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Insanity. I’ve been around a few times when people were talking about migrating but this truly does seem like the most real possibility yet. And I welcome it with open arms.
What if they're doing this, letting us all get riled up, and then after the black out they go "ok ok, we get it. We'll reduce the cost down to insert still high but irritatingly doable number" and that was the plan all along. That they started outrageously high so they can land where they actually expected to be. A bunch of users go back grumbling but feeling like they still won, yet we got 4d cheesed.
Or I'm just high.
If this was meant to be a good PR thing for Reddit, they wouldn't have done that terrible AMA. I really do thing Reddit is dead set on their plans right now.
Reddit is using spez to cop the hate and take the fall. He will resign from his position and take a 'behind the scenes' type job at reddit. Then a new public face will be appointed.
Spez and his ego are too invested in it now. He can't back down, his ego won't allow him to. Although, I could see a vote of no confidence from the board removing him and them saying "Oops our bad, we've removed him and we're going to listen to the community."
I almost wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate move to make some of us leave. They view us as negative value users.
Demanding that a for-profit business forego profit seeking is like asking a cat to stop hunting.
It's what they do.
Communities are fundamentally not profitable. Maintaining community requires work and infrastructure, and all adding profit on top of that does is increase the price of maintenance.
The profit motivation, instead, causes people to do things that are inherently anti-social, and which injure communities.
Reddit is entertainment, above all else. There's no "community" in a forum with 2 million people in it. There is only noise. But communities found homes on Reddit, and Reddit has no use for them.
There's no profit motivation here, though. Costs need to be covered, but costs are also distributed. Transparency and the understanding that community is an investment can keep things rolling and free of meddling from pepole who want to abuse our psychology and degrade our mental heakth to line their pockets.
Reddit and their sham AMA will be remembered as how NOT to manage a social platform and its PR
Do we really need more examples of how to not manage a social platform and it's PR?
can we get some positive examples instead
tom from myspace
end of list.
Tom was one of my first online friends. Tom made a bunch of money. Tom took the bag and fucked off doing what he loves. He really is the standard lol.
Doesn't he post pictures of places he travels to on Instagram these days?
Man literally took the money and ran to persue his dreams. He is an inspiration.
I feel like this should be a feature of capitalism. Once you hit like $50-$100million in the bank, there's a ceremony where they give you a fancy "I won capitalism" gold trophy and then you have to retire to live your life. You aren't allowed to continue running corporations and politics after hitting that threshold.
Never forget what happened to digg.com People don't seem to learn, although they managed to slowly bring the site to a halt in 14 years which a long time so they are not that stupid I guess.
I don't think it's a problem of not learning the lesson. The problem is that you can't succeed in making a social network if you ask anyone to pay in any way. You need it to be useful, which means you need everyone on it, and everyone won't be on it if it costs anything or is otherwise gated behind even the smallest of hurdles. So rich VCs come in and say, "here's $100,000,000 to go make this thing invaluable, and then I want my money back with a handsome profit". Everyone in the game always knows that the product is going to get shitty when it comes time to pay the piper. Being shitty is a side-effect of making money. The gamble is that it'll be so ingrained in people's life than they'll begrudging eat the shit to keep using it. They're looking for the elbow in the curve -- how shitty can it be before everyone abandons it. That spot of maximum shittiness isn't a mistake -- it's the target.
Too late for me, already deleted 99.9% of my content. My account will follow after the strike. I want to advertise some mags (do we say that? I say that) that ought to replace the subs i liked. Then i'm gone.
Fuck them. Even if the 3rd party app debacle settles, there is still so much shit going on that I wanted to leave for a few months anyways:
They've been trying to forcibly transform reddit to be the bazillionth social media website for years now. Avatars, being able to follow accounts, I don't need that shit. I want a content-centric website with a discussion culture, not Instagram X.0 where the depth of a comment rarely goes beyond "yeah, that's cool". It's only a matter of time until you can't downvote anymore and they will implement some form of swiping or some other unnecessary shit function.
Their app is shit. Their new website design is shit (and will be forced on users soon 100%).
The whole NFT-avatar-embarrassment is a whole chapter on it's own. They still try to sell that bs to people, even after all of them lost 90%+ of it's value. The fact that this company runs a pyramid scheme as a side hustle should be reason enough to leave.
Then there is the censorship. I don't mind censoring nazis and alike, they can go to hell. But the monkey business going on with the subs that try to help with the migration to other platforms is the epitome of stupid. As if these people never heard of the Streisand effect. These people think we are idiots, and they let us know at every opportunity.
Honestly, even if they did do that (and I personally don't see it as likely) - they've slandered the name of third party app developers enough IMO, especially Apollo. Apollo's dev isn't continuing his app without a written apology for spez's blatant lies, and I'd say other devs'd do the same, so the damage has already been done.
Like, ultimately, I have no philosophical objection to Reddit charging for API access. I have an objection to Reddit a) charging ludicrous, unreasonable amounts with the very obvious intention of killing off third party apps and tools and b) repeatedly giving a middle finger to its own userbase, and particularly those who put in unpaid labour to keep the site ticking over.
