Reddit to kill third-party apps July 1 with new draconian API pricing and rules

[johnny]

i refuse to believe modding is some herculean effort that they can’t do it. open the subreddits. 

[Jason]

29 minutes ago, johnny said:

i refuse to believe making Big Macs is some herculean effort that they can’t do it. open the McDonalds. 

 

[Air_Delivery]

Let Reddit pay for mods.

[Jason]

1 minute ago, Air_Delivery said:

Let Reddit pay for mods.

 

this kills the IPO (and the business)

[Kal-El814]

14 minutes ago, Jason said:

this kills the IPO (and the business)

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

28 minutes ago, Jason said:

this kills the IPO (and the business)

 

Then it really isn't much of a "business" to begin with.

 

Reddit is essentally Wikipedia with a far less user-friendly interface.

[Jason]

21 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Then it really isn't much of a "business" to begin with.

 

Reddit is essentally Wikipedia with a far less user-friendly interface.

. 

Sure. And as far as I know Wikipedia has never declared war on its mods like this. 

[Jason]

BTW, a lot of these subreddits had their users vote before taking the subreddits private. 

[johnny]

24 minutes ago, Jason said:

BTW, a lot of these subreddits had their users vote before taking the subreddits private. 

yeah i saw some results on large subs and only a few thousand people even voted 

 

casual reddit users had no idea what was going on and were wondering why half of their subs were gone 

[Spork3245]

1 hour ago, johnny said:

yeah i saw some results on large subs and only a few thousand people even voted 

 

casual reddit users had no idea what was going on and were wondering why half of their subs were gone 

I enjoyed all the weird subreddits that were suddenly being recommended to me on my home feed. 

[Kal-El814]

Imagine looking at Musk steering Twitter into the iceberg and going... that seems like a good idea!

 

Reddit's CEO did just that, naturally.

 

Reddit CEO praises Elon Musk’s cost-cutting as protests rock platform

WWW.NBCNEWS.COM

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Steve Huffman said in an interview that Elon Musk's cost-cutting at Twitter was inspiring and that the two have chatted "a handful of times."

 

Quote

“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said. 

 

The sheer boobery. 

 

EDIT - this one is even better.

 

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview - The Verge

WWW.THEVERGE.COM

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“The blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community.”

 

These people are so thick.

 

[GeneticBlueprint]

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. But it has changed for the worse. 
 

Reddit probably isn’t going anywhere. But it will probably change for the worse. 

[Kal-El814]

45 minutes ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. But it has changed for the worse. 
 

Reddit probably isn’t going anywhere. But it will probably change for the worse. 

 

Yeah.

 

And of course, Reddit is within its rights to charge for API access and to give a deadline for folks to get in line.

 

Charging a fortune and having the deadline be so close? Dumb. The perspective that Reddit was subsidizing these devs is just straight up magical thinking.

[Jason]

12 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

The perspective that Reddit was subsidizing these devs is just straight up magical thinking.

 

And there's multiple angles on why it's magical thinking. The power users using the third party apps to submit content. The mods using third party apps to keep the site running. The fact that third party apps predate the official app by about a decade and were an important part of getting reddit this big in the first place.

[BloodyHell]

I mean, reddit mods are the worst mods anywhere on the internet. The ceo is right that members should have the right to vote out mods. Reddit is the worst place on the internet. Even polite disagreement about the simplest of issues can get you banned with no way to appeal that actually gives you a fair chance at reinstatement. The critical Role, PS5, and one of the Fly Fishing subs I use are run by the worst people I've ever seen. I saw a mod ban a guy because his fly rod was cheap. Ive seen people banned on the ps5 forum for very clearly and politely stating their problems with a playstation exclusive. Not fighting with members, just stating their opinion, citing examples and specific problems. 

 

So anything that takes power from those mods can only help the forum as a whole. 

 

But I generally don't have a problem with Twitter either. I think platforms that are private should be able to police speech, even if I don't like it. But I also agree that if the private company wants to allow free speech, that is also fine. I applaud anyone refusing to censor political speech, including Musk. I've certainly grown not to like him, but I do agree that free exchange of opinions should be the default. 

[GeneticBlueprint]

Stop giving Wade ideas

[johnny]

did the reddit mods realize that nobody since the conception of the internet actually likes mods? 

[SuperSpreader]

5 hours ago, johnny said:

did the reddit mods realize that nobody since the conception of the internet actually likes mods? 

@Jason

[Spork3245]

5 hours ago, johnny said:

did the reddit mods realize that nobody since the conception of the internet actually likes mods? 

What? Everyone loved Namlas!

[Spork3245]

 

[chakoo]

16 hours ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. But it has changed for the worse. 
 

Reddit probably isn’t going anywhere. But it will probably change for the worse. 

 

Reddit isn't going anywhere. At worse case if the IPO goes poorly the CEO will be blamed and jetted for someone else. 

 

Twitter has a chance of folding or being sold due to it's stability issues, not paying cloud providers/services and mound of lawsuits that are constantly growing.

