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Big companies representatives 😉 doing AMAs telling the truth about the horrible things their companies are doing would be interesting to say the least.
That’s not just any publication, it’s owned by Reddit’s largest shareholder. They must be worried.
Tbf Ars is extremely editorially independent
I’ll be damned. I had no idea Conde Nast owned it. That said I can see a more recent injection of $150M by Tencent too.
On an unrelated note, r/sino is now a default sub.
That PRC echo chamber of a sub?
Conde Nast has owned Reddit in some part since at least 2012. They’ve tended to stay pretty hands off with it though.
Reddit created a way to drive more people to its native apps (where Reddit shows ads and generates revenue) as of July 1. But we can’t overlook that Reddit was built on people’s willingness to provide free content and labor, and the API battle has driven away some of the most popular content and veteran volunteer mods.
Reddit won the battle for API fees, but the war for desirable content—something no social media platform can ever be complacent about—is at risk. And that’s not the type of problem that ousted mods and forcibly reopened subreddits can fix.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
This is too good.
the last line in that article gave me whiplash. like oh shit
spez: We have always been at war with Eastasia. Victory Gin for everyone.
I thought I would keep using old.reddit after they killed RiF but I’ve abandoned the platform all together. Finally got my lemmy account and I’m not going back. Google still shows me Reddit when I search for just about anything but I’m actively avoiding them.
For me, it wasn’t so much the loss of third party apps as it was the way the admins handled it. I had never realized how little they actually valued their community. Instead, everything was about the money. Too bad they failed to see that users and the content they created was the reason Reddit was worth anything in the first place.
There were absolutely paths forward that would have worked to allow 3rd party apps without price gouging them. The whole thing was in bad faith and they never wanted to allow 3rd party apps at all, they just didn’t want to announce they were kicking them off the platform. It wasn’t just about the money, it was about control. Control over the users by forcing them to use their app where they could push unwanted content on you and degrade your experience to maximize profits. The 3rd party apps made money by providing a better user experience which was directly counter to their aims to maximize profits.
3rd party apps did not make a huge percentage of the user base, so why were they so afraid of them? I think the answer is that they are planning on making the user experience on the main app much worse and they know users would be looking for alternatives after, so they went out to kill the alternatives, or charge them an insane amount.
Your theory at the end there sounds right on the money. I never considered that before but I think that is the most plausible.
That was my line of thinking too, more or less. After RiF, I was like "I guess RedReader is still up, since they got an exemption! I’ll just wait out till July 1 then switch to that.
But the day after the protest, I just decided to drop the platform altogether. It felt spineless calling out reddit on their bullshit, just to fall in line and still give traffic to their site.
Just add “-reddit.com” to the ed of your query and the search engine will omit results from that site.
I hope someday instead of google, I go to a website that has the fediverse indexed and directs me right to a Lemmy thread with my answer.
Google is shit, Reddit was what I searched for everything on and now Reddit is shit.
Let’s fucking go Lemmy I have faith in you
Here you go! 🤓
A gentleman, a scholar, and an all-around good person.
I wonder if AMAs will ever come to Lemmy. Part of the attraction for AMAs on Reddit was the immediate interaction with a mass audience.
Lemmy, as it stands doesn’t have that mass media presence.
Damn
Tldr: iama mods are no longer seeking out celebrities or doing any high value organizing like that. They will do only basic modding.
Why are they still doing moderation for free on a horrible website that is reddit? They should just quit & laugh.
Sorry for the meta question, but what’s the difference between AMA and IAMA? Are these 2 different subs?
IAMA was the subreddit that hosted AMAs.
Both acronyms come from the titling format: “I am a XYZ, ask me anything”
Thank you!
Iirc two different subs with similar concepts, but I’m not going back to check.
AMA ask me anything IAMA I am a
The latter belongs to Apple’s ecosystem.
AMAs died when Reddit fired Victoria, they haven’t been worth a shit in a while.
Who is Victoria?
In the statement from the AMA mods, they stated that if Reddit wanted to continue providing that sort of celebrity outreach that they had been doing for free, they should hire a liaison for that.
Before the mods took that responsibility on for themselves, Victoria (/u/chooter on Reddit) used to be that person.
Victoria was able to pull in some big names for AMAs, and she was good at identifying good/interesting questions and helping with submitting responses. Reddit unceremoniously fired her one day and the quality of celebrity AMAs dropped significantly after that.
It’s so crazy how they fired her. Reddit’s leadership really loves to shoot themselves in the foot. I applaud the mods scaling back their AMA mod duties. No point in doing so much extra work for a community that reddit continually shows it doesn’t care about and actively harms through their bad decisions.
do we have any idea what they fired her for? I keep seeing people that are mad about it, but I don’t feel like I have enough information to know if it was really unjustified
It is not known exactly who made the decision or why. Apparently even to her.
