Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices
old.reddit.comI wish they would just let Reddit die.
I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems.
We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.
Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.
Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.
> I'm tired of ecosystems.
> Bring back the 90s. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
Not sure if you remember the 90s like I do. The percentage of people sharing their own content on their own terms was dwarfed by that of content hosted on 'ecosystems'. In fact, I'd assert that the path to accomplishing the same is far less steep now compared to then.
Today's reddit mods are the same as Digg's power user's back in the day. It's an open secret that a few dozen or so individuals control the top 100 or so subreddits, and calling that fact out is often met with site wide bans.
Reddit died a long time ago, and it's time we let it go.
I don't even know why I got 'banned for life'. No recourse, no explanation.
Good riddance frankly.
I said something akin to this on a 4chan post a little while ago and people hated me for it, but I stand by it. People need to 1) get more in touch with the technology they're using and 2) take back control of their content.
If you are into tech and what it provides for us but don't have your own website where you can post and design however and whatever you want, then what are you even doing? It's 2023, a .com domain costs $5 and HTML and CSS can be learned in less than a week.
We need to leave these massively-populated corporate data farms and go back to specialized media like content-specific forums and personal web pages. We've oversimplified and under-stylized our potential web presence as individuals for the sake of companies who farm our data. At least with forums the hateful comments are coming from people within your niche and the posted ads (if any) pertain to your interests.
Bring back web rings.
No! Hacker News at least has room for reasonable discussion. Reddit seems to be full of mean-spirited 8th graders with a political agenda. The only problem is the amount of interesting content that flows by is too compelling.
Discord, Patreon, are.na, read.cv... There's lot's of smaller communities out there you just have to stumble into them (maybe pay a small fee for them)
Discord is just reddit with even more issues (no discoverability, completely closed, good luck searching for anything).
> This community sucks, but for different reasons.
For what reasons? I am honestly curious if we share same thoughts
Hacker News discourse is of a much higher quality than any other social media website.
That said, the priorities of the community is frustrating as a lot of it's driven by venture capital and money. I know it's Hacker News, but that doesn't change the point that in order to participate in a higher level of discourse I have to tolerate a bunch of capitalist stans.
The community also has a profoundly noticable difficulty with empathy for people outside of tech.
The community also loves to self-congratulate itself for how much better they are than other communities while still having their own issues.
There are other aspects as well like when people are talking about X but then commenters chime in and start taking about Y or Z, and say it's so much better and completely go off course.
Lastly I cannot emphasize how much I hate the articles that make it to the top where they say "X is bad" only to try and sell me on a solution. I'm getting quite sick of that as well.
Again, the discourse is great and I love it. But I still think this community suffers.
Also curious, as this community is one of the best I had the luck to find. Where would OP direct me for non-sucky communities online?
I'm still looking. Please let me know if you find one.
The best I've found is discord communities I end up in on accident.
Decentralized platforms with no shitty middlemen fiduciarially responsible to shareholders to exploit you even harder next quarter? Where's the $$$$$ in that?!
Hosting and building them…. The “rent” and “shovels” of the digital era.
reddit isn't going to die for a long time, even with 3rd party apps dying. Neither is HN.
peak boomer-posting
Ok Zoomer
Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right?
You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.
Addiction and the fear that reddit staff will just appoint new mods, like they've done before.
Also, the mods don't do it for free at all. They get paid to promote content.
All the primary mods on the big subs also have online social media marketing consultancies.
Most do it for free. Powermods often are getting paid to promote stuff.
Reddit can replace the mods at any time, if necessary with their own staff until they get volunteers.
That only works for the top few dozen subreddits, the ones that were once 'default' subreddits, they can't afford to pay people to sit and moderate the other hundred thousand subreddits all day long.
They probably don't care about that long tail. While valuable to individual users, I'm sure their business is an 80-20 like any other. For monetization, they just need to make sure the default subreddits stay moderated. Which they can with hired guns if required. This is how every other social network works after all.
What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?
Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?
Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?
Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.
Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.
Three big issues off the top of my head:
* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.
* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.
* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.
Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.
> Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.
Mastodon is a good example and counterexample of this trend. Gab was the biggest Mastodon instance, largely populated by the kinds of people pre-Musk Twitter banned or limited (and their followers.)
But the second (post-Musk) wave wasn't people who got banned, it was people leaving because they didn't like Musk and/or his changes to Twitter. And Reddit's own userbase came from Digg in much the same way.
Imagine if Mastodon had been easy to migrate to, Twitter would have collapsed like a popped balloon.
Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.
>Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.
