The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next
techradar.comI'm done with reddit. My account is 12 years old with nearly 70k karma. I moderate a niche subreddit and have helped build a wealth of knowledge.
I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit.
This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.
> We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.
This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API.
The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. They seem to have forgotten this, and by violating the unspoken contract with the actual creators, they are at risk of losing them entirely. Social media platforms are useless without creators.
That unspoken contract is interesting. As I understand it, from Reddit's point of view, the contract was "We give you a place to a thing that you want to do, and will provide you storage space and bandwidth. In return, you give us the content you produce."
I imagine that this was, in fact, spoken -- in the terms of service. Not that anybody reads the terms of service (and I'm doubtful that any of them are really legally airtight).
It sounds as if users expected more, though I'm not sure what. Even as an unspoken contract, "free access forever" is a lot to ask. Those users can ditch Reddit, but I don't know if they'll find a (spoken) deal that's any better.
(Though I'm not sure why. Servers and bandwidth cost money, but not that much money.)
The facade of platform capitalism continues to deteriorate(?)
Unfortunately Reddit is probably right that this will simply blow over eventually. Most people are entirely captured by platforms nowadays, used to the slurry of the algorithm and without much ability or drive to really leave the lazy river to either find content outside of that or create content outside of that.
> I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit.
This is a direction I would like to see things going. It could just be that I mostly frequent tech-oriented communities, but with "self-hosting" as a hobby growing the way it has and servers being much cheaper than they used to be, I think (hope?) a lot of communities will retreat from these places to ones where they have more control.
This is also my hope.
I think 'slim' sites like HN really show that you do not need a lot of hardware to run a forum.
When you own a forum you can preserve the knowledge indefinitely, even if the forum is taken offline.
Reddit can close down your subreddit just because, they own it.
Subreddits like yours are the true loss here.
They are also the reason I think people stick around on Reddit.
Users show up for popular stuff like memes and videos. But they can get that anywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are all finely tuned infinite scrolling content machines. They stick around on Reddit because they find out that their "niche" interests have whole communitues of 20,000 other people there to talk about them.
Sadly this is also something I don't think many of the competitors can accurately reproduce in any kind of short timescale. It took over a decade for Reddit to build these organically, and they are really only sustainable because of the sheer size of Reddit's userbase. 20,000 users on a niche subreddit represents a microscopic fraction of Reddit's 430 million active users, so when you scale that down to an alternative with 2 million users (almost 20x Kbin's population) you end up with only a handful of users.
Some of these communities are going back to forums, but that isn't a real replacement either. A user subscribed to 5 niche subreddits no longer gets one place to see all their stuff, they have 5 separate forums they need to follow, and all the usability problems that come with them.
The venerable sdf.org might be a good home for your community. It's a nonprofit that's been online since 1987 and hosts a variety of communities. Usage is mostly free. They recently launched a Lemmy instance where you could set up a "subreddit" with a couple of clicks - https://lemmy.sdf.org/
Likewise. I made all of my comment history into gibberish as well!
What subreddit is that?
Countdown to when Reddit leadership does some drastic moves like (1) forcibly making some of the most popular private subs public again, (2) removing the mods who want to keep things private. This would effective take these communities under company control.
This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable.
Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on the API pricing issue, they are unlikely to win back support from the moderates themselves in the immediate future.
They are allegedly already starting. For example, r/AdviceAnimals is now back and they have deleted the blackout post. Plus the old lead moderator is gone. My understanding is that removing a lead moderator requires reddit admin action.
Reddit is using the same approach as Apollo: basing their business on a free resource.
For Apollo it was the api (for which they were willing to pay if the price was fair)
For Reddit is free labour and content, which they still want for free
While I don't have a ton of faith in Reddit power-mods, my HOPE is that there would be enough solidarity amongst the mods to make finding replacements difficult and I can't imagine investors would be happy to see leadership excising a potentially significant percentage of their current volunteer labour force.
You can always replace mods, especially if Reddit pays the new mods.
