this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023

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The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit (www.wired.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

114 comments fedilink hide all child comments

“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”

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[–] [email protected] 180 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

If it wasn't hurting them they wouldn't be doing damage control.

Spez wouldn't be doing (awful) interviews (going so far as to praise Elon Musk)
They wouldn't be publishing whitewashed versions of history
They wouldn't be changing the rules to silence dissent
They wouldn't be plotting to overthrow protesting mods to install compliant ones
They wouldn't be lying about trying to work with devs
They wouldn't be preventing people from deleting their old comments/posts
They wouldn't be forcing subreddits to reopen
They wouldn't be advertising on Facebook for new advertisers
They wouldn't be trying to smear Apollo's developer
They wouldn't be posting propaganda notices on new reddit's homepage
They wouldn't be censoring discussion about alternatives like Lemmy and kbin

It's working, keep it up.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 years ago (7 children)

It's seriously hilarious that the "damage control" has been more damaging than the blackout itself

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community

[–] bionicjoey 27 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Honestly I think every time spez says something stupid it convinces another wave of Redditors to check out Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

The exit didn't start with the API announcement, just gained steam. What's truly baffling is that Reddit seems to want data on where users' final straw is.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

Who knew the best "celebrity" endorsement for the fediverse comes from the CEO of Reddit...

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They could have even gotten third party apps to pay for API access. They just needed to set a fair rate and a workable timeline for the change.

Instead, they said "we're charging $20 million starting next month. Good luck trying to stay afloat with those sudden costs!"

Reddit could have increased their profits and kept users/moderators happy, but they chose Burn It All Down instead.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago

There’s a term for that. The Streisand Effect, I think.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

That's in the same vein as "it's not the crime it's the cover-up"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Haha yeah well I didn't say they were doing a good job of it!

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 years ago

They wouldn't be lying about trying to work with devs

Its fascinating watching him keep digging. He bullshits, gets caught out, so he bullshits about a different dev. Rinse. Repeat.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago

I haven't been to Reddit for a few days and they did these stuff already? Let's keep this up.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/43599/Reddit-censoring-information-about-kbin

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Thanks I've been trying to fill in those claims with links so this one is great :)

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[–] PenguinTD 63 points 2 years ago

funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is

If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.

The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it's EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”

Brilliant. Reddit looks out at a crowd of people at a packed show and says "ok we could lose 5%". But those are the ones who return another night as musicians. And you cant run a music venue long term with open mic 7 nights per week.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Plus, you shut down the pipeline. No one's going to make the jump from the other 95% if the content sucks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Plus they dont want to pay bouncers so the number of assholes is going to keep creeping up

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 years ago (3 children)

What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).

The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

He's so egotistical about it. Insults mods as "landed gentry" and users' concerns as "noise" - but those are literally the people that have created this "valuable dataset" he's coveting so greedily.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

That's why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fidelity dropping reddit's valuation by ~40% made me go "oh boy that's bad news" when I saw it at the start of the month.

Imagine thinking you're cashing out at 10 billion and now you're only getting 6. The horror.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Imagine you're an employee thinking you're going to have stock worth 100k, and suddenly it's worth 60k and falling.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Except that it already has been. They've already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.

They didn't pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It's no great loss.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Corrected headline: The Reddit API Cash Grab is Breaking Reddit

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I hope Redditors don't cave and cease protesting, clearly it's working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I haven't been on since the 10th and I was on it near constantly before that. If reddit sync isn't going to be around 10 days from now then I have no plans to use the site anything like I used to. I literally have no desire to learn their crappy app and lose the curated experience I had set up for myself. The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago (11 children)

I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they're doing this now because they've run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won't be noticed in a month.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Look, I am happy as long as there are enough people on lemmy and kbin to have a fun website here. I can go and visit reddit now and then to see what kind of stuff they're upvoting, that's not a problem. But I want the potentially better alternatives to grow.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's the spirit. We don't need to complete obliterate reddit to make it the better alternatives viable. We just need to get a minimal mass of people here to keep momentum growing.

I keep thinking of Taleb's essay where he talks about how effective a intolerant minority can be on affecting change in general behavior.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Exactly. Reddit itself should be a case study. Lemmy and Kbin offer an opportunity to build something great and learn from what made current Reddit (the good and the terrible) what it is and some things to avoid.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. Presumably Twitter also crunched the numbers, but look how that is turning out. I think the statement about Musk implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk.

Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn't mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I doubt anyone on the Reddit payroll tells spez the unvarnished truth right now. Musk's employees infamously curate their interactions with him. I read somewhere about one (I want to say working in info-sec for Tesla) who kept an extra monitor with a Matrix style scroll of bullshit because it matched Musk's perception of what a busy person in that field should have up.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It also came out that Musk's businesses have a Musk disaster mitigation team that reverses his bad decisions, and "guide" him. But Twitter didn't have that, so that is why his reign has been so disastrous.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (5 children)

To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.

Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.

I'm not too concerned about this thought. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won't be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Presumably Twitter also crunched the numbers

Twitter is responding to official inquiries from authorities with poop emojis. The people running numbers have been fired.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Regular users don't care about the mod drama. The real backlash will start on July 1st when all the apps stop working.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

I hope the real thing is more just stop doing their volunteer work. I hope spam and bots run amok, NSFW gets posted everywhere, reports to unanswered and people devolve into screaming matches.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

When the "vocal minority" are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

“Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”

I'm looking at you too, Netflix.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago

stares at capitalism

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public

Correction: Reddit's plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It boggles my mind that I read this sentence near the end of the article:

"Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want."

This isn't a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. "fill their needs.... with advertising."

Nobody has "advertising needs." It shows how fucked-up the internet has become when a journalist writes something like this unironically, without even attempting to explain themselves. They just assume everyone believes they have advertising needs. Unreal.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

This isn’t a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. “fill their needs… with advertising.”

Feeds not needs. You even wrote that when you quoted the author.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

You might wanna reread that quote

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Not trying to sound like La Palice but in all the articles and posts about this issue, they seem to miss the core of what is making users mad (the mods fight is different, although in the same direction, but solvable).

The thing to the user who's generating content and not only swiping his finger is: they don't want to experience Reddit as other users experience Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. They follow issues, not people. If you get in the middle of this relationship between the anonymous user and their discussion on an issue, with your tricks to show them your promoted content, you'll be told to fuck off.

There's nothing to improve in the Reddit Official App. Everybody hates the principles it's created on, much ahead of the poor design choices and lack of features.

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