this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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"It's time we grow up," says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.

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[–] Druidgrove 98 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] LUHG_HANI 55 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Druidgrove 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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

Reddit got so big it's now the default, the masses are always looking for the simple default option.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] drpeppershaker 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] realitista 6 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] Ember 7 points 1 year ago

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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[–] baascus 71 points 1 year ago

😂 fuck u/spez

I like the Fediverse and I think I’ll stay.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Druidgrove 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

We can only hope.

[–] Pavidus 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] GuyWithLag 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] twack 26 points 1 year ago
  1. Fine, let the people who apparently have no concept of foresight turn Reddit into a cesspool.

  2. This is clearly about cashing in on machine learning at the expense of your users. Maybe you should self reflect a bit before your entire website is produced and consumed entirely by machine learning.

[–] ghariksforge 25 points 1 year ago (16 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"We're 18 years old," Huffman said. "I think it's time we grow up and behave like an adult company."

Who the hell is this even directed to?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

The 16 year olds defending their actions?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

"It's expensive to run a company into the ground" - u/spez

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] neontetra 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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

It's expensive to run a company that constant wastes resources and is trying to grow beyond what it is.

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

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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site... Huffman acknowledged that if those users instead browsed with Reddit's own app, it would shore up the company's bottom line.

Ok how the hell does 3% of users shore up the bottom line of Reddit. Something is extremely fishy.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I enjoy how he's still talking about this as if it's purely about having 3rd party apps pay a fee, not about his incredibly piss-poor handling of it.

[–] average650 6 points 1 year ago

I know right? I have no problem with a fee existing. It's the ridiculously high fee, and the complete BS he tried to feed everyone that really drive me away. It's only going to get worse. I hope lemmy gets big enough

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

"But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members."

One way to find out right.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it's expensive to run a company

well, congratulations - its your lucky day, steve! lemmy is here to relieve you of that onerous obligation. now don't let the door hit you on the way out.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yes, it is expensive to hire engineers to build an NFT Marketplace, Steve.

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

I really hope July 1st destroys reddit as we know it.

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[–] KooMSlayer69 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

he moderated WHAT? So not only is he an idiot, he's a pedo? What a great image.

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

The fact that he was a mod on jailbait is kind of a distraction. It's funny in concept, but at the time, mods could just add anyone else as a mod instead of sending an invite to be a mod. So anyone could be assigned as a mod for an embarrassing subreddit.

There's some problematic power tripping mods and those incidents are the most visible, but probably >99% of mod actions are essentially unnoticed and just keeping subreddits relatively organized. And people were doing that for free. If reddit isn't profitable, then pissing off moderators that were doing work for free does not seem like a good approach.

I doubt he was targeting moderators directly, but that's what ended up happening in part.

Using the percentage of mods that use 3rd party apps is disingenuous (if that stat is even correct). There's probably tons of mods on low volume subreddits that don't need to do much and thus don't use the mod tools on 3rd party apps. But I bet the percent of mod actions that come through the API vs native is very different than counting it by mod that use the API vs native. As in, a small percentage of mods on big subreddits are probably doing a lot of moderation and they are probably using 3rd party apps at least part of the time.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

All the numbers don't add up. He says only 3 % of users use apps but then also there is a significant cost to not serve that 3 % ads? They also only make pennies per user. They must count any hit from Google as a user or something wild to boost their numbers.

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