Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
It’s not that you’re charging for API access; it’s that you’re charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
I’m so tired of unchecked greed. It ruins everything. US Pharma is a great comparison.
Main reason why I’m gonna try and stick it out with Lemmy.
Hard to corporate greed a decentralised system :D
Pissing on 3PAs and saying “it’s raining only on reddit”
This! I’m happy to pay more for my Apollo Ultra Subscribtion, but their prices aren’t based in reality, they have the only purpose of driving 3rd Party Apps out of business. And then they also wanna limit NSFW content to the official App and nothing else, that’s affecting a lot of Subs I’m in (a ton more if I count my throwaway porn account) It’s just ridiculous.
Of course they aren’t going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.
My expectation… Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a “we did everything we could” and then go back, business as usual.
I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.
I’m team Apollo. When Apollo goes I’ll go.
It’s Lemmy for me from now on!
It’s been a good 10 years with Reddit but it’s time to be the bigger person and step away from toxicity.
I feel so bad for Christian. He’s been an absolute role model in handling this—calm demeanor, transparent communication and willingness to compromise (which Reddit obviously doesn’t have).
He’s put so much work into Apollo and stayed composed so far during the shutdown process. What scares me for him is the risk of refunds now: whoever subscribed to a premium tier can have the purchase refunded since he won’t be able to provide the service. I hope not too many will go the refund route.
A lot of people claim that they bought the premium tier even after the announcement in API changes to support him, despite 3P apps shutting down in 3 weeks. I feel like most users will be supportive and not refund, myself included (Sync pro)
I second that. Poor Christian. What an absolute chad!
I think you’re probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don’t see another viable alternative.
But I’m hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.
Perfectly valid reason to do so, everyone needs a place to recover. Those who need reddit as a lifeline shouldn’t lose that. Be well friend!
Thank you! And you, too!
I relate to this, I am in a number of support groups on Reddit. I ended up just making the knitting community here because I didn’t know what I was doing and now I’m a mod. I really want to set up a c/stopdrinking community here but that’s a mod role I am not willing to take on.
I so wish there were one here, but yeah, I don’t have the time or experience to make mod something like that.
I think there is a huge difference from going to a specific sub that doesn’t have equivalents and just browsing aimlessly. The aimlessly browsing is where they get the real juicy user data on what people engage with.
Fuck em.
I agree with you. I’m OK with keeping one foot in reddit just for that sub, but it would feel wrong to use the wider site.
This is me. If I can’t use Apollo or Narehal, Reddit is dead to me except when web search sends me to a Reddit thread.
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It’s their own fault. They didn’t have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn’t have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I’m really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
There’s this toxic idea in the business world, that in order to be successful you can’t just make money and be profitable, but your profits have to keep increasing year after year. This kind of runaway, cancerous growth is poison to the country and the world.
The founders want to be billionaires, as if being a multimillionaire would not be enough.
This is like if a Grocery chain said that they need to stop selling Lemons to little girls because the lemonade stands were profitable and they aren’t. The scale of the two businesses is not the same… none of these apps have millions of dollars in VC funds or thousands of employees.
But Reddit doesn’t need these thousands of employees, they’re already getting the brunt of the workforce for free (the mods). Like the other guy said, one hundred engineers to manage the platform, 100 customer service to help the mods/do admin and off you go, you just need a few unobtrusive ads to finance that. But that’s way too open and won’t turn you into a billion dollar business nor get you any love from advertisers or VCs, let alone going IPO, so we are where we are.
Agreed. What are all their employees doing? Is reddit basically an adult daycare?
As someone who’s 4 weeks into new job with very unclear duties, there’s definitely a point where a company loses a lot of efficiency because there’s too many people who don’t seem to do much for the company, even those who want to do more for the company.
On the upside its a very low stress job with very good pay and benefits, plus I’m getting to do things like leading trainings that I might not otherwise get to do at this stage of my career
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it… Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
And the Apollo dev said there were things they could have done, but the combination of 30 days notice, and the number of subscribers Apollo had who had prepaid for a year, (at a much lower price) the was no way to make that work. Plus Reddit had promised them no API changes just a few months ago.
They also could have saved money by remaining a link aggregator/discussion board instead of deciding to host media as well. Any surge in costs is their own fault.
They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them.
THIS!
Here’s your API passkey. If we catch your app not displaying ads, your passkey be invalidated.
Bobs your uncle, all the browser apps are now delivering your ads.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
If they were worried about money, then they should have remained a link aggregation/discussion board site instead of hosting media themselves.