They mention this in the article
Victoria leaving was tragic but can we talk about Rampart?
I just had a good laugh at myself because rampart is so non-existent in my mind, that I had to Google what the hell you were talking about.
So Woody Harrelson is forever famous for the worst AMA ever because he aggressively plugged a movie that must’ve been so bad and irrelevant that I have no idea what people are talking about when they reference it today.
Lol I remember someone in that thread asking Woody if he remembered taking a high school girl to her prom and knocking her up. And the social media manager faking Woody’s involvement just answering “can we stick to the movie?”
Yeah the entire AMA was a dumpster fire, but that was when things really devolved. It quickly got upvoted to the top, and it refused to die. Every single comment he made was quickly bombed with “why haven’t you answered that prom question yet” responses.
I always have time to talk about Rampart.
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I’m still there, too, but not nearly as much. If they take old.Reddit away, I’ll be completely done.
In the meantime, Wefwef has been doing right by me. Just wish communities were more active.
Hey this is X celebrity, btw check my latest project, coming out tomorrow. Amas quickly became an easy promotional platform.
It’s one of the reasons I stopped going to them. Once I realized that if I saw an AMA for a specific person, it must have meant that they were just there shilling some new project.
I mean it’s literally no different from guests on talk shows or podcasts. They are almost never there just for fun.
And I get it. Why would you put yourself through that unless you’re promoting something?
There use to be some AMAs of bored pseudo celebs and they would just show up to take some fan questions and then bounce back to the woodwork… thats the type of shit I like.
Calling promotion shilling is a bit silly though.
Is it?
I think Promotion = Shilling… just a bit more derogatory term.
Most of the time, subs don’t let people pimp their personal shit for monetary gain, no clue why it’s more socially acceptable if it’s Jennifer Lawrence over some dude who makes cool pottery.
Ask me about LOOM
Nice hat.
Not if it’s my latest project, “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
Lmao thanks Margot
Who’s managing this account?
Academy Award nominated actress Margot Robbie can manage her own Lemonworld account!
(Don’t tell my publicist please)
@MargotRobbie @Aux lol what is going on? Where’s the blue check?
Lemonworld 😂
I love it!
It’s give and take. As long as they also answer the questions it’s pretty effective. Why else would a celebrity or politician so an ama?
Idk for fun? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember how James Corden got fucked over while holding his AMA. Good times.
The Fediverse needs to trick him over here too, so we can do it again. See it as the Fediverses official legitimization or coming-of-age ceremony on the internet.
I memba this. That was crazy.
I don’t, what happened?
Hey, I was there!
Here- this way you don’t have to go to Reddit to read about it- https://www.distractify.com/p/james-corden-ama-mean
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It’s so weird. Ellen is a horrible mean person but she gets a talk show. Corden is a horrible mean person and he gets a talk show. Is it because Carson was also a horrible mean person or something?
I’ll be very curious to see the stats start rolling in regarding any decrease in Reddit’s views, etc. since July 1. I’m still using it, but only about half as much as I did with Apollo.
I’m only using Reddit on Safari now that Apollo is gone and, even then, my use has been minimal since the blackout last month.
It will be slow, but Reddit’s death will be fine for me. I will definitely miss the smaller, niche communities, but I think they’ll all find a way to carry on either through Lemmy, et al, or whatever rises from there.
Reddit’s decisions, from investing in NFTs to letting go of Victoria way back when, have all been contributing to the inevitable, but when the content providers leave - and they are - the site will just collapse. My schadenfreude lies in Reddit never even realizing its IPO after all this drama.
I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.
What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
But personally, I’m ok even if reddit isn’t toppled. Now that I’ve stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.
Yeah. In the beginning I’m rooting for the death of reddit but now that I’ve weaned myself off of it I just don’t give a shit any more. They can rake in billions, or they can crumble tomorrow. I’m elsewhere and I feel fine.
I hope reddit adopts twitters new rate limiting and stars making people log in to view content that will really drive traffic away and make searches for blank reddit searches dissappear from Google and hopefully be replaced by blank lemmy start showing up in Google
Im a casual reddit lurker. I left because the official reddit app is horrible to browse even casually
See, but the fact you actually committed to leaving means there’s a lot more people even more casual than you still on reddit.
The fact that you used a 3rd party app and just commented on a thread means you are not as casual as the average Reddit consumer.
Yeah, in the beginning of the debacle many people commented that they didn’t even know that there were third party clients.
lol the official app came to be long after 3rd party apps existed. The official app itself was a 3rd party app that Reddit purchased (though nothing good remains)
If, you are correct that…
most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else.
And, a lot of the content creators and content moderators leave, decreasing the quality of the content on reddit.
Then, these lurkers will leave the platform.
