“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
I just commented on another similar article! His reasoning for this move contradicts itself! How can he claim that the overwhelming majority of users (97%) use the official Reddit app, but the use of 3rd party apps is destroying their bottom line? That means that that the lost profit from 3% of users are the reason for the API price change?
And… if there are only 4-5 big 3rd party apps (like Apollo, RIF), why force them out of the market? If only 3% of users use them, are they really that big of a deal? Why are the prices so astronomically high?
This is Reddit consolidating their empire. I hope that folks are prepared for future roll-outs of new subscriptions and reasons that Reddit users need to pay.
I’m honestly shocked the redditors are so blind to this. Do they actually think it’ll just be plain sailing from here on out?
Maybe in just to old skool and remember a time when Reddit would have really stood up.
It absolutely will not be plain sailing - I think that the protest is an early warning sign. People that stick to Reddit are going to be bombarded with ads, Premium features, and new programs after Reddit goes public.
I am an Apollo user until the end - I think that after having such a good experience under Christian, I forgot how scummy a big corporation can be. Times are changing - we just saw some similar things with Musk taking over twitter.
Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.
Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.
Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.
I think this is a better place than Reddit already. It’s fairly new and people are excited about creating content. But I think in reality, sooner or later every sub will be forced to open, and everything will go back to normal. Of course some of the users would’ve completely migrated to the Fediverse or other platforms, and it’s up to us whether the Fediverse survives or not.
Reddit felt like it was going downhill for a long time. I think I just started scrolling it out of habit, only participating in a few subs for hobbies and games. This shitshow was the kick in the ass I needed to shreddit and delete my account.
Also. I think more users need to do that. Make sure you shreddit your comments and posts so reddit can’t keep your content.
It’s been pretty bad for a while now.
I used to go to reddit to learn something new, to see the news for the day, to find a cool new hobby or interest, to read deep discussions about topics that I didn’t know that much about.
But that was like 8 or 9 years ago.
Lately the entire front page is doom bait, vaguely disguised racism, political trolling, violence, memes, and reposts.
I used to browse /r/all about half of the time and my subscribed subs the other half.
I muted serial reposters / content farmers whenever I noticed them, but this past year I hit a breaking point and I changed my default feed to subs only and intentionally chose to avoid /r/all.
Sucks that I’m going to lose my niche communities on reddit, but I’ve been a lot happier here so far.
Exactly. For guys like me who joined 16 years ago, it’s felt like a steady decline for a decade already. This is just a convenient time to jump to another platform because others will join me.
Thats a great word for it. Doom bait. I hated being surrounded by pessimism on that site
A switch flipped somewhere to whenever i logged onto reddit I would leave feeling worse. It’s for the best that I stopped using it i think
I agree. Everything was so much more depressing. Maybe it was the subs I subscribed to but I felt it was more than that.
Reddit got so big it’s now the default, the masses are always looking for the simple default option.
Yeah it’s the convenience of use. Fediverse right now is not convenient to use IMO. Most of the people here are somewhat tech savvy and even then many people did face issue of creating an account and were confused about how the whole thing works. Now try explaining all that to a person that just uses Reddit like the company intends them to.
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It makes so little sense to me. They could have charged a reasonable amount and made some money off of the apps, but instead, they chose to kill them and lose their users. Some might migrate to the official app, but this uproar may have caused even more to leave the platform entirely.
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At this point this seems intentional. This has definitely pushed me away from Reddit and I’m already seeing a lot more meaningful conversations on Lemmy. All I ever saw on Reddit anyways is people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes. Took a lot of scrolling to even get to people actually talking about the topic.
Agree it’s intentional. Normies don’t care about any of this and will just follow the memes. Most of us here are the users that had ad blockers and probably didn’t care about giving gold.
Giving and receiving gold was surprisingly, one of my least favourite things. Someone gave me gold once and i felt beholden to say thank you? I didnt ask for it, i didnt comment in hopes of getting given “gold”. I never gave anyone else gold. Why would i give a shit about getting it myself? Its a fucking forum.
Reactions are common in lots of forums though, gold is just a special reaction.
A special upvote if you will, its not really that deep.Waste of money.
Ramen, exactly 💯 this. Every time I wanted to see what commentary was on the post I would almost have to scroll to the bottom to get any talk about the actual post.
Reddit OTOH was a good place to discover other things organically (not the enshittification attempt “other people liked that sub” interjections). But the only thing I miss is a way to group my subscriptions.