To the point that quite a number of subreddits that have been banned, or that have been voluntarily shut down, have already set up their own clones on their own domains. t_d, drama, and fds are three notable examples that I can think of off the top of my heads.
HN is functionally like a single topic forum, which makes it a little easier to have rules about what is generally allowable content. Many single topic forums still exist, though in recent years have had to take a back seat to Reddit et al. Maybe if Reddit goes completely to pot, people will look them up again.
Network effect is the biggest one IMO.
If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....
Or if you have EU users
That doesn't apply by default. While the US is enabling people to be more litigious, EU will mostly slap you with fines for doing bad things. You have the option to... not do bad things. (Yes, I'm sure there's some odd counterexample somewhere, but this holds in general)
The problem is law doesn't fine for doing bad things, it fines for breaking the law which is not exactly the same.
In my previous company for a project we had to hire lawyer for more than a week just to determine if we were breaking law, even though the site didn't do any bad things by normal people standard.
In the end the suggestion was to just slap a consent form with consent rejection redirecting to some other site, which didn't made sense to me, but yeah that's what the law says.
> this holds in general
Way too complex to navigate that minefield, lawyer fees will be a big hit on the budget of any reddit challenger.
> Personally, I like places like HN
What are those places?
"Ask HN: Sites with the quality of Hacker News, but for more general topics?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302827) lists a couple. There's regular "what is the HN of <insert industry>" Ask HN questions, somebody would make a list.
Metafilter.
Hosting costs: Let's start with text only.
Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it?
Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?
The hardest part is going to be the community itself. Reddit (the board and shareholders) are betting that the community is too large to migrate to a better alternative.
Every time you upset your user base, you give them an opportunity to leave. Or, you turn your advocates into neutral. They stop being willing to do free work for you.
Reddit is dependent on free work. Moderators are a significant portion of that process, and they are the ones who depend on the API the most. If your moderators decide to do less work, your community starts going down in quality. If the community goes down in quality, they will make the decision that a smaller community is better than a poorly run community and someone else will capture that use case.
The question is if that will happen before an IPO. Given the climate, that IPO may be two years away.
Not only does it rely on the labor of mods and dealing with a lot of bad behavior. However, the admins also enforce a "code of conduct" on the mods and threaten the loss of the sub for lack of compliance.
Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site?
To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments.
If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.
Do you visit niche or speculate topics? They have far better communities than any of the default communities. My observation is comment quality scales with complexity of the topic.
It’s extremely hard to rebuild most of these high quality communities elsewhere. Often, it seems only the troublemakers/outliers are willing to move to another platform. They simply become a stain on the alternative platform.
Yeah. A new platform needs to offer something fun or interesting in its own right to attract users. Otherwise it's going to be an island prison for the worse members of the old community.
A golden rule of using Reddit has been to unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and subscribe to niche interest ones. /r/politics etc are huge but they’re dumpster fires.
There’s essentially two reddits in one: the default one and the enjoyable one. You don’t get the enjoyable one by default.
The issue is also that the right people need to come.
Generally speaking, the issue with new startup competitors for social networks is that the first people they attract a critical mass of are people who got banned from the other sites for spam or excessive toxicity, and once they’re there they spook potential new people. It’s the online version of the “Nazi bar” problem.
That's why I suggested piggybacking on HN's karma points.
The internet is still young, but full of once successful than failed social media sites. Myspace, digg, Friendster, Orkut, Google+, Vine, LiveJournal, etc..
I promise you, Reddit won't be around in 50 years. And it may not be much in 5 the way they're disrespecting their core audience.
There are many reddit clones. The value is completely in the communities and not in the technology.
r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.
What are some of those Reddit clones?
Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?
I think Aether comes close: https://aether.app/features/general/
There are reddit-likes on the fediverse (which means they are using the ActivityPub protocol). The fact that a software like kbin works on ActivityPub means that users on other fediverse software like Mastodon (twitter-like) can interact with posts on kbin. Discussion, interaction and discoverability are thus not limited to just the small community on kbin. https://kbin.social/
Here is a discussion by @feditips@mstdn.social on reddit alternatives on the fediverse. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884
>but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.
bogleheads?
> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?
One already exists in Lemmy.
I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.
Are "all of the laws and regulations" against "child abuse material" specific to the US?
Bootstrapping an alternative. Growing it from nothingness, being easily welcoming but not overrun by spam and malicious content. Getting to a critical mass before losing the goodwill with users and runway with whoever pays for this. This is a very significant moat, one that makes Reddit's leadership believe they can turn the screw without worrying about competition for now.
> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?
This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit.
> Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.
Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI.
It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative.
But anyway...
...AI really is going just great. /s
The irony that the technology we once used to combat spam is being used to create spam has not been lost on me
The Network Effect.
This is the point critics are missing when they argue about Bitcoin's intrinsic value. Bitcoin has no value other than its network effects. Facebook, Reddit, Bitcoin, etc. are valuable because of their usage. Which makes them hard to replace even if they're not perfect.
> Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?
Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.
That's not quite the whole story.
Moderation of large scale social media is a god-damned nightmare.
The automoderator feature of reddit seems to be very complex. You can configure a lot.
creating momentum is hard, even with a better product. Even before the internet, the slightly technologies did not necessarily get enough traction to unseat the incumbents
Can someone explain why this is such a big deal to some people? I legitimately don’t understand why this matters.
Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software.
I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users.
To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.
The first party clients are undergoing the enshittification process
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
They would rather direct users to content that Reddit wants them to see. High engagement content like quick meme pics, short videos or polarised political content that generates time on site and activity that looks good to investors. Profitable content like the awards programs. Not externally hosted content where the ad revenue might be going to YouTube or journalists rather than Reddit. Not comments discussions where a user might spend time reading rather than generating new page views.
This might be fine with you if you see Reddit as "that site for the memes", but for a lot of users, especially veteran users, it replaced forums and other sites for discussing hobbies or other content, and that content is both harder to enjoy as the official apps push you towards what Reddit would rather you see, and drowned out by the more casual content.
In addition, for many people, they would like an efficient experience where they can select what they want to dig deeper into and then get off the site, while Reddit would rather you doomscrolled for longer to improve their metrics at the expense of the user's time.
So it's been very clear for a while that Reddit's first party UX design does not gel with the aims of these groups, which, being veteran users and therefore having more time to get used to the site, are over represented amongst those creating content or in roles like moderation. And this has been mostly fine with these groups as long as they can just go to the refuges of third party apps, old.reddit and compact reddit and ignore Reddit's trend chasing. But compact is gone, third party apps are going, and it's hard not to extrapolate that to old.reddit.
the mods also use third party tools that use the api to make modding their subreddits easier. All of those tools will die, given the api costs, making the mods do more work if they want to continue.
Good point. I mod a small subreddit, and the Reddit app interface for this is... bad.
If I use modmail to communicate with a user, it shows up as an unread message for me from me.
I don't get it.
Very well articulated.
Imagine if Google started charging for POP3 and IMAP access. Either use the official Gmail clients or pay ridiculous client costs.
Sure, there's no inherent right to free third party client access. And you can obviously switch to any service you want, or start your own. The point is that Reddit is taking away features and workflows from users which have been available for longer than most users have been on the service. Moreover, the cost is specifically being put on clients rather than users: you can't pay for Reddit through your favorite client, the client itself is being forced to pay.
If you've been using Gmail with Thunderbird exclusively for the last decade, and Mozilla is suddenly faced with paying a billion dollar API bill or shut down Gmail access, imagine how shitty that situation is for the end user.
This is the best analogy I've seen so far.
I'm an Apollo user and I'll be dramatically reducing my use of Reddit if and when the third party apps are killed. The official Reddit app is nearly unusable, with a remarkably poor UI and too many ads. It also doesn't offer the tools for subreddit moderators that third party apps do.
The hope is that, despite being a small percentage of total users, third party app users represent a large volume moderators and high value contributors. If that's the case, this change will hurt Reddit enough to potentially roll it back.
What will probably happen is Reddit will tell us all to pound sand and we'll find alternatives.
> I'm an Apollo user and I'll be dramatically reducing my use of Reddit if and when the third party apps are killed.
Devil's advocate: are your current usage patterns making money for Reddit? If not, then your reduced usage will be considered a win by Reddit, all things being equal.
I think the people this change will hurt are in large part fine with paying a reasonable sum for API access. I have no idea what reddit would consider a reasonable number (if they actually tried), but for me it's probably in the $1-5/month range.
That's full API access of course, not the limited API they've had which doesn't allow e.g. vote interaction, nor an API without NSFW content like they are proposing now with the ridiculous $12,000/50M requests.
Of course they aren't interested in being reasonable here, they obviously just want to kill off 3rd party apps. I actually don't get why they don't just go out and say it, what they're communicating now is just death with extra steps.
Reddit charges $7/mo for Reddit Premium. I assume it's worth at least that much to Reddit.
I have no interest in 5 of the 6 perks listed as part of reddit premium, and $7 is more than I think is reasonable, but if that were the only option I think I'd pay it, assuming that the service remains about the same that it has been (which I doubt very much would be the case unfortunately).
Yes. I create content, which generates traffic, which generates ad-revenue.
