The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
You must log in or register to comment.
Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.
reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.
the content is the people. that’s the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they’ll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you’re just a dick.
i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn’t a word. let’s make it a word.
I’ve hoped for decentralizing a lot of stuff over the years and every time the clunky nature prevented them from taking off.
Sadly, until there were centralized spaces the average person didn’t really get into the internet when it was IRC chats and disconnected forums.
It’s not defederated it’s federated and decentralized
oops. don’t drink and post, y’all.
The thing is, they COULD’VE monetized it and still kept it alive. What they’re doing instead is killing the golden goose for a quick cash-out.
Edit: I hate your username. A lot of trauma associated with that failed tongue-twister.
As crappy as it would be, charging users a couple bucks a month for ad free and the ability to use third party apps would probably have been the best move they could make.
Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing that Huffman has hired Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO….
Haha! Yeah, fuckin’ Linda, amirite?
Should I know who Linda Yaccarino is?
The new Twitter CEO, who we know is really just there to take the fall for Musk’s bullshit decisions.
Sure is funny how reddit wasn’t concerned with with mods having to much power or enforcing any code till it affected the snowflake admin
This is why all the “fuck the mods I’m with the admins” folks are so short sighted. The only reason bad mods can exist is because the admins won’t remove them. They’re fine with bigotry and power abuse. The current mods are just a sacrificial lamb
Not just “not concerned”, it was literally their formal position that mods owned the subs that they modded. You couldn’t remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive. If the mod was active and not actively breaking TOS then reddits response has ALWAYS been “if you don’t like the way the sub is being handled, make your own sub and let the free market sort out whether yours or theirs is better”.
They held that position since the founding of reddit and it was as fundamental to the platform as the ability to create your own instance with your own rules is here on Lemmy. Right up until it was starting to get in the way of the CEOs big IPO payday.
And that is exactly why I am here now. I didn’t care that much for the API protests at all. Thought they were pointless. But this behavior meant that they were violating the very thing the made reddit, reddit. If subs weren’t spaces that anyone could use to try to carve out their own communities, then what is the point?
Furthermore, they aren’t even violating the code of conduct they are using to do this, so clearly all of Reddit’s promises are now worthless.
WE made the content. The community. No doubt the majority of level-headed folk would have accepted ad requirements in 3rd party apps. Hosting isn’t free, something needs to be monetized.
But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about locking down content from the new wave of AI models and charging for it. Charging for content we created freely to be shared.
Yeah and it’s not like you wouldn’t understand that Reddit would 2-tier its API so that paying Reddit users can get served ad-less experiences while non-paying need to see ads for your app to use the API. That’s not even that uncommon from what I interact with at work.
Ads? No, I would not accept ads. What I would have accepted was a subscription payment. Hell, I went so far as to purchase Apollo lifetime ultimate.
I am more than willing to support things I use. I am not willing to deal with ads though. Especially when they sneak in like they are posts, and take up entire scroll widths.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I don’t get how people put up with that either. My wife said that we were being over dramatic about the 3rd Party Apps protests, but will agree that the ads are annoying. Hopefully she’ll convