Reddit and its communities are preparing for a life after the platform's API changes forced popular third-party apps to shut down.

Reddit and its communities are preparing for a life after the platform’s API changes forced popular third-party apps to shut down.

  • Candelestine@lemmy.world
    28·
    1 year ago

    I usually criticize these journalists for being a step or two behind the actual news with regards to social media movements. In this case though, at least they clearly state they are simply reviewing the past events.

    As a result of that one little disclaimer line, this is actually a decent article and a reasonable bit of reporting. Even managed to be pretty impartial. 8/10.

  • Arotrios@kbin.social
    23·
    1 year ago

    Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.

    In comparison, I’ve found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it’s activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.

    I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it’s still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that’s changing.

    What Spez didn’t count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who’s ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you’ll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.

    Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit’s early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.

    But what’s more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It’s created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn’t been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It’s when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.

    And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit’s community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn’t about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It’s about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don’t feel like working for him for free.

    • Pandoras_Can_Opener
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’m really fascinated at how in the lead up to this they consistently alienated moderators and users so into reddit that they looked up 3PAs. Like they really went ham on the users that make their site work and go all shocked pikachu when people leave/disengage/protest. That’s a level of social incompetence I can’t conceptualise when the stakes are this high.

    • HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social
      41·
      1 year ago

      Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn’t think bestof communities were lame.

      As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.

      I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.

      Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo’s carapace?

      What are your thoughts, @arotrios ?

      • Arotrios@kbin.social
        5·
        1 year ago

        Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he’d go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he’ll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit’s slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.

        • HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social
          31·
          1 year ago

          So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn’t arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn’t have to think about reddit’s corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.

          This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn’t have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I’m on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I’ve since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian’s mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.

          You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?

  • PenguinJuice@kbin.social
    17·
    1 year ago

    There is no hope that reddit bounces back to legitimate relevancy after this. We are in the early stages of its death spiral

    • LazaroFilm@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      @PenguinJuice Even if they were to back track on their decisions, they’ve shown us they can destroy it all just because they want to. The threadiverse will allow a bit more of checks and balances. I’m storing Reddit along with MySpace, in the hood memories I had there until the fire nation arrived.

      @Girlparts

    • JonEFive@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      It’s a lot like Twitter. Twitter was doing alright prior to Musk. Their user base was as strong and plentiful as ever. There have always been shitty users and toxic corners but Twitter did their best to downplay that and highlight the better parts of their platform. They did their best to walk that fine line between moderation and censorship.

      But with Musk spending $44bn so that he could meme without consequence and restore accounts of politically powerful people to gain favor, along with him gutting all of the departments that did the moderation, the site has gone from a legitimate place to interact to a well known cesspool of toxicity that users and corporations are starting to shy away from. Turns out that getting rid of moderators might not be such a good idea.

      There are still a great many users on Twitter who are actively participating and that won’t change anytime soon. But the ratio of good content to bad has changed and Twitter’s reputation both as a company and as a platform has been tarnished. Twitter isn’t going anywhere, but many people have grown weary of the antics and moved on. And that’s what we’re seeing of reddit right now. The only difference is the simultaneous mass, organized exodus of users from reddit vs the more gradual enshitification of Twitter.

    • PostnataleAbtreibung@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      Oh my gosh, I so hope they shot themselfes in the food, healed with an underlying infection, develop sepsis, recover from this and fetch mrsa in the hospital just to die from falling down the stairs.

  • Madison_rogue@kbin.social
    14·
    1 year ago

    The API pricing would cost him nearly $20 million per month to run his app

    I really wish journalists would get this right. I’ve seen $20 million per month instead of per year more than once.

  • AmidFuror@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    The fact that Relay can stay free of charge while “exploring subscription options” means Reddit modified their terms with some developers. The original deal announced at the end of May meant devs would incur charges starting July 1, although they wouldn’t have to pay for those charges until August. That would mean racking up potentially millions in costs right away.

    Reddit said they would work with developers who kept communication open, but then they wouldn’t answer emails. If a deal was made with Relay it would have been very last minute and therefore rather unprofessional.

    I used Relay but will not reinstall because it is temporarily free. I am done with Reddit. They don’t respect their users or recognize where their value derives from.

    • HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social
      21·
      1 year ago

      I also suspect that there were inconsistencies between pricing based on the 3rd party app in question. I don’t mean that Apollo was being charged more (in proportion) for having a larger userbase compared to apps like Relay or narwhal, but that Apollo was being charged almost double per unit to access API than Relay or narwhal. I am reading between the lines of articles published two *weeks ago about this because it didn’t make sense to me why these smaller apps would be able to afford the business model if Apollo had a $20M bill to pay in August.

      What gets my goat is why didn’t reddit ever just headhunt Christian or other 3PA developers and bring them into reddit corporate to build out their native app? That’s what Google or Microsoft would have done to quash competition. Or, to be truly evil, hired Christian and then never let him work on apps again with both an NDA and a non-compete in place.

      Huffman regularly calls reddit unprofitable with a heavy dose of ire, but I think there could have been a way to bring a reputable 3PA dev into the fold to keep the reddit native app at least comparable in UX.

      • ffolkes@fanexus.com
        1·
        1 year ago

        They DID do that, when they bought Alien Blue. Then they promptly destroyed it. Good UX != profits. So they butchered it into some sort of zombie app where everything was designed to make them money. And that’s why they are pushing so hard to make EVERYONE use it.

        If anything, they hate 3PA devs because they show users what the experience could be like - how good and clean it could be - if they didn’t have a greedy corporation trying to sabotage everything.

        They don’t need to hire anyone to pacify them. Reddit doesn’t gaf what happens to the devs, whether they are pacified or not. It’s like a tiny baby fish cursing the ship that just harvested 120,000 fish in a net. The ship laughs, and sails away.

        Hopefully things will be better once federation grows in popularity. I know I’ve been using it daily since this all started. But sadly I have to augment with reddit because there just aren’t enough people here yet.

        • HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social
          11·
          1 year ago

          I had no idea that was the history involved. This makes more sense now why maybe reddit has a vendetta against quality developers. haha

  • de-integro-initium@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Reddit, reddit is on fire we don’t need no water, let that mother fucker burn, burn mother fucker. Now when we came out, we told you it was just about 3pa bad treatments, Then spez had to send internal letter with his motherfuckin’ opinion about how futile the blackout is. Well this is how we gon’ do this
    Fuck spez, fuck reddit admins
    Fuck any mods that are not protesting ,
    And if you want to be down with reddit API decision , then fuck you too.

  • Got_Bent@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think what pisses me off the most is that no matter what happens, Spez will somehow walk away with enough of that sweet, sweet CEO money to fund my life several generations over and will probably get another sweet, sweet CEO position somewhere else to destroy another company because he’s got “experience”.