this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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It's an absolute non-starter. The amount of random... I'm a medium fish there and there's SO MUCH you have to know to mod a sub, plus you're constantly in PR mode with the users to keep everyone happy and enjoying your work. Communication skills. Bot wrangling and sometimes creation. Automod. Css. Rule modifications. Enforcement and reviewing existing threads for rule violations. PLUS you have to know the existing culture or you're gonna make everyone mad.
I kinda want to see it. Reddit would explode.
Good summarization. And I am sure it WILL explode if they dont start paying serious mods serious money for something that was done FOR FREE by the community before. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It's ironic, too, because their entire refrain is "we're broke". Well then. Now you lost most of your big subs and a ton of users AND you're broke. Guess at least we fixed the bandwidth problem.
Meanwhile it was all over ChatGPT training on their API. You'd think that woulda been step 1 to fix.
Right? I'd have talked to OpenAi and told them the situation. OpenAI can probably afford ANY api fee by now so that would've been the most logical first step.
Well whatever, reddit needs me more than I need reddit so I'll stay here for now. I like it here :)
I'll like it better here when I can set up all my retro gaming communities again, but yeah. Same as when the twitter thing happened and we went to mastodon. Community is much better for being smaller, and full of the kind of people who seek something like this out.
Be the change you want to see and set it up!
It's definitely gonna happen. I might end up just setting up a server first and doing it that way, it feels like the easiest way to go about things.
Maybe I'm missing something but is there a reason they couldn't have started addressing all of this with a terms of service agreement for the API? They demonstrated they can make exceptions for some accessibility apps, so if AI is the issue, then why not focus on that? If they wanted to force ads on apps, they can make that happen as part of the agreement too. As much as people wouldn't like it, this would still be a better posture than now.
The current situation appears so poorly though out to me, but I'm just a guy.
I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It's funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers
How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.
Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.
My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.
Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say "you must show our ads" and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.
I don't even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it's quite common. But the price they're asking is completely absurd and doesn't scale appropriately. They also didn't give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.
There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I've said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn't understand reddit. Reddit's greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they've made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.
I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?
I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.
They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.
It's so utterly bizarre and stupid.
It's just corporate accounting. They're profitable but they essentially cook the books to get the tax benefits of being "unprofitable". This is why amazon is still occasionally "unprofitable" even though they're growing year over year. You can't just keep taking out loans to buy and build new warehouses if you're actually unprofitable.
Huffman is just a greedy piece of shit. He, himself, made a comment when talking about Apollo that implied this developer is sitting on millions and he deserves a cut of it. API calls in terms of cost to the company cost fractions of a penny and plenty of large companies make money off their API. They could charge the base cost and add 10% for the profit. The problem is a realistic and reasonable cost for reddit's API would probably cost the apollo dev maybe a few grand a year. Like I said above, Huffman thinks there's a lot more money to wrangle out of developers there, but I'd bet the apollo dev was barely making a fraction of a percent on Huffman's net worth.
I was invited to become a mod on r/daystrominstitute a few years ago and within about a month realized that I didn’t have the time or emotional capital to invest in that job. It’s challenging, especially in a sub like that where there are pretty serious rules governing discussion and it burned me out really fast. The people who do it (well) have a passion for it; plucking some rando to be a head mod is going to kill a sub.
the thing is -- none of that needs to exist! this is why reddit started to get so shitty, no one can keep it all straight; it's simply too much considering how meaningless all the stakes are. i as a user never asked for constant review of threads for rule violations nor gave a shit about css or anything.
TBF a lot of the backlash against the protest on reddit also boils down to "it doesn't matter to me, so it's not needed". Fact is if moderation is done right you don't notice it. I add new t-shirt bot spam sites to auto-mod the second I come across them, for example, so they only ever get posted once.
Reddit has had css since before the Digg migration.
This is like how some companies view their IT teams:
The "backlash" is from the users who want no moderation so they can say whatever shit they want with no repercussions, and those are the ones who will be the most active once the mods leave and the decent people after when the assholes chase them off. Not a good way to attract advertisers.
You might not, but us very satisfied users of the shining beacon of magnificience in reddit's cesspool, /r/AskHistorians, did and that was (is?) a model of the contribution to civilisation and human knowledge can be made in a well regulated space on the internet. But those very erudite and busy professionals and scientists moderating there will in all likelyhood throw in the towel and I am afraid anything that comes in its place in another medium would stuggle to reach the same level.
If you want to see what a forum site looks like without any of that stuff, look at 8kun/8chan. I don't think you realize how unusably terrible reddit would be without mods.