There's not going to be a lot of ad-revenue if a sufficient number of users are like you that use 3rd party clients. Content creation/consumption on Reddit follows power laws, therefore the vast majority of Apollo users are consumers who do not generate any ad-revenue while costing Reddit compute and bandwidth.
The percentage of views from third-party clients is single-digit, but it's likely a significantly above-average percentage of those are power users who generate content, moderate subreddits, or both.
This suggests to me that management is not interested in making it a long-term sustainable business after the IPO, but in a short-term cash grab.
The native apps and website are horrible for a number of reasons. I definitely wouldn't touch Reddit with a ten foot pole if 3rd-party apps and old.reddit.com went away.
I'd say people using the native apps are generally unaware that there's even an alternative. This whole shebacle will - if nothing else - change that to some degree.
Curious, have you always just used the native app/website and never tried 3rd party clients?
For years, third-party apps were the only apps and some of them were really great. Then Reddit introduced the official app, which is inferior in every way, and now it wants to forbid the other ones.
> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage
The question is: Who is using these clients, specifically?
1. Visually impaired people. The official reddit app has terrible screenreader support
2. The longest-term & most dedicated users to the site, who are responsible for the content that everyone else uses & who want a) ad-free browsing; and b) a better experience than the official app, which sucks
3. Moderators who require better functionality on mobile than what the official app gives
These are all communities that matter a lot, even if it's a small % of users.
A lot of power users use third party software that offers extra features (or just a UI they are familiar with). Mods of popular subreddits are power users and friends with other power users. So mods or people they associate with use third party apps far more than average users. If the numbers are small, they are concentrated among people who have a lot of reach on the platform.
It's similar to how Twitter shut down several tools only used by power-users to force a small number of people into using their first party app.
Obviously, Twitter/Reddit wants the revenue associated with supplying the app. But it's not clear if it will be worth pissing off their user base.
> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage
Reddit's "new" UX is so dismal that they keep "Old Reddit" alive so that they don't lose their mature users en masse. On mobile, I would not even try to wrestle with Reddit's own - I depend entirely on the "Reddit is fun" Android third party client.
- Moderators use the poweruser tools in the third party clients
- I'm not sure how niche third party clients really are. Reddit started as a community of tech-savvy users who would not put up with the crap the official site/app is doing. There's probably a reason why reddit kept old.reddit.com online for so long.
You already got good responses. I will add something many don't bring up in here: The death of bots.
Bots are a huge part of what makes Reddit decent. This API change will kill them all.
> small number of third party client users
I feel like that number is not that small. Apollo for iOS (which is not only a fantastic Reddit client, but an exceptional example of a great iOS app in general) has about 1.5 million monthly active users. And that's only a single client.
As you can see in your replies and in many posts on Reddit, people using these third party clients (which are soooo much better than the first party clients) are likely to dramatically reduce their usage without it or even stop completely.
If this change makes moderation more difficult, it negatively impacts all users of the site.
I'm perplexed as to what to support here. For someone like me who brazenly hates Instagram, FB, Snapchat kinds of social media, Reddit is a gold mine of wisdom, advice, and content, if used appropriately. And the best way to use it was through third-party apps like Relay, Apollo etc.
The eventual loss of better user experience is saddening, but I'm not sure I fall into the category of not using it at all, because it's where I learn about a lot of useful stuff on life, personal finance, frugalism, unfiltered review of a product I haven't used yet etc. I hope this decision doesn't break the site.
I started to build an alternative: https://flingup.com
It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.
I love this idea, but the content I'm seeing on the front page right now is turning me off from using it. A lot of fringe political content (pandemic trutherism, Bud Lite culture war shit, etc.), which is not my idea of interesting since I can find plenty of that anywhere else.
That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth.
notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server<->server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing.
notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is: distributed: peers backup/serve content anonymous: but don't trust it to be psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavyThat makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.
Yeah I think the only way you can get an alternative to a major social network site off the ground without it turning noxious in the process is if you can mobilize a sizable existing somewhat-grounded community to bootstrap it with to set the norms. This is hard to pull off though… even if you get a crowd that large through the door you've still got the uphill battle of attrition ahead of you.
>it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died
Nobody knows what actually happened because the dev/creator stopped using all their known accounts in 2020, and yet the website was still working until Oct 2022 (see also comments here in case you missed it https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/zicasn/...)
A good reddit alternative needs to offer something fun. It can't just be a link dump/political soapbox, because reddit is already a link dump/political soapbox.
I know it's not popular here, but look at the success of TikTok. It attracts users because it's fun. People go there to laugh, enjoy themselves, and share stuff they've made. Sure, there is lots of politics on there too that users engage with, but that's not the main lure for them.