How does that square with Reddit's profit-seeking goals? Reddit isn't profitable when operating with an army of unpaid volunteer mods. I find it hard to believe they'd actually invest in proper moderation.
I think the biggest problem with employing moderators isn't the cost, but that it now makes reddit liable for the moderation failures.
I agree. If the subreddits remain closed indefinitely, I think the only options are forceful removal of the holdout moderators for the largest subs, or, and this seems somewhat unlikely, a shake up at the company. I don't think it'll save the situation, but I could see the brass removing spez if that means it would all be over.
I was thinking about this too... this seems to be the most likely end game. The best way for the company to 'handle trouble makers'. They will definitely lose some users but enough should come back to hold the popular subs up. I mean, really, if you asked me who the mods of the subs I frequent were, well... I do not know.
I completely support Reddit doing this in some cases. Mods have no right to hold my city’s sub hostage indefinitely without consulting the community. If they don’t want to mod, that’s there right, but namesquatting is not. Not the city I live in now, but I imagine support would be about the same as r/NewOrleans for an indefinite blackout (non-existent).
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1491zmn/moving_...
> What happens next.
Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord... Which is awful, with how siloed and noisy Discord is.
I hope I am wrong, and that a good alternative gains traction.
Discord will not replace Reddit. It's a chat client. I don't understand why people keep saying it's a replacement. It's not. I have tried!
It doesn't replace reddit, but Discord is serving community building needs. A lot of large successful projects do support via Discords.
I know it is incredibly inefficient with the same questions being asked and answered constantly, but it appears to be what we do now. But even with that downside, it creates more intimacy/connection instead between members. So it likely leads to more engagement, even if it is inefficient.
But does that scale? It's one thing building an online community serving 100-5,000 users. It's quite a different thing to build an online community serving 100,000-10,000,000 users.
Absolutely not. The noise of a Discord server of that size would be immense. The substance would quickly be lost to the non-stop noise.
It scales horribly.
But that has not stopped some servers from exploding in size. And its "fine" if you are just trying to shoot the breeze or shout into the void, not look for specific information (which is truly horrendous) or answer FAQ (which is even more horrendous than reddit).
Also discord stuff are not searchable publicly. The experience is completely different, it's not even comparable.
It doesn't scale, but most communities are not 100,000+ users. Most communities are relatively small.
> Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord
I wish they'd at least try Discourse first.
Discord is where knowledge goes to die.
Discourse and similar traditional forum style platforms have horrible UX.
The fact that topic replies are presented sequentially and not as nested threads makes large topics downright miserable to navigate, and responses almost impossible to follow. And I will die on this hill, I don't care how many grizzled old timers try to tell me this is better. I'm not a zoomer who doesn't remember the internet pre-2010, I've been here since the '90s. I know exactly how bad it was, and the better UX is a massive part of why Reddit largely replaced these old communities over the last 15 years.
UX matters. Nested threads are huge for good UX.
I recommended Discourse for it's overall approachability and lack of confidence in my ability to convince a community moving to Discord to something more complicated.
People don't like upfront investment for longer term gains so sequential is a way easier sell.
I guess I'm saying my Discourse recommendation is damage control much like a tourniquet and not my ideal.
I don't know, discord makes me hate life less than discourse.
For me Discord is not a replacement, I find difficult to follow unless the channel is almost deserted then what’s the point
I wonder if there is an opportunity for some grassroots data liberation from Discord. I.e. if a tool that allows admins / users to scrape and mirror discord server data somewhere.
Also how come there is no more open, not CCP-aligned Discord alternative yet?
Isn't that what matrix is?
hmm is there a way to access Discord through Matrix?
I meant not replacing Discord but rather connecting to it / siphoning the user-generated data to a more open place
I have to agree with others. Although Discord has it's uses, it would be really hard to migrate a subreddit, and still operate efficiently.
Where would they advertise their Discord servers though? You still need to use the Reddit platform to carry over large user bases - which means at one point mods should briefly end blackout. But how to coordinate that without giving in?
There's a message greeting you when you visit a subreddit that's gone dark[1]. They could have an invite there, if that's their plan.