[GeneticBlueprint]

1 minute ago, chakoo said:

 

Reddit isn't going anywhere. At worse case if the IPO goes poorly the CEO will be blamed and jetted for someone else. 

 

Twitter has a chance of folding or being sold due to it's stability issues, not paying cloud providers/services and mound of lawsuits that are constantly growing.

My bet is Elon sells it at a heavy loss in 12 months. But it will still exist. 

[chakoo]

1 minute ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

My bet is Elon sells it at a heavy loss in 12 months. But it will still exist. 

I also think it will be sold but so damaged it will require a reboot. I also do put some stock in Elon’s ego being so bit that he just folds it to “take his ball and go home”.

[Jason]

3 minutes ago, chakoo said:

I also think it will be sold but so damaged it will require a reboot. I also do put some stock in Elon’s ego being so bit that he just folds it to “take his ball and go home”.

 

Anyone who's not Elon owning Twitter would probably revive it as long as it's not another chud.

[stepee]

is it true that fatz got voted out as mod of r/kindergarten? 

[Fizzzzle]

Has anyone else recently been followed by a bunch of random bot accounts? Over the last couple weeks I keep getting alerts that I'm followed by some bot account. My Reddit account is like 8 years old.

[Kal-El814]

22 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Has anyone else recently been followed by a bunch of random bot accounts? Over the last couple weeks I keep getting alerts that I'm followed by some bot account. My Reddit account is like 8 years old.

 

You're finally popping up on libertarian radar, good luck out there.

[Spork3245]

1 hour ago, stepee said:

is it true that fatz got voted out as mod of r/kindergarten? 

[Fizzzzle]

1 hour ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

You're finally popping up on libertarian radar, good luck out there.

My 18 year old self would have the biggest peen if that were true

[Amazatron]

As soon as the mods were threatened to lose their mod status, they completely gave up and again proved the stereotype of Reddit mods.

[GeneticBlueprint]

On 6/18/2023 at 9:42 AM, Amazatron said:

As soon as the mods were threatened to lose their mod status, they completely gave up and again proved the stereotype of Reddit mods.

Actually a lot of them are just turning off the NSFW filters for their subs now. I guess ad revenue can’t be generated when those filters are off. Which has made it, well, NSFW which is where I do most of my redditing. 

[GeneticBlueprint]

Here’s a good overview of everything so far from the Apollo dev’s perspective. He seems like a pretty reasonable individual in regards to all of this to me. 
 

 

[TwinIon]

On 6/18/2023 at 9:42 AM, Amazatron said:

As soon as the mods were threatened to lose their mod status, they completely gave up and again proved the stereotype of Reddit mods.

I've seen a lot of subs open up in different ways that make it clear that the protest is on-going. /r/Formula1 is only allowing stickied threads, a few very large subs are only allowing Jon Oliver or other weird content. Some are allowing almost anything, including NSFW stuff, which can't be great for selling ads.

 

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this is the beginning of the end for Huffman as CEO. He might be a founder, but he doesn't have any real control of the company. This is entirely a mess of his own making. I'm very convinced that he could have raised the API rates and not ended up with this level of backlash if he handled it differently in any number of ways. I'm not expecting the protests to have much effect on Reddit's policy decisions, but the whole thing is a really bad look for Huffman. I feel like his primary selling point to investors and the board should be that he understands the community given his long involvement, but that doesn't seem like it's been helping him here.

[DarkStar189]

On 6/17/2023 at 3:20 PM, Fizzzzle said:

Has anyone else recently been followed by a bunch of random bot accounts? Over the last couple weeks I keep getting alerts that I'm followed by some bot account. My Reddit account is like 8 years old.

Definitely.  I've gotten 7 so far. 

[Jason]

3 hours ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

Here’s a good overview of everything so far from the Apollo dev’s perspective. He seems like a pretty reasonable individual in regards to all of this to me. 
 

 

 

3 hours ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

Here’s a good overview of everything so far from the Apollo dev’s perspective. He seems like a pretty reasonable individual in regards to all of this to me. 
 

 

 

For the "herp derp open the subreddits modding can't be that hard" crowd:

 

Quote

Reddit's hostility toward moderators

There's an overall tone from Reddit along the lines of "Moderators, get in line or we'll replace you" that I think is incredibly, incredibly disrespectful.

Other websites like Facebook pay literally hundreds of millions of dollars for moderators on their platform. Reddit is incredibly fortunate, if not exploitative, to get this labor completely free from unpaid, volunteer users.

The core thing to keep in mind is that these are not easy jobs that hundreds of people are lining up to undertake. Moderators of large subreddits have indicated the difficulty in finding quality moderators. It's a really tough job, you're moderating potentially millions upon millions of users, wherein even an incredibly small percentage could make your life hell, and wading through an absolutely gargantuan amount of content. Further, every community is different and presents unique challenges to moderate, an approach or system that works in one subreddit may not work at all in another.

Do a better job of recognizing the entirety of Reddit's value, through its content and moderators, are built on free labor. That's not to say you don't have bills to keep the lights on, or engineers to pay, but treat them with respect and recognize the fortunate situation you're in.