> A good reddit alternative needs to offer something fun. It can't just be a link dump/political soapbox, because reddit is already a link dump/political soapbox.
Huh? If reddit is a political soapbox for you, you're not subscribed to the right subreddits. They already offer something fun by default: the homepage consists of nearly only funny posts when I open it in a private tab right now. And that formula clearly worked
Reddit has lots of politics on the default front page, even on subs that aren't explicitly political. But my point was that a reddit replacement needs to have all the fun stuff that attracted reddit's userbase. It can't just be the political extremists who have been permabanned.
It is merely a tool, guided by the same principle Aaron Swartz implanted into reddit. Freedom of choice, freedom of expression, as long as the laws in the country hosting the servers are upheld. Communities can form and moderate the content as they please, but alternative communities can also form with perhaps less moderation. It is up to the users to make it what they want, not funded by advertizing, but rather with potential donations. It doesn’t have to be huge. If it gets too big, it should be able to split up.
Sure, I understand. Just providing feedback as a potential user of such a tool—personally, I'm not super interested in the current community it's attracting, and a hands-off approach to moderation seems like it's unlikely to attract the kind of community that I (or others with tastes similar to mine) would be interested in.
There's a couple neat glimmers on there, like the link about beekeepers, but if I wanted to hear conspiracy theories about Joe Biden or mean remarks about trans people I would just go on Facebook and see what my uncle's been posting lately :P
1% of your users will comment. If you want to have 30 articles per day, you need at least 3000 users if they post an article per day. Look at tiles.net, unless you focus on growing users, it will take some time. On the other hand, you could use ActivityPub in some way or form to offer content.
It's https://tildes.net/
Your website offers me to install a "Create React App Sample" app. Which makes me wonder what tech stack you are using.
It’s a react frontend with a standard API and a database, and Keycloak on top for IAM.
The API arguments are interesting from another point of view - who really owns the content generated on a site like Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker News.
Once I send this post out, do I own it? Can I claim some sort of compensation for my comment being used in an AI training set?
Does HN (or whichever site I post the comment on) own the comment, and therefore should be compensated for the comment's use in said training set?
Do we both own the comment, and both have rights to its use?
Depending on the Terms of Service flavor your platform of choice serves you, it’s generally that you own the content you post, but grant an infinite, irrevocable license to use that content for just about any reason, including as an entry in a dataset sold to a separate entity for use training a large language model.
I think this is a really important question worth answering by future UGC-based platform incumbents.
Legally it's governed by the terms of use which for most sites say something along the effect of you retain copyright ownership but transfer a non-revocable unlimited license to the platform.
Sometimes other legislation, like EU right to to be forgotten, GDPR, etc. overrides that and they have to take it down, but otherwise they could pretty much do whatever.
GDPR doesn't force a forum to take down content unless it contains private information. It's enough to just change the username to a random string and then it's no longer tied to you. Authorities in my country published guidelines about it because plenty of people saw it as an opportunity to get rid of shit they wrote when they were younger.
The mobile reddit site is so bad, it is basically unusable and they tell you to get the app. I personally don't even prefer Reddit mobile, I use Apollo if I have to moderate on the go, and it's really good for moderation I haven't used the Reddits mobile app for moderation but I remember when I did that it was terrible.
I understand the purpose of this and that if they raise a sufficient enough stink, it will likely get them to cave for the time being.
However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduction but overall, the writing is on the wall: Reddits corporate priorities are no longer aligned with the community’s.
I'm not sure how a "one-day anything" is supposed to get anyone to cave. This seems like those performative one-day big-tech "walkouts" where it's just people waving signs over an extended lunch break and then getting right back to work as usual. How does that practically have any effect?
"Go dark indefinitely until change happens" might get someone's attention. This is barely a blip on the radar, and even if there's a minor revenue impact, Reddit knows it'll be over in a day so they can obviously weather it.
> The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action.
If Reddit caves, it just gives mods more power and they'll use that for any future change or nonechange. What will it be next week? Force Reddit to shut down all subs that these power mods dislike?
Investors hate a shrinking user base, so this move can massively backfire.
It does not matter much if the value of the remaining users also increase
I wish Usenet becomes popular again.
The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale.
Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance.
I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing their future for short term gain. It's the only path to being eventually rid of them.
And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.
> The days of ... Digg losing to Reddit are over.
I disagree. Especially somewhere like reddit where the power lies in a relatively small pool of moderators (ie. a couple of hundred people), who aren't well controlled by Reddit the company.
These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.
And I'm sure reddit-clones have been approaching the moderators with lucrative offers to do just that...