I'm afraid you might be right. Most of the reddit clones or alternatives are cesspits of right wing hate, I guess that's because historically the only people fleeing reddit have been those that are too toxic for reddit to allow.
I'm hopeful the atmosphere changes, but I believe discord or hive might be the best positioned to be the refuge. Discord is awful for anything not transient. Hive has the whole web3 nonsense behind it. But they both seem more....balanced in their audience who uses them.
I'm not super familiar with how the fediverse works, but I was able to join a Lemmy instance that doesn't seem to fit that bill.
> but I was able to join a Lemmy instance that doesn't seem to fit that bil
Yeah, the way to avoid racism other cess pools on Mastodon seems to be choosing a server that mods and frequently updates ban lists.
https://hachyderm.io tops that list for me.
A few hard truths
- No alternative is going to show up which can host anywhere near the amount of traffic that reddit receives/received. That takes a lot more money than any new contender can drum up.
- reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit
- A lot of users are going to wander back over to post-blackout replacement subreddits
- A lot of communities are just going to disappear. It breaks my heart as a member of a sport-based subreddit, there's just no good substitute. If I were in charge of a sports league, I might be working on some sort of equivalent because for me personally a lot of the joy of watching a sport is sharing reactions with others. I can see my interest just fizzling out.
> It breaks my heart as a member of a sport-based subreddit, there's just no good substitute.
I'm in the same boat. I love /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball, from the consistently formatted game threads and post-game threads, to the clever offseason shitposting [1]. It's sad to see reddit putting on the brakes on their API that power the moderation tools which make those subreddits so good.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/5nbcgu/examining_the_e...
There is a base alternative, which I'm going to choose, and that's just to use social media less. Not going back to Reddit even if another alternative doesn't pop up.
> reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit
They could, however, take a saner approach to making a profit. If profit was their actual goal, for instance, it's entirely likely that they could actually make more money by either reducing the API pricing or charge it to the user (by making it a function of Reddit Gold). Of course, that assumes that money is the goal of the API changes, which was never obvious to me.
I mod three niche communities on Reddit. Two are for sites I own and run, and the third is for TTRPG generators. I made the first two private with no intention of making them public again. The third I'm not comfortable making unilateral decisions on, so I'm just un-modding myself for it.
Now I'm considering starting up old-school forums to replace the first two subreddits. It would be a lot of work to manage them over time and I'm not sure that's the best use of my time. However... they would be communities fully under my control.
Decisions, decisions.
Fully under your control and fully on your dime. Your traffic may be low enough where it's not all that expensive. But it is on your dime.
Then again, that appears to be the future of Reddit, doesn't it? I've never created a subreddit but from what I've been able to gather you all are using tools to assist with your moderator duties and now those tools are going to have to pay Reddit for API access, meaning soon enough you're going to be paying for using those tools.
Either way it looks like you're going to have to pay. It's going to be a question of how much are you going to have to pay and how much freedom of control you'd like.
I already have infrastructure that it could be put on. Assuming the traffic remains low, that doesn't worry me.
I've decided to go ahead and do it. Now I'm looking at my options. Flarum and Lemmy seem reasonable.
Lemmy apparently has controversy with its developers, with Kbin being given as the alternative. So you could look into Kbin aswell.
When you send out a memo telling employees not to wear clothes that show your company's name and brand, that's how you know you're making good changes right?
dominion voting systems may have sent out a similar memo to their employees. the company was definitely not the one doing bad in that case. it's often the case that there's some group that is irrationally upset at some company, the company warning it's employees about the risks of that doesn't seem to reflect anything but good on the company.
If any subreddit mods read this, thank you for doing this. I understand that taking down something that you poured so much energy and effort into is a tough decision. But it's for the best.
I used shreddit[1] to remove my account's posts/comments. It's infuriating to read this line:
> Back in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the site wanted to start getting paid for helping to train some of the big AI chatbots.
I hope this protest shows the leadership that users have the power.
Update (Wednesday, June 14): we've updated this article with news about a leaked memo from Reddit's CEO, which could prolong the blackout.