I don’t see why these folks would stay on reddit if the content decreases in quality. Especially, if we are assuming these lurkers do nothing to contribute to the content they are consuming.
It’s interesting, you actually provided great evidence which counters your original claim that reddit will not be affected by all of this bad publicity.
The point of contention which is why I believe as above is that the standards of most people still on reddit are fairly low. Reddit has been going downhill for years, this much is known; it’s only now, with this latest screw up, that I, (assumedly) you, and many others have decided to jump ship. I, personally, willfully ignored much of the enshittification of reddit, content that I could use third party tools and apps to make up for it’s deficiencies; now that reddit is showing they don’t care about us and are tearing down those tools, I’m gone.
But for many others, they don’t care about any of the current goings on. Many do not even understand how the site actually works, confusing mods with admins as the same thing and not even getting that a sub could shut down (I was a mod, and saw many pieces of mod mail that amounted to “why can’t I see posts here help”). Their standards for how bad things can get until they’ll make a change in their browsing habits are surprisingly resilient.
you can see the posts/comments per day on this site:
https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
there was definitely a dip, but there seems to always be a dip on weekends and with it being a holiday in the US it is hard to say how much that is affecting usage
Wednesday should be the first ‘normal’ day since July 1st so I’ll be interested to see how much it recovers
I’m much more curious about interactions/engagement than views. How many posts and comments compared to before the API changes?
It does have a post/comment volume chart, but I don’t know how reliable that data is. On July 1st, the API change affected both users (resulting in some leaving which should reduce those metrics) as well as mods (resulting in a reduced ability to deal with bots and trolls, which should increase those metrics).
Add in the complication that Reddit’s admins now have a short vs long term conflict where the short term is helped by making it seem like the API changes haven’t hurt anything and allowing bots to inflate numbers (or even run them themselves) while the long term would want to see bot activity stamped out so that more users aren’t driven away by it.
I don’t think we’ll get a good idea of what’s going on in the short term. In the long term, it might require tools to scrape the data without the API being available (which will definitely happen, you can’t allow users to access something and prevent programs from accessing it because the browser itself is a program and HTML, which makes it possible for browsers to organize the information they display, also makes it easier to parse and separate data).
I only use it when I’m on desktop. Their mobile app isn’t bad in my opinion, but I just refuse to give them my data.
I don’t really care if Reddit dies as long as we keep getting good content here on the fediverse. So far I have been totally surprised exactly how good this place has been as far as activity goes. I will miss the niche communities on Reddit so if we can siphon a bit more growth off this is excellent but the various Lemmy servers have enough activity to replace Reddit for general content for me
I deleted my account, I still browse on desktop but I won’t interact.
I’m glad RES lets you block subreddits even if logged out, because there’s some real shitholes which appear if you aren’t logged in
Let me guess – it went from “Ask me anything” to “Stroke me anything”.
Some lemmy instance admin should do an IAMA there.
Once things start stabilizing from the latest influx, I feel like outreach like that should be the next phase
Are you sure? I’m not certain that the Fediverse will be improved by an influx of people who generally don’t care.
Looks like a certain super talented Australian actress picked the right place to promote “Barbie”.
Margot Elise Robbie, you’re a genius.
What is this referring to?
It’s refering to my new movie, “Barbie”, silly.
Margot Elise Robbie, your posts of tech commentary and promotion of “Barbie” on in theaters July 21st is AMAZING!!!
That’s “character actress Margot Robbie, marketing genius” for you!
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Lol awsome
Man I just hope this account is actually legit and operate by the real Margot Robbie. That’d be hilarious.
It would, right?
Margo
I just hope my wad of hundreds is enough to include popcorn and drinks.
Imma need to see your verification pic, Ms. Robbie.
Ew no you’re just going to post it to lemmynsfw.
I mean, you’re welcome to do one with your clothes on.
Unless she thinks Margot Robbie would only do it fully nude, then she should go for that.
It’s amazing to me how sanitized the reddit front page is. All this nonsense going on right now (which Reddit The Company, and Steve Huffman in particular is responsible for) is incredibly important to any potential future of Reddit The Website, up to and including the possibility of Reddit (the Website, the Company, and the Userbase) becoming irrelevant.
But go browse reddit, and you have to look for it. Right now, the first arguably “anti-spez” submission is from r/shitposting, halfway down page two.
And that’s it. There’s nothing else. If you wanna talk about the current events of the website you’re on, on that website, apparently go fuck yourself.
I’m surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I’ve curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.
I suspect they’ve fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.
I guess the dissidents left.
Most people don’t actually give a crap and those of us that did probably already left. I think this is mostly what Reddit was banking on happening. The question remains whether those that have left also were contributing the most content through posts or comments which could make the site stale and in turn drive more people away.