I’ve seen people saying “Lemmy can never replace reddit because the instances won’t be able to afford to host video!” …My dudes, I have never once asked my forum / social media site to host videos.
It blows my mind that Reddit can look at 90% of its communities going dark in some way and think, “yeah, this is fine.”
EDIT (AGAIN): Thank you all for the comments on total subs. It’s still clearly not 90%, but it still appears to be a significant portion of the active Reddit community. For the interested, check out the comments below for stats. :)
It might be as Louis Rossmann said, it was a mistake to say "we’re going black for two days. They should’ve just says “were going black until you cange the rules again”.
Abstaining for two days is enough to break a habbit.
Reddit’s traffic might not recover for a while.
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Of course it’s up to the user to take action and abstain but if I open Reddit I see posts and can mostly scroll through my feed like it’s any other day. If I wouldn’t have known subreddits went private (and they didn’t sticky a message) I might have not even noticed since I’ll just see posts from subreddits who don’t participate instead. The power that makes Reddit so good is working against the community effort right now.
The first thing I did this morning was open BaconReader from my homescreen before realizing what day it was. I replaced BaconReader with Jerboa to try and break the habit. It’s not easy and I think Reddit knows it.
Is this for real? I wonder if different people’s r/all look different. Mine is a ghost land. I would know something is up instantly. There’s like 20 posts on my front page with 0 up votes from random ass subreddits I’ve never heard of. The content of the posts on the front page is wildly different than normal too.
I never use r/all. But I just checked and most of the top posts I saw yesterday seemed to be there still, so maybe there’s indeed not much going on.
What is Jerboa, if you’ll excuse my ignorance?
It’s the Android app for Lemmy
Lots are just going dark indefinitely so hopefully it hurts them. I went to look on there this morning and their server response is worse than Lemmy atm so I dunno what’s going on.
Loading full web pages takes more server processing power than API access.
This is browser and RIF just seems weird because blackout should mean less user load.
A lot of subs did that , im sure reddit worked do make it finite .
There are, apparently, 2.8 million subreddits. About 8,000 are dark, meaning that’s just over one quarter of one percent of subreddits. Even with some of the largest subs participating, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no massive dip in traffic. There are enough subs still open with enough mass appeal that most people will just look at some other subs for a few days. And I’ll be honest, even though I’ve made an account both here and on kbin, I know I’ll still use old.reddit (with RES and an adblocker at least) most of the time, simply because I doubt any of the subs I actively look at will do any meaningful migration that would lead to a similar level of discussion.
Hmm, 2.8 million subreddits, but how many are ghost towns? I wonder if anyone has a measurement in terms of monthly active users or something along those lines.
Of all the subs I was subscribed to, there were I want to say only about 10 that didn’t take part in the blackout. I unsubscribed to all of them. I am now subscribed to only subs that either took part in the blackout, or in one case one that opted to remain public (due to the nature of its contents) but is blocking all submissions for the next couple days.
For me, once RIF stops working, reddit will be dead to me. I will never install their official app, and 99% of the time I’m on reddit is on mobile. I have no doubt that old reddits days are numbered as well and that was the remaining 1%.
Not for long you won’t. RES and old.reddit are on the chopping block too.
IDK, he said in the AMA that old reddit isn’t going anywhere, and even if he’s lying I don’t think he would immediately do a 180 and kill it. The way I see it, it will probably be around for the foreseeable future.
He was just bullshitting about API changes in April, he’s absolutely lying about old.
Well if that ends up being the case, then I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Reading comment above yours i dont think the 2.8million is correct and it also states that there are only 100,000 subreddits with over 125 subscribers and only 34,000 with more tham 1000 subs. Of the roughly 8000 subreddits that went dark there are someof the biggests subscriber counts woth some having millions of subscribers. I think based on that that its actually quite a hefty number.
It’s also worth noting that many of those massive subs, especially the default subs, have lots of overlap in subscribers. r/funny with 50 million and r/aww with 30 million does not necessarily equal 80 million people because there are millions, probably even tens of millions, of people who are subbed to both.
Wait WHAT.
Yeah, it’s kinda crazy. I support the blackout but deep down I know nothing of substance will come of it. Their dip in traffic is probably not much worse than when a major city loses power.
I wouldn’t say nothing. I found this site.
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Why would anyone even want the job as a moderator on a dying site that’s going to be filled with trolls and spam? Heck, you’d be better-off just getting a job at McDonalds. At least that pays.