Who owns the user-generated content? Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit? One could potentially even claim the same username by verifying their ownership of it on Reddit. Of course it's not easy but a mass social migration might be more practical than mass segregation in hopes of something else to slowly gaining traction.
>Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit?
Lol, no; this is why I rarely worry about developers encroaching on operations concerns. A completely trustworthy site (https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-comments-are-pub...) states that that reddit had 303 million posts and 2 billion comments, in 2020. Could you imagine, how long it would take, and how much you would need to spend, on compute, to scrape 5+ million comments a day, using something like Selenium? I am guessing that it's a number approaching infinity. Plus, they would figure it out and just shut you down.
Interesting read (from HN today) about crawling a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours, for $580, over 10 years ago.
Reddit owns the content so you can’t do that.
Tell that to OpenAI...
I was about to ask this exact thing.
Remember how when Linus got mad/tired of the previous version control system (Bit-something?) he went ahead and started git. I wonder if anyone is mad enough.
Is it possible to implement an alt-reddit in git? Every comment is a branch of the parent. Every post thread is a tree after all. If you could attach metadata to a branch you could keep counters (for upvotes-downvotes), golds given, etc. I know not much of how git works internally so there are probably many caveats (how does editing a comment work without branching). Sharing whole posts could be a matter of letting someone else checkout a post URL and you could dig to get all the comments under there. You could also have 'post aggregators' (like torrent) and some sort of UI that displays what reddit does today. So technically you could have decentralized alt-sub-reddits that advertise themselves/content to aggregators.
Let's hope we don't repeat the same greedy walled datagarden monopoly and privatization/theft of information -problems with the next generation of social media. Does this shit culture ever change?
We have federation now, which should hopefully kill the datagarden model once and for all.
There's serious usability & scalability issues with existing federation right now, but these traditional social platforms killing 3P clients is a huge boon for federated ecosystems. Just look at Tweetbot-- which used to be considered one of the best UX for Twitter-- and how it's transformed into Ivory.
I'm hoping that a 3P developer brings some of their UX skills to Lemmy or Kbin, which would be really beneficial for bringing new users into the ActivityPub world
I would love to contribute. I don't know much about federated ecosystems, though. If you do, could you point me to the right direction? (Google is shit as you know.)
I installed Matrix and Synapse to my local server, but the installation process is not good, and the usability is bad. Clients are super buggy. Unusable, basically, as information got lost all the time.
I'm a game designer and a low-level game engine programmer, grumpy about slow hard-to-use software, so maybe there's a higher chance of doing more good than harm, lol.
Definitely use some of the platforms as a user, first. I personally use Lemmy & to a much lesser extent, Mastodon. I think once you start using them and understanding how the web UIs work (or don't), it'll help you build a mental model around the problems with UX and (partially) scalability of how federation works in these systems today.
You can always go down the ActivityPub rabbit hole (maybe starting with something like https://dev.to/thasmin/getting-started-with-activitypub-2mgm) to understand the federation protocol, but this may be less useful if you're interested in the UX problem
Check out join-lemmy.org for Lemmy instances to join. You should be able to find more info there, or at least ask for more.
This is reminding me of when all the Vine power creators banded together and tried to make demands or they would "stop creating" and all it resulted in was Twitter deleting them and their entire website.
Don't be surprised if Reddit starts taking some pretty drastic action here on the grounds that they're violating one of the site's oldest rules which is "don't break Reddit".
Not saying it's good or bad, but just that this is almost definitely not going to go the way these people think it will.
Reddit will take over the subreddits and a few moderators will lose their privs. About 25% of users will permanently leave. Reddit will go on but it won't be what it was unless the board takes drastic action but even then it's probably too late.
25 seems a bit high. I would be surprised if it reached 1%.
And Tiktok took that and made it a billion dollar business. Twitter sure showed them.
Twitter is also a billion dollar business ... too bad it used to be a $44 billion business.
Just goes to show you that it doesn't matter how much of a lead or the millions you can pour into a blackhole, hubris luckily makes everyone an equal player.