Facebook, Instagram, etc. have shown that users are willing to put up with an absurd amount of bullshit and bad apps. While Reddit may lose the crowd who are aware of this whole issue, those users are likely the tip of an iceberg of "I just want to see ~~titties~~ kitties."
Reddit isn't a cozy corner of internet subculture anymore. It was instrumental in getting the orange buffoon elected, for crying out loud.
People use those things because of people they know in the real world, reddit isn't like that.
also I dare say it was more 4chan than reddit who got trump elected
Rubbish. It was Twitter.
cnn is probably the biggest factor
Surely, Reddit would just remove and replace these moderators at the first taste of real pain. Yes?
I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough. They'd have to decide between an influx of spam from having no moderation and upset users, massive disruption from upset disruptive moderators, or stale content by freezing all submissions to the site.
If I were in their position, I would have trained for this scenario, and already prepared a way to put entire subreddits into 'read only' mode which just replays history - ie. show funny cat pictures from last year. Then any subreddit that starts talking too much about leaving for a new platform gets put in read only mode. Let people think they are still interacting - ie. people can still upvote/downvote/comment, but it's mostly/all dummy stuff.
But... I bet they haven't prepared, and will be caught off guard.
>I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough.
There is never a shortage of losers desperate for a crumb of power.
Sure, there would be no shortage of applicants, and they'd all largely fall foul of the Douglas Adams rule about those who seek power. But they need not just people who'd put their hand up and do the moderation, but wouldn't drive all the users away (whether immediately or long term), which would be the hard part.
A lot of the depends on if you think the moderator role is truly impactful in a meritocratic way where better work is rewarded with higher quality communities and content V.S. a largely rote role which involves correctly implementing the community rule set.
If the former is true, the moderators aren't really "replaceable" in that way. You can fire them, but the output of your product will suffer as a result. In that interpretation the moderators are actually some of the most important customers of Reddit - they produce quality content in return for free hosting and occasional assistance.
If the latter is true then you can just fire them and it doesn't matter...but it kind of seems like no one believes that? If Reddit really thought they could fire them they probably would have just done it? I don't know what the truth is but I think the former interpretation dominates thinking.
“ If the former is true, the moderators aren't really "replaceable" in that way. You can fire them, but the output of your product will suffer as a result”
Sure - the cost would be higher, but is that cost actually higher than allowing insurgent moderators to retain control over very prominent subreddits and, presumably, shut them down? Doubtful. There’s no way Reddit would allow moderators to “take down” Reddit.
I mean, I think there have been plenty of examples of new moderation teams being able to kill popular subreddits. So I do think there's a good chance that the option is illusory. The subreddit will die if you piss off all of the moderators at the same time and it kind of doesn't matter if it's through a protest you won't listen to or by firing them.
The last time subreddits staged a coordinated strike like this, Reddit warned they would replace moderators next time. I wonder if they'll make good on their threat? I wish they would, the powermod situation on reddit is out of control. Part of the reason these coordinated strikes happen is because most top subreddits are ran by the same handful of people. It would do reddit some good to get variety among the moderators.
Removing some moderators would probably anger other moderators...
And those can be replaced with what has to be an infinite pool of people willing to volunteer as thought-police for a public company.
But will the users stay if they do that? I'm not convinced I would.
Users don't care about the moderators. Users care about the content.
Most people hate the mods. "Mods are gay" is a common refrain on reddit. The mods are the killjoys that removed your post that didn't conform to their hyper specific subreddit rules, or locked a fun post before you got there.
Mods aren't leaders, they're hall monitors.
I reckon most people wouldn't care, they aren't there for the mods. Others, although far fewer, would celebrate due to the power mod situation mentioned above. /r/all is just awful nowadays so it might be an improvement.
I can vouch that it is not infinite. You couldn't pay me to do that shitty job.
>These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.
That's not quite true. Reddit has the power in this relationship. See for example what happened when /r/NoahGetTheBoat tried to rebel
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoahGetTheBoat/comments/13c9fx4/rem...
>>
For all those reporting this, it isn’t coming down. If it makes you uncomfortable and you’re in the US, this is part of US “gun culture.” Work to change it. Edit: Good lord people, yes I can see that the post was removed by Reddit. We can’t influence Reddit admin actions, but we’ve reached out for clarification on the removal. Edit2: Reddit has clarified the removal, and it will not be rescinded. Not much else to see here.IMO the powermods are one of the main problems of reddit.
We need to go back to build open protocols. Protocols instead of programs. And then let Open Source and companies build the programs.