Indeed - I think they’ll manage to find mods but the quality is certainly going to leave something to be desired.
I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let’s be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I’m sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy’s active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit’s monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is ‘dying’, Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it’s a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)
Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it’s going to be a couple years off.
In every situation in real life where there is a corrupt person on the brink of losing their position of power, there are dozens of people silently ready to give up their morals to be the next anointed person of power in that position.
The next moderators will be the ones who innately want the new Reddit to succeed. I imagine the newly chosen moderators of the largest communities are those power users/top posters who have been wanting to be a mod for a long time. Here is their chance. They will be given free Premium Reddit and have no problem with ads because they won’t see them.
This streamlining of the mods is great for business – you don’t have competing narratives and you still have people doing cheap or almost free labor. It’s a thinning of the herd.
Reddit replacing the rebellious mods with complicit mods is going to happen, and it will be good for investors. They want to drive out the unmarketable moderators and users. They want a unified, top-down Reddit to feed information to consumers. No discord, no discussion, no possibility to have a controversial thread or topic accidentally associated with your brand. Total consumption.
The ads currently target people who eat at Taco Bell and worship Jesus (yes, one ad was really trying to get me to subscribe to a service that teaches me the “real” type of love that Jesus preached). This is the 100 billion dollar valuation Reddit that will exist in five years, and it will be successful.
And honestly, fuck /u/spez, but we would all let our personal Reddits die if it meant billionaire status and guaranteed generational wealth for our progeny for the next quarter of a millennium.
There are absolutely not 2.8 million active subreddits. I just spent like an hour trying to find data on this. Nobody cites their sources. I used a dump of subreddit statistics from 2018, when there were just over a million subreddits. (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/comments/8gzmmv/i_created_a_better_csv_textspreadsheet_list_of/)
There were ~34,000 subreddits with more than a 1000 subscribers. And 100,000 subreddits with more than 125 subscribers.
Looking at https://subredditstats.com/ the top 5000 subreddits make up about 30% (based on an estimated 840,000 posts a day by some reddit user on a subreddit that’s currently dark so I can’t give a good link) of the daily posts and surely far more than 30% of the daily traffic.
This makes sense to me. I was wondering how many were active, engaged communities and how many were shells or ghost towns.
somebody else pointed this out, but it’s honestly bizarre he’s going in on the “we aren’t making any money” ploy in preparation for the ipo
what’s the pitch to the investors? “please by shares in this unprofitable company, in the hope that we can become profitable by pissing off our userbase”?
“We’re not afraid to make the tough decisions and purposefully alienate our longest-standing users, the ones who know about things like adblock and try to hold us accountable to things we said a decade ago. Please give us money for this new sleeker userbase without any of those pesky olds.”
Completely agree. They want a tiktok or Instagram clone except for link aggregation. Happy people mindlessly scrolling and eliciting predictable reactions and emotions.
Cats -> 🥰 News -> 🤔 Injustice -> 😡 Helping others -> 🤗 Cool gadgets -> 🤯
No thinking just liking
This is exactly why I don’t like traditional social media. Doom scrolling + validation fishing + content designed to illicit a response (good or bad), is a no for me fam. Reddit desperately wants to be one of those, and it’s clear as day, and for that reason, I’m out.
Ahh, the Disney Star Wars tactic.
In Reddit’s defense (I’m team Apollo, for the record), it is a legitimate concern to become profitable. But drastic changes that infuriate the community with little time to adapt is very questionable. It’s weird to me that Reddit just blindsided Christian like that after he’s had many years of good collaboration with them and always showed good faith. I feel like there would have been a lot of more beneficial alternatives. From how they responded to the community outcry it’s clear that they want to ban third-party apps without downright saying it.
Reddit could have charged the actual lost revenue plus a reasonable mark up. Then the 3rd party apps could have survived on a paid subscription basis, and Reddit would’ve made more off those users than if they’d moved to the official app.
Now a bunch of them, like us, are jumping ship instead. It was a dumb business decision. And this kind of stubborn disregard for their users is the kind of thing that destroys companies.
The reason Reddit doesn’t want to do that is they can harvest and sell so much more user profile data if they funnel everything through themselves. That is what they are selling to investors.
Yup. I get it too. ‘We’ll lock down and get rid of the 3rd party apps, just give us a couple of months.’
I’m also thinking about what is the proper way to handle this LLM situation and how should the maybe grown threadiverse react to it. Mastodon actively resisted the attempt of building a central search service but a dataset builder can go stealth.
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This would be very good for Lemmy, I’ve just started an instance and trying to find content from all the federated servers can be a bit of a pain…
It’s not actually about the money in that sense. Don’t be fooled.
No, they want to kick out third party apps because that cuts costs and the first party app is way better for pushing ads onto users. That’s the real investor pitch, they just aren’t saying it out loud.
If it was about being profitable, why charge such outrageous prices?
If it’s about covering costs created by these apps, why suddenly drop such a huge change on them with an timeframe that can’t possibly be met? Why don’t they work together with app developers, communicate things well ahead of time and give them some leeway when necessary?
They just want to kill third party apps without outright saying it and the easiest way to do that is to charge costs they can’t pay.
They still have and will sell all the user data.
That’s the reason why I edited all my posts/comments and deleted them afterwards. Also requested all my data with a GDPR form, will also request deletion it they don’t budge
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I thought companies going into an IPO are often unprofitable/losing money, but still attract investments in the hope of future profits.
Something like that!
Guess I’m sticking with Lemmy, then.
This is the way
This is the way
That’s what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don’t really see how Reddit recovers from this. It’s sad because I loved it and there’s nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
Honestly fuck that guy. I’m glad that I don’t need to continue supporting this person.
Tbh, I’m really enjoying this small feel of Lemmy. I’m not even mad I left.
The only thing missing for me personally is some small niche groups like sffpc for example. Luckily a lot of these groups have discord servers as well, so I’ve started using those in place of the subreddits if there is no lemmy community.
I completely understand missing some of those groups. Have you considered putting together a community on this platform to bring some of that over?
The only time I’m getting into reddit again is to get the list of topics I loves so I can find their match here lmao
I still not fully understand lemmy butim starting to like it
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Although many arent showing due to the blackout, so I’m doing my best to stay off at the moment and check back once for those various subs once the blackout is “over”. Not a fan of the power trip and likely will only use reddit very sparingly on desktop from here on out. I almost exclusively used it via Apollo and Infinity for Reddit.
Have you got an invite to the sffpc discord? I totally forgot.
Don’t make the same mistake of giving all power a for-profit single corporate entity like Discord.
Alternatively, why don’t you guys start a sffpc community? There’s clearly interest.
Be the change, ya know?
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
RIP Reddit! This was all I needed to see to delete my reddit shortcuts from my phone and computer. let’s gooooo lemmy!
Same. Dude is acting like a spoiled brat digging his heels in when everyone is telling him he’s making a huge mistake. It would be like the captain of the Titanic seeing the iceberg and thinking “It’ll move”.
I think for me it was just the one last thing that pushed me over the edge. The content was starting to get meh and the bots were 👎
Like I said a few other places, even if Lemmy only grows to be 1% of the size, I honestly like the small community vibe of it more than Reddit. More direct interactions.
I’m hesitant to remove my Reddit bookmark. Too many good memories.
Might just burry it deep in my bookmarks
same here, the only reason I haven’t completely deleted my reddit account is because I still wanna sell some stuff there. Other than that, I’m not planning on using it anymore
Well Steve, it’s not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you’ll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that’ll be leaving.
I won’t argue against the need for reddit to be profitable, they’re a business after all, BUT, all respectable software that is paid has different tiers of pricing, usually ranging from single-user to corporate-deployment.
spez is complaining everywhere that they can’t allow corporate-level scraping of data to train AI for free, and that’s fair, but why don’t they differentiate “small” devs developing apps for users from “corporations” training AI?
I find it really hard to believe it’s too difficult for them, other paid software/platforms do it all the time.
The only logical explanation to me is they don’t want to, they just want to kill apps no matter what, that’s why the unreasonable prices for everyone, they’re just using the “no profitable” excuse to do that without a worse backslash than they’re getting already, tho they’re being quite stupid about it.
The reality is they can scrape the content for “free” into another database without using API’s index it and then train off it. A high price tag is not a road block for AI development. The just need real user interactions and it’s the moderated forums that make it valuable as most toxicity is removed.
So our next goal should be to embed “fuck spez” as a valid response into the AI.
If we all run a script that changes all our comments to 'fuck spez" I believe we can do it
AI training has nothing whatsoever to do with API charges.
AIs can be trained on stale data, or data slowly downloaded over days and weeks through slow & cheap bulk API calls. That’s not the situation with (e.g.) a third-party mobile app, which needs to make fast API calls to service user requests.
Since I don’t see a link to it in the discussion, here’s an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