I previously said this is their Digg redesign moment. I hope I'm wrong! There has to be some middle ground. Not sure what the pricing models are, but maybe revenue sharing or reasonable fee could keep the clients operating.
Anyone knows how come this post does not appear not even in the top 150 submissions in the HN frontpage?
Money maybe? Bots downvoting? It was at the top 60 at some point.
I am somewhat shocked that Google or Facebook or TikTok haven’t taken this as an opportunity to rush to the market to fill the void. Never before has this space been so ripe for the taking by a company with the resources to get something to market.
There is 3rd option: mass adoption of teddit instances:
teddit.net
It uses the free "unofficial" API like Nitter or Invidious. So users can use Reddit without it being awful, and deprive Reddit of their over zealous ad revenue without actually leaving Reddit.
I think this depends on how reddit handles anonymous access. Even if someone took the approach of sharding calls but combining the results into a single interface, I suspect it would quickly catch reddit's attention and cause further changes.
I still think there’s more going on than API pricing. I realized I have a lot of other resentments about Reddit I think other people may have their own and it’s all coming out now.
I hope it isn't the end. Yes there's some garbage on there, but there's also a lot of good content in many thousands of subs. And a sub for virtually any human interest or foible you can think of. The barrier to entry is very low and the international reach very high.
The front page, ie. /r/all and /r/popular a virtually indistinguishable from the same three days ago. There are memes, news, tik tok videos, sports, etc.
Power users aside, I suspect the typical reddit user's experience is virtually unchanged.
Mainstream's reddit experience is clicking on Reddit links from Google. Many of which are dead as of right now.
According to the API, reddit post and comment frequency is higher than it was 4 days ago: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
Seems like the blackout is not working even a little bit.
That's completely speculative, plus those are not the KPIs that the business gives a shit about, in terms of engagement oriented revenue. Advertisers care about impressions, and unique users, and that's it and I would bet your childrens' lives, that both have seen a statistically significant hit.
They do it for free XD
Just auto release moderator/ownership of subreddits that have been disabled for > 48 hours.
Reddit can fix this by simply promoting alternative subreddits to users. There are many. Competition will fix things
The thing about alt subs is that you quickly figure out why they're alternatives and not mainstream, and it rarely has anything to do with promotion. I'd add that the very act of promotion changes a small sub into a giant, unwieldy one very quickly.
e.g. Look at anime_titties, the ill-named main alternative to News and Worldnews, and tell me if you can see a problem with that being promoted. I sure can.
for every titties there are 20 other news subs that are just not gaining traction. You only see titties because it's sufficiently differentiated from the news subreddit
The same is true for all of the other alts, they tend to be either minimally moderated, and/or full of ideologues who are too toxic for anything else.
That's not a winning formula.
I barely noticed the blackout. And pretty much every subreddit I use is back up and running.
Blackout had next to zero impact in the short term, and I doubt it will have any lasting impact.
I mean...something like 70% of subs are private at this moment. I deleted my account before the API changes were announced but it's easy to see that most of the subs I used are still private. I'm trying to get a dedicated server running for a game I started playing and the Google searches I've been doing for answers on some of the settings all return a shitlaod of reddit results I can't access.
Your experience is yours, mine is mine, but given the objective fact of how many subs are currently private, I see no reason to think your experience is typical.
Your experience is also my experience.
One should try googling anything with reddit.....most of results will be private.
Man says "I ate lunch, why are people starving?"
More like “man says I ate lunch, some people didn’t eat lunch for a few days, but now most people are back to eating lunch”.
This was Occupy Wall Street all over again. A disorganized mess of a protest with no chance at making a difference.
Occupy Wall Street changed things a lot more than people seem willing to admit. At a minimum it kept the US from going the same "austerity" direction that Europe did around the same time.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/how-occupy...
My Reddit newsfeed is currently just r/casio, so I've been looking at lots of watches.
Same boat. I try to follow more niche subs and unsubscribed from any of the large ones. I can't notice it from my home page. Popular has been a lot different on the other hand.