That was a fight we had "won" on the days of MP3 (very painful), SMTP, MKV, among others during the 80s and 90s. The fact that people are now more willing to go back to install "real software" (in the form of phone applications) instead of web apps is an opportunity.
'We' are building such a protocol with ActivityPub. What's wrong with it that you have ignored it?
Aaah!! I was just trying to remember the "facebook killer" . Diaspora!! IIRC ActivityPub is what c as me from its inception in 2010.
Nothing wrong with it. Good job what the team has been doing. Now we only need some entity to build the "killer" social network app using it.
Something like the Hotmail or (later) Gmail of SMTP.
I'll be waiting!
"Less Online" is exactly the silver lining I'm seeing from this new era of public facing websites slamming the doors shut, and treating sharecroppers ('creators' in the current lexicon) as inconveniences.
Disagree. Generally it’s porn/restricted content as the driver. If Reddit to better monetize the Platform decides porn/certain popular conte t has no place. Another similar to Reddit platform will emerge to host this less than above board content. That will in turn drive other topic discourse and eventually the downfall of the old.
See Snapchat for sexting. Instagram for insta-thots (Facebook has parents these days on it), and YouTube which originally was used for hosting copyright infringement (still is).
> Digg losing to Reddit are over
I strongly disagree and I can give you a clear reason why.
Internet forum / niche communities serve a few purposes, and the advent AI (I know, bear with me) destroys their existing moat.
A reddit serves the following purposes:
1. Persistent store of timeless information - ChatGPT style models have made this redundant. I
2. Updated store of current information - The problem with current information, is that it's generated where the users are. It is a chicken and egg problem, but that's exactly what makes it so dangerous. It takes 1 viral moment for people to pull off a critical mass of exodus, and you're never getting your users back. Like a siphon that will keep draining until your reservoir is fully empty.
3. fully realized niche hang-out spot - 20% of people create 80% of content. The 20% are embedded deeply enough in internet culture, that they can make a consensus move to another platform, and the other 80% will follow. (only applies to niche hobbies)
4. 9gag replacement - This is easy to disrupt and has been disrupted many times before. Reddit itself has already destroyed any sense of uniqueness that its platform had. No meme platform has managed to stay cool for more than 1 generational cycle. Reddit will be no different.
Previous reddit exoduses didn't work, because it involved banning a certain extremist/morally dubious communities. The alternatives were terrible, unmoderated and struggled to migrate the timeless information over. The next exodus will be normal users. Timeless information migration has already been completed by ChatGPT.
My favorite subreddit has already migrated to a 3rd party website. Moderation is a lot easier with LLMs. The last remaining piece of the puzzle is for a semi-competent new competitor to show up. Let's see if it actually happens.
> Persistent store of timeless information - ChatGPT style models have made this redundant.
This was only possible because ChatGPT-style models were trained on data scraped from Reddit using the (then) free API. While it may seem like bolting the barn door after the horse has run out, Reddit can ignore this and become obsoleted by models that keep ingesting the latest user comments, or at least earn some money out of it.
As far as alternatives for Reddit go, there's http://communities.win. That's where all the subreddits that got cancelled went. My favorite community on there is http://communities.win/c/nonewnormal which was an anti-lockdown and later anti-vax community that got cancelled on Reddit.
Reddit refugees, used to a finally manicured echo chamber, will of course find it toxic. However, it doesn't suffer from the problem of Gab and Truth social in that there's enough fun stuff mixed in to make most of the content funny and reasonably entertaining and not just overly serious excessively doomer politics.
Rumble seems to be doing pretty well too. However, nothing can replace Reddit for the unbelievable variety and ontology of adult content.
I'm not sure those days ever existed. MySpace is still operating, after all. I think we may have overestimated the degree to which network effects lead to an exclusive or monopolistic structure - it turns out a lot of people are pretty willing to have multiple active social media accounts, and that there are disadvantages to very large networks (pushing people to spread out into a series of smaller ones). And then there's federated stuff like Discord and Mastodon, where you can use the same account to join many networks, decreasing the modest friction.
Here's an idea -- there is already a sizeable number of users that get to Reddit via third party apps. Would it be feasible for a would-be Reddit alternative to form by having all the third-party apps switch over to the new platform overnight (as soon as their API access to Reddit is cut off)? That would get you a large enough user base to bootstrap.
What killed Craigslist more, Facebook marketplace or the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act?
>And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.
I, too, want to be hopeful, but how do you think this can possibly happen?
Metcalfe's law is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vecto...
TLDR: The more people share a method of communication, the more value that method of communication has. Social networks organically evolve towards monopolies.
