0.24c per 1000 api requests which for high volume apps isn't feasible.
Reddit has entirely failed at building their ad business, which every other major social site has done successfully. Reddit makes 1$ per user-month on ads, while Instagram makes $35. If they could even get to $2, they would be profitable. The API access issue is largely a side-show to this core problem.
The challenge for this is that targeting on reddit is harder than other sites which have lengthy profiles and interaction statistics they can use to do targeting.
An elegant solution to this problem would likely involve some product tweaks to incentivize users to tell reddit more about themselves, and a refocus on ad sales. Neither of these seem impossible to me.
> An elegant solution to this problem would likely involve some product tweaks to incentivize users to tell reddit more about themselves, and a refocus on ad sales.
How much more information do they need? They already take all that info [1]. I'm pretty sure 99% of the official app users did not turn these settings off.
Make 3P API access require a reddit gold sub. $6/mo and it lets you use whatever client you want and reddit gets that $4, not a dev who has to pay it forward.
This was my original take as well, but I now suspect the reason for all this and their refusal to accommodate the app ecosystem is that they don’t want third party apps at all. They want users on the official app where they can monetize the additional profile data in ways beyond their ad platform.
I don't think there are many claiming that the API needs to remain free - it just needs to not be so prohibitively expensive for the developers. Pretty much all third-party apps are run by individuals who are passionate about wanting to create a better Reddit experience, and not by some megacorp trying to fleece Reddit.
Under the proposed API rules I would have had to pay twice for accessing both Apollo on iOS and Sync on Android, which makes no sense.
To me, the most logical thing to do is make third-party app access a Reddit Premium feature.
Reddit wins as they would make far more money from me as a paid user than a free user, third-party devs win as they no longer have the burden of coming up with the money to pay a potential $1.7 million bill a month [1], and I win as I get to use the app I want on whichever platforms I want.
If they're going to charge for it, they should at the very least charge a reasonable price. They are not doing that, and are thus essentially extorting third party apps (who will not be able to pay the exorbitant fees).
Charge a reasonable amount instead of intentionally pricing third party apps out of business. Alternatively, make their official app as useful as the competition.
it's fun that the online community is getting a crash course in how protests and strikes actually work. As people have known since forever, a strike needs to be all-in or else it's too easy for the company to replace them with strikebreakers.
There's been so so many bad takes of "oh why don't they just protest by doing X instead" and 99% of the time the answer is, because we already know that X doesn't work.
This is a weird move. I wonder if the Reddit leadership aren't feeling their egos bruised a bit by this user revolt. A better solution would be to deprecate subreddit blackouts "due to a bug" wink wink
Moderation on reddit was always pretty heavy-handed, arbitrary and unnecessary. Reddit should have removed most of them a long time ago (at least from the popular boards), but doing so now just looks distasteful.
It's a bad look, though, to be punitive in the face of protests.
If they had simply terminated the mods prior to this, well, they both wouldn't have actually had a problem to begin with, and could have easily chalked the whole thing up to a push to be more "open".
> but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
That's essentially forcing a tragedy of the commons game theory.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the second best time is now. I for one will be moving off Reddit to the fediverse. Is it as good as Reddit?... no, but it could be better.
Funnily enough, yes, it is very easy to mass remove posts on Reddit with both the api and third party extensions. However, removed is not deleted. Another mod can reapprove a removed post and it would be restored.
Reddit already has the tools to undo this kind of sabotaging
There’s not much stopping Reddit from taking over the user accounts and just reopening the subs with the same ‘mods’ — but run by different users. The scariest part is that they could use those accounts and ‘speak’ for them — “we’re sorry, we changed our minds. we are back. huffman was right”.
They’ve already demonstrated that they have the power (and will) to modify existing users’ comments.
A large amount of subreddits also have discord servers under the same alias. This would immediately blow up in Reddit’s face and get them mocked by every new publication
> They’ve already demonstrated that they have the power (and will) to modify existing users’ comments.
Huffman was also immediately caught and has been restlessly mocked about doing that.
I still won't entirely understand where Appolo's 20Million figure comes from.
As far as I understand all the outrage is because of what the Appolo dev published, but reddit seems to claim that even for third party apps they get 100 queries per minute per user which seems like it would be enough? Whay is Appolo doing that this is not enough or what am i misunderstanding about 100 queries per Oauth client?