Currently Lemmy is getting up to speed, and the discussion quality has already started to drop; we’ll see whether communities can police themselves.
people just trying to one up each other on the comment threads for upvotes.
Here, have an upvote on me =D
This is why the fediverse is so great. It really is really expensive to run a social media company. By spreading the cost over many actors and encouraging competition, this allows us to host content without being beholden to billionares.
*Chinese billionaires
Are you trying to bring your Reddit = Chinese government xenophobic r/conspiracy Reddit nonsense here? Would you like to provide proof? Because this is violating a rule.
I think he’s referring to how Reddit used to operate on Tencent funding. Tencent is partially owned by the Chinese government.
5% stake is not relevant if you looked at other shareholders of Reddit. It is a xenophobic conspiracy theory if we looked at the largest shareholders of Reddit (https://web.archive.org/web/20230108005443/https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/who-owns-reddit-a-breakdown-of-the-type-and-nationality-of-shareholders/):
- Conde Nast (AP): 100% * 0.72 = 72%
- American VCs: (5% + 1/3 * 5%) * 0.8 + (1/2 * 11.1% + 7/18 * 11.1%) * 0.9 + 5% * 1.0 = 19.21%
- American individuals: (2/3 * 5%) * 0.8 + (1/18 * 11.1%) * 0.91 = 3.23%
- Dubai VC: (1/18 * 11.1%) * 0.9 = 0.56%
- Tencent: 5% * 1.0 = 5%
Breakdown of Series A VC, Condé Nast: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-thrives-after-advance-publications-let-it-sink-or-swim.html
Breakdown of Series B VCs being all Americans: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/reddit-series-b--662ba273
Breakdown of Series C VCs being 8 Americans and 1 Dubai VC: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/reddit-series-c--168f04d0
Breakdown of Series D VCs with 3 American VCs and China’s Tencent: https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/reddit-series-d--c9282e50
Condé Nast and one American VC hold more shares than Tencent, plus Reddit is astroturfed by US military, as seen during 2015. https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/ Reddit, if anything, is a literal US military arm to spread propaganda in media, and not controlled by Chinese government.
The root of “Tencent CCP own Reddit” conspiracy literally lies in r/conspiracy to spread xenophobic sentiments against China. Anyone perpetuating this nonsense will face a ban after this.
I am asking this in full earnestness: is any critique of the Chinese government assumed to be rooted in xenophobia?
Most of it has its roots in xenophobia and crushing the “near-peer competitors”, yes. You can ask US government about Cold War McCarthyist propaganda which is spread by NATO (US/Europe) media. You can even go back as far as 1940 to find a short film series Drums of Fu Manchu (check YouTube), which is before NATO’s creation, or the Opium War I by Britain in 1856 and British Raj on India for 2 centuries.
Orientalism, xenophobia and imperialist looting/plundering against East are historically well known evil deeds of Anglosphere.
I feel that maybe you’re reading my question as ‘critique of China is inherently support for the west/US/etc’ which I absolutely do not mean. I think that it’s possible that painting all critique with a broad ‘xenophobia’ brush (while undoubtedly warranted at times) can prevent discussion in good faith.
The above poster specifically “corrected” parent commenter, knowing very well the conspiratorial xenophobic notions he was propagating. Most Anglo people never talk about China/Russia (or any country that is NOT a “western neoliberal democracy” or its vassal state) in good faith, because Cold War McCarthyist poison is filled in their heads, resulting in a knee jerk reaction whenever they see the words “China” or “Russia”. There is no reason why Anglosphere participants should be given benefit of doubt, when instead of following by example, they continue to get more vitriolic everyday. I am happy that Russians cannot be dehumanised on Lemmy, considering how much of a cesspool Reddit is.
If this is the thinking I can expect on this instance, perhaps this is not the instance for me.
It’s well known and accepted that the Chinese government has significant control of Chinese companies, and Reddit is partially owned by Tencent. That’s not xenophobic.
The fact that it’s something like a 5% stake is more relevant.
Read the below response. https://lemmy.ml/comment/750332
Condé Nast and one American VC hold more shares than Tencent, plus Reddit is astroturfed by US military, as seen during 2015. https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/
The root of “Tencent CCP own Reddit” conspiracy literally lies in r/conspiracy to spread xenophobic sentiments against China. Anyone perpetuating this nonsense will face a ban after this.
“a literal US military arm” is just as ridiculous. It’s neither.