I said this in a sibling comment but it felt responsive to yours, so you summarize, I think what we're finding out is a.) When the marginal cost of joining another network is 0, people will join "lower value" networks and b.) When you have enough people on the platform, the marginal value to the user of adding an additional user becomes negative - when you get to a certain scale, the new people joining are less likely to bring you additional conversation then additional trolling and harassment.
Anecdotally, HN is at a sweet spot for me. It's large enough that I'm just a person in the crowd (which I value), but it's small enough and the interaction is limited enough that I don't feel I'm likely to receive persistent, ongoing harassment. (I catch plenty of trolling, but it never feels personal really, I don't think they'll recognize me in the next thread we bump into each other.)
Specifically on Metcalfe's law, consider that just like with the internet, e-mail, the phone grid, and p2p protocols, it is possible to have a common network without centralized control.
I welcome you to Subreply.
I'm curious how the logistics of this strike are going to happen. With the old reddit themes you could just put a black everything over with squares in CSS but the new themes are so uncustomizable (especially in the app) that your average mass consumer may not even notice. In addition, anti-spam/anti-bandwagoning measures may be leveraged by reddit to censor protestors in the subreddits, along with banning of "malicious" moderators who attempt to enforce the strike on the most popular of the subreddits. While that would obviously degrade the moderation of those subreddits the sheer inertia of the communities will result in the consuming masses thinking everything is working as usual
Mods can set the subreddit to private.
And reddit staff can reverse that immediately. I'd be amazed if they didn't prevent huge subreddits from going private altogether without someone from the staff giving the go ahead.
And then the mods can program auto moderator just remove every new post or comment.
And then reddit can remove the mods, but then who will run the community events, common threads, and do the actual moderation that many of the subreddits use heavily?
That’d piss off a lot of mods who moderate huge subreddits in their free time for Reddit…imagine if those mods got mad and decided to let inappropriate things through that drew negative media attention? Doubt Reddit wants that press when they want to IPO soon
they are scared that reddit might remove them. mods seem to be a special category with pathological attachment to free labour that they see as their own instrument of power.
I've been following this since it erupted and am currently developing something that I hope will either enable the Reddit community to transition to a new home or force Reddit to abandon its paid API plans.
The first step in my plan is to implement a read-only API proxy which does not use Reddit.com's API but instead scrapes the necessary data. This should cover 80% of the API traffic, if it works then third-party apps will be able to transition their apps to this new API. So if Reddit does put their API behind a paywall there will be a way for developers to avoid at least some of the ludicrous costs.
I already have next steps in mind, but they really depend on what Reddit does. I sincerely hope they reassess what they are doing with their API.
Doesn't reddit's website use an API? It's new.reddit.com seems like some single page app bullshit, right?
The real problem you will run into though is that Reddit will restrict what you can access without login. They already tried to flip the switch once on requiring login to access NSFW content, and had to backtrack at least temporarily. I'm not exactly sure why they had to, but supposedly they have now added some missing feature to their web version that allows upload of NSFW content on desktop, so maybe they're ready to unpause. And the official API will block NSFW so I think that's returning. And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.
It's actually interesting how they do it. The new and old Reddit seems surprisingly similar in how they handle at least the initial page loads.
> And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.
Argh, that would suck. Not as bad as losing my Twitter but still. That said, they explicitly say in their API docs "We're happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions". So at one point in time they were happy to allow scrapers.
Why not just impersonate the official mobile app and use its API?
That's another option. Scraping the webpages isn't actually that difficult (though admittedly it is likely to be less reliable).
They will be back. I don't think they will stick to their guns.
They should step up their game if they really want to voice it. Delete all the posts and the accounts. Then if decision is reversed come back with new account.
What is a one day strike going to accomplish?
You want to strike? You strike until there is a real financial harm to the company and shit gets changed. Otherwise, keep your useless opinions to yourselves.
I know I'm not contributing to the conversation, but this is really funny.
I agree. Please let Reddit die already.
Just before I stopped using, some stranger messaged me (in the same language) and offered to sell me video sex with a young person.
Reddit has become a prostitution platform.
n=1 is a bad sample size. I've been on there 10 years and nothing of the sort has happened to me. If you don't like reddit then you should leave and find a better platform for you. I highly doubt reddit is going anywhere for a while because there is no easy alternative like there was when Digg died.
I see this as a grand opportunity to start new subreddits. It's been decades that the biggest subreddits are being ran by the same aging small group of moderators. The new ones may not be better over time, but it's worth giving it a try.
There's nothing wrong with reddit finally being a bit more serious about their content which is awesome compared to a lot of what is today's internet.
Maybe if they focus on making money they 'll stop their childish grandstanding and culture war