Unfortunately a) goes against Reddit's express self-interest, and with regards to b) some people are stupid enough or salty enough about having their shitposts removed from places they shouldn't be to actually be on Reddit's side and going "yeah, down with mods!", neglecting to note that the mods are pretty much all that stands between Reddit and a horde of spambots, porn accounts, children, trolls and racists making the site downright unusable.
As far as I understand, the thrid party app developers stood in solidarity and they are scrapping the apps no matter what at this point.
The protest is more of a way to show reddit administration that they need to be community centric rather than profit motivated because the community can mess their shit up if when they need to.
I don't know what it will do, really. I'm just glad I got out and found this place. I hope more like minded people find it and move too.
It is bitter sweet, but I am excited to a new start in a much smaller (dare I say tighter?) community.
The short time I've spent here so far has been relaxing in a way. I don't feel rushed to get to the next post. The clunkiness on mobile reminds me of forums back in the early 2000s. I'm sure the nostalgia will wear off, but at this very hectic point in my life, it's nice to slow down for a change.
Yes, I feel like this too. It reminds me of my old BBS days, back before "web 2.0" became all commercialized.
This has exactly been my experience so far. I've been on reddit for about ten years and the last few years things just got a bit too big/hectic. I'm very excited about a fresh start regarding social media and really think this might be the way to go!
I agree with both of you @Rexxiter and @Ole, and the best thing for me here is, people actually talking about things like a normal forum.
Reddit has that "everything is an inside joke and to get upvotes, you gotta post the appropriate inside joke first" feeling. It's a collosal collection of memes in that regard.
This here feels like a normal forum with normal people talking normally about normal things. It's amazing!
I, for one, am going to miss the endless inside jokes that every subreddit has. But one of the perks of being an early adopter is that maybe I can see new ones appearing here.
Fingers crossed, this place will take off and we'll have all the inside jokes we need!
Also, check the side bar. The site is getting crazy traffic in its prototype stage. With this much demand, I'm hopeful (knocks on wood).
I don't want to get my hopes too high but:
That won’t happen. The high API prices are there to fleece the AI bros desperate for training data for their new models.
What might happen is that they might offer some limited concessions to some devs under some conditions for some period of time in the hope that this gets misreported as “Reddit says okay to devs” and the fuss dies down despite nothing having changed in the long run.
I think come July, Reddit will remember why websites offer free/low cost API access.
Everyone who wants the data will start busting out the web scrapers again. Chat GPT makes deciphering any obscuration techniques (changing class names, table formats, etc.) absolutely trivial.
The AI excuse is a smokescreen. If it was really just about fleecing the AI bros they could have made a tiered system where free API access is rate-limited. The AI trainers "read" millions of times faster than people, so a paid access that lets them read that quickly would absolutely be worth paying for. This has always been about killing apps that don't give Reddit absolute control over what you see.
Idk, seems out of character for spez and CEOs in general. I really think they're just that clueless. They think they have a website. What they actually have is a community. And now it's an angry one.
I just hope enough of us are angry this sticks
We've reached a point where leaders have realized that they can literally flip their supporters the middle finger, call them all idiots, and still have people consume their product. It used to be that CEOs used to at least try to hide behind PR image management consultants, but these days? Well, to quote our former US president "I could shoot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for me." And he's right. I'm not trying to get into a political discussion, more a societal one - this is where we are as a society - where leaders can do awful things and yet people shrug their shoulders and keep doing what they're doing as though nothing happened.
Louis Rossmann made a really good point about all of this too. A 2-day blackout is perhaps worse than doing nothing. All it does is prove that people will go away for a day or two, then come back and continue on like nothing happened. It proves that no matter how angry you make your customers, they'll be back.
I'm really glad to see so many communities have committed to going private indefinitely. I'm also glad to see just how many users are leaving the site "permanently" (one can hope they remain true to that). The only way that a company will learn is if they suffer consequences that actually affect their bottom line. PR doesn't mean jack these days, only profit.
I've been waiting for this for years now. This is the first time the migration feels real. Let's milk this cow here as long as possible until it gets ruined by investors like they do it with anything fun.
The real reddit was the memes we made along the way.
I have come from Reddit because the concept of the Fediverse seems to me a better concept, now it just needs to acquire critical mass. Not at all I miss Reddit, all my homies hate Spez xD
I'm curious how this'll impact platforms going forward. If it ends up being a fart in the wind, reddit recovers 2 days later.. I can see more companies taking the initial bad press knowing they'll get what they want anyway. Or, if it sticks like shit to porcelain - sticking to their guns, killing off their product and burning bridges and reputations on the way out - will it give companies the realisation that we are entering a new world now where such decisions will have real lasting effects.
I truly hope this is the start of something, I hope the same bleeds out into the likes of gaming when something is shipped in such a disastrous state at a premium price, apology is made then everyone goes quiet.
Being held accountable and to suffer consequence is something that's been alien to these people for too long.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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