Far, far less ridiculous than “Chinese government controlled”, as there is real proof of US military astroturfers, as shown above, and Reddit even suppresses this information intentionally. The whole of frontpage is suspiciously filled with pro-US imperialist propaganda and an anti-China/Russia article every week with dozens of awards.
And you think there aren’t Russian and Chinese propagandists on Reddit?
pro-US imperialist propaganda
Right. Like all those school kids getting shot.
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
“It’s expensive to run a company into the ground” - u/spez
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I liked it better when they had one kind of Reddit Gold and displayed a progress bar on the homepage showing what percentage of daily operating costs were covered.
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Yeah I get that, but I don’t respect it. I show my Patreon income even when it gets large enough that people might think twice. That’s their choice.
No no no but you see we need to restrict API access for the third party apps! They use just way too much bandwidth!! Apollo alone can use like 300 requests a day! We need people to use our shitty slow horrible app that uses an average of 500 requests per day. If it weren’t for third party apps we (10 billion dollar company) would be thriving!
They’re just greedy, the only reason the official app makes marginally more money despite using more requests is thanks to tracking
3% is bullshit. About 20-30% users use third party apps. Source: r/privatelife founder, and these are 12 month usage statistics.
However, this is also the most favourable scenario, being the largest authentic privacy subreddit not filled with Snowden/Assange dismissive mods. But it is around 20% rather than 3%.
Spez is now making up self contradictory nonsense and even attempting to create infighting between moderators from yesterday’s statement he gave. Spez simply wants to leech off all the great content made by “guest bloggers” (a term old timers use) and all the unpaid moderation people have done. He is simply saying that the old relationship is over, and that all old users can fuck off, because new users are ready to consume an Instagram-ified official Reddit app with doomscrolling, chock filled with ads, a bloated UI and load of spying and tracking. Reddit also is astroturfed by US military teams, so that is tied into the reason why all Big Tech platforms are suddenly going hostile – to invent a new reality, devoid of any criticism against Western empire.
What it is Spez? How can people who use third party apps simultaneously be only 3% of the user base (I realize you proved he’s wrong) and significant enough to ruin Reddit’s profitability? Cause if you’re going public and only three percent of your users can ruin Reddit’s profitability you’re in for a rough ride. Investors don’t like too much risk.
really went off the rails there lol. I could tell when you mentioned Snowden/Assange.
you don’t think it’s nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?
That fedposter behaviour continues to piss me off as a privacy stalwart.
I’m actually somewhat happy all this happened now. I’m sad for the 3rd party app devs and everyone who suffers from these decisions. And for the wonderful communities and knowledge bases that were shattered.
But I think it caused me, and many others, to realize that great community and discussions could still be had on the internet, and that we hadn’t been having those for quite a while over on reddit.
There’s a lot of value in smaller scale too. Not everything needs to be mega-platform level for the mass market. We can have great communities in smaller spaces online too — sometimes even better as a result.
I have been thinking about this a lot in light of recent events. Growing up in the era of smaller communities, forums, etc. I can’t say large, monolithic, corporate entities have ultimately been a change for the better.
It’s not better. It was only better since I didn’t have to create several accounts for the different forums I would use. This small inconvience was enough to stop contributions from people that don’t even care about that topic.
The downvoting is the worst part. I’ve seen correct comments downvoted, not opinions but tech questions dealing with standards. Downvoting creates an anonymous mob mentality. This gets bad when the mob knows nothing about the topic and is open to all.
Reddit has destroyed so many communities because of how easy they made everything. No one really talks about that.
It’s been boosting discovery of fediverse and causing an explosion of both traffic and hopefully donations.
I’m hoping the app developers move to Lemmy. I’d happily pay monthly for Sync, and he could spin up his own server and the fee would cover those costs as well. I’m sure many people would do the same for their favorite apps.
Sentence 1: Really, only 3 percent of users are pissed about this; It’s insignificant.
Sentence 2: These disruptions from 3rd party app supporters really hurt our bottom line. This is expensive!
Maximum cope
“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
See this is another thing, how is Reddit management not in prison and on the sex offenders list? They willfully and knowingly distributed child pornography for YEARS. What the fuck?
Man I’m seriously waiting for reddits downfall
From what I remember, jailbait getting taken down was either what they did right before or right after reddit got sold to whoever. And then, iirc, in 2018-ish they got bought by a Chinese company.
What are you talking about? There was no sale in 2018, much less to “a Chinese company”. AFAIK the last company that owned Reddit was Condé Nast (the purchase in 2006). Since 2011 they have been independent of Condé Nast. Since then, they’ve been reliant on venture capital.
Edit to add: Anderson Cooper’s calling out of Reddit for hosting the jailbait subreddit in 2011 is the impetus for it being taken down, not the sale of the company.
Not owned by, but heavily invested in by Tencent.
I think that’s where the confusion lies, however it’s currently owned by Advance Publications.
That’s very interesting. Tencent is not even hinted at in Wikipedia’s timeline of Reddit page. Also, when they say that Reddit was able to “operate independently of Condé Nast”, they’re being somewhat deceitful and implying they were independent. Advance Publications is only mentioned in the footnote/reference, and what they meant that Advance Publications is hands-off compared to Condé Nast.
Tencent’s investment is peanuts. Here is a full breakdown of Reddit’s investors. https://lemmy.ml/comment/750332
Fair dues, I was going off what I had found online, which didn’t include a breakdown.
Whenever there is fearmongering about China/Russia/communism, assume it is funny McCarthyist Cold War propaganda. No matter how small or big the claim is, use that thumb rule to avoid brainwashing.
It’s probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
As CEO, I always like to go online and tell the whole world “we’re not profitable” right before my IPO. Big brain stuff, ya know.
I also like to get caught lying about business calls, really helps the reputation
I think this is exactly why. It’s to make sure that Reddit is “shored up” from any profits leaking out, and making sure that NSFW content is locked down so that investors actually invest.
It sucks because it’s our posts, our comments, our information that makes Reddit what it is. This is simply preparation for advertising and other for-profit opportunities. Greedy.
We can only hope.
😂 fuck u/spez
I like the Fediverse and I think I’ll stay.
Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!
It’s one of the most visited websites and I don’t see that changing when 2% is leaving the platform
Doomscrollers are worthless traffic numbers and do not buy Reddit premium.
It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.
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Playing devils advocate, I suppose some companies have an extremely tight window where they rely on that last 3% after costs…I believe grocery stores operate like this…but reddit is not a food store, and I don’t know wth I’m talking about. (:
Don’t get me wrong, reddit has been the worst for about 10-12 years now and keeps getting worse every year, but as long as we’re talking about this mysterious 3%.
How much traffic does that 3% account for? That’s the real metric. I assume it’s more than the avg user.
Also, what is an avg user? Someone that just wants a crowd-sourced opinion once a month is not. Is it someone that just looks at the front page and moves on? Does the avg user post? Do they lurk? Surely they’re not mods.
I realize all these questions are moot, as reddit has been utter garbage since a little before fatpeoplehate got taken down.
I don’t have a MBA, but that seems… off.
Yes, it is. So charge a reasonable API price and this whole argument is over.
But that won’t happen. This is about monetizing Reddit’s content ASAP before Spez resigns ASAP with a nice big, bonus for pushing through those beautiful API changes oh so smoothly.
The more Spez speaks, the less sad I am about Reddit dying. Platforms come and go. There’s loads of Internet corners to discuss my hobbies. I don’t want to stay on a sinking ship with a hole shot out by the captain because he has ship insurance, actively throwing people off board as him and his crew climb up the still buoyant part whilst insisting THIS WILL BLOW OVER. I’m not going down with the Titanic of community boards as it sinks. It’ll die in infamy and I don’t feel like drowning alongside it.
However, I will now thoroughly enjoy watching Spez naively, single-handedly dismantle Reddit’s legacy for short term gain whilst thinking he’s being a super duper smart businessman we couldn’t possibly understand. Or possibly being a forced fallguy for share holder decisions which he has a choice in avoiding by quitting.
I’ve never in all my years of Internet browsing seen someone running an Internet-based company so blatantly indifferent to the customers they serve. There’s no Reddit revenue without Redditors.
I wish him luck on his inevitably piss-poor IPO when Reddit offers little content of value and more people get more angry at him as more ridiculous reasoning flies out of his mouth. Reddit’s gonna look like MSN News by the end of this mess.
I mean there are a lot of parallels with Elon and Twitter.
The thing that amazes me about the Reddit tanking - is how sudden it was. For anyone who was paying more attention than I was at the start - how long were there smoke signals for?
I swear it was like 2 Apollo posts within 48hrs straight into blackout shitstorm within the week.
Elon at least hummed and Harred about it for a good while before destroying Twitter week after week and that was fast.
Spez seems to be speed running it.