So if Apollo had 100,000 users (as an example) they had 60 API calls for each of those users (6,000,000 / 10 minutes), now they have 100 per 10 minutes for all of those users total.
Every post / discussion about Reddit and these new changes play right into the hands of Reddit's upcoming IPO.
No matter the outcome spez (the ceo) can simply point to how 'important' reddit is for the internet. How much people 'rely upon it' for their day/day information.
All of this mess simply raises the amount Reddit can raise in its IPO.
Just accept we need to see ads to pay for the bills or get a premium subscription. Personally I find unethical to use a freemium service and block the ads. Because how am I reciprocating the service they gave me?
Using a client different than reddit's official should be allowed upon the agreement to make reddit win something else back, e.g. subscription
There's a recurring theme that appears on HN: company is founded, grows for a while, then a new CEO comes up and screws things up. That even happened to Reddit already!
But what fascinates me is that I believe it's one of the founders killing the goose this time! At least it's a change from what we usually see.
> Is this a management strategy where the end game is: win or no longer exist.
I've seen a lot of speculation that Reddit could be close to running out of funds. If (big if) this were the case, then it truly is a win or die scenario for them.
I understand (note: I don't necessarily agree) with Reddit's decision to alter its API amidst the AI renaissance of 2023. OpenAI and their ilk recognized the value of this dataset for training, regrettably for Reddit, before Reddit itself did. Now, it's Spring 2023, the data horse has bolted, and Huffman is looking for dollars to wipe the egg off of his face.
Though Huffman should have foreseen such a turn of events, we all collectively erred in the same way when we surrendered our social graphs to Facebook in the 2000s. Furthermore, Facebook committed a blunder similar to Reddit's, allowing Twitter to establish their social graph before Zuckerberg secured that data.
To the disadvantage of thousands of communities, millions of users, and even the Reddit corporation itself, capitalist forces are pushing Reddit's leadership to recoup every possible cent of opportunity cost.
Reddit claiming removing mods is for the community, yet the community is against these API changes, and seems to support the blackouts from all the polling i've seen.
I think the blackout is a huge overreaction. They should try to phase it out to not financially damage app creators who now have to issue $10k-100k+ in refunds, but otherwise, there is far more disruption from the blackouts than having to switch to the official reddit mobile app.
This strikes me as a fair impression, as someone who doesn't really have a horse in this race. The job of moderators is ostensibly to foster communication and limit abuse within their subreddits. While i understand the motive of these protests, they appear to run counter to the moderator responsibilities?
Reddit would be right to remove these moderators. This protest does nothing for the users of Reddit. Why would they maintain a website of derelict communities when there's a clear and obvious alternative?
Huh? The protest is to make it possible to keep things working. It's bizarre to see the amount of complaining about mods making or breaking a sub and then at the same time the amount of people calling their actions impactless or leading to derelict communities. Which is it? Do users and Reddit need them or do they not?
The only option after fucking over volunteers is that Reddit can start paying people to moderate and keep their platform working. Give it to someone else willing? Good luck with that. Hand your house keys to a stranger, you're gonna love the new interior design.
> The protest is to make it possible to keep things working. It's bizarre to see the amount of complaining about mods making or breaking a sub and then at the same time the amount of people calling their actions impactless or leading to derelict communities. Which is it? Do users and Reddit need them or do they not?
First off, different people have different opinions. Pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of loose groups of people with different opinions, different reasons for associating with each other, is just silly.
Secondly, reddit and their users might need moderation, but that doesn't mean they need these particular mods. Reddit can take the subreddits from these mods, give them all the finger, and keep whatever users choose to say (which is probably most of them.) There will be no shortage of new mod volunteers. Many of them will be bad a the job, they can be weeded out over time just like usual. They don't have to pay mods, mods have no leverage to make such demands because there's a huge crowd of scabs willing to take the job and no labor organization laws cover unpaid mods.
> Many of them will be bad a the job, they can be weeded out over time just like usual.
How long would users tolerate that though?
> there's a huge crowd of scabs willing to take the job
Probably. Though I see few incentives that won't turn perverse ones, especially now that Reddit clearly doesn't want to support mods. So this will last as long as there are communities that haven't been ran into the ground. Those who seek it the most usually deserve it the least.
Sounds like a bunch on pointless turmoil for little guarantee that things would improve.
Sorry... but this was handled very poorly by reddit and its CEO.
Should have just disabled the 'go private' option. A subreddit, is not 'owned' or property of a moderator.
Eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/Brooklyn/, should not be own by one person that decides what to do. The questions and answers are made by common people that want to see their content that they posted into the subreddit. They are not property of some anonymous mod/editor but belong to the community.
As a user of reddit, my relationship is with reddit and not some primadona mod who decides to deprive the community out of vital information. I have contributed to many subreddit, and the mods never asked for permission form the contributors if they actually wanted to go dark. They don't own the content, and reddit needs to act.
I see just one primadona in this story and it's not (one of) the mods.
Unless you only use Reddit in a Google-result-and-bounce fashion, your reddit experience is directly shaped by the mods (unpaid) work, especially on the larger subs.
The mods grow and nurture the community. Reddit just provides the infrastructure, and a poor one at that, which is the reason for so many apps (including mod tools) are needed.
> A subreddit, is not 'owned' or property of a moderator.
That is exactly how reddit works. Reddit does not compensate the mods.. this is a minor compensation that they get to maintain their fiefdom. Don't like it, create a new sub.
This seems like a canned retort intended for usual cases of randos complaining about how a subreddit is run. But it doesn't work in the context of this discussion; if Reddit admins don't like how a subreddit is run they don't have to "make their own sub", they can just take control of the sub they already own. Make no mistake, moderators do not own these subs, reddit owns all of them. There is no compensation deal between reddit and the moderators, the moderators have no rights from the perspective of Reddit's owners.
That's just not true. This is not how reddit works. There are other rules in place that make it clear that mods don't own the subreddits that they mod. They are stewards of that community, but when they try to sabotage that community they can and should be removed.
Historically speaking, it has been incredibly rare for subs to be taken over like that. Subs have run with rules about banning members with at least 1 comment in subs they don't like (usually the_donald, mra, conservative, etc) [banning over non-sub behavior is a big no no for a long time with the admins], there are subs that aggressively automod, there are subs that ban over constructive criticism, there are subs where active mods are pushed out at any moment by a top mod, etc. Heck, there are a few subs that require photo evidence of your race or gender to participate.
Unless it highly embarrassed the company or it is an ongoing violation of their content policy, mostly those communities still remain as they are.
It's a reasonable policy if we're talking about a very niche hobby. If it's /r/news or /r/nfl where the name serves as a natural Schelling point, then it will attract power-hungry people who are able to indulge their drive to control others with a large natural constituency that continues to flow into to their subs without any awareness of its governance.
If the mods couldn't make the subreddits private, the protest would then have meant they stop moderating but the subreddits remain open. I'm not sure that would have looked pretty, and it would have taken time for Reddit to go through each sub and appoint new mods.
Buddy those primamadonna mods were the ones who made browsing r/brooklyn possible for you.
And in most subs where I've seen polls done, a hearty majority of the users are happy to support their moderators (on this issue at least).
> They are not property of some anonymous mod/editor but belong to the community.
The community called for this, and in most cases the majority are supporting it. Make up your mind if you're on the communities side, or Huffman's. Those are the options.
Calls mods primadonas while also feeling entitled to “vital information” and ownership by the community that Reddit says they own. It’s out of touch all the way down to Steve.
mods are not the ones creating the information. It is community driven. I have contributed a lot of info, in various subreddit, and I don't want to see it go dark.
Mods never asked for permission form the actual redditors on their decisions and they are acting as mini dictators. Time for Reddit to act.
true... or just get new moderators in that are ok with keeping the site without turning it into private/blocking access to everyone else. No one likes personal fiefdoms, and the mods are acting like local warlords.
Well thats the crux of the issue, reddit mods find third party apps improve their ability to perform their free labor. Theres no expectation that new mods would find the core reddit experience better.
Current mods can protest even after their removal by mass reporting posts on their former subs, causing the new mods to engage with the poor moderation experience on the core app.
It's not that simple, like to get the content you want so that it's just Q&A in a congenial fashion that takes moderation, like there's extensive rules here and elsewhere rather than it just being some unmoderated free-for-all. Moderators keep things on topic and civil, like certainly you want Reddit moderators to remove comments that are insulting others, threadjacking, etc?
Well, it's not public utility. A founder created the subreddit and a team of mods manage it to make it usable for you. Brooklyn and all other subs you use would be radically different with a different team of mods
Yeah that’s exactly right. The reddit mods are the worst type of drama queens. They should have no special power to control the user experience or site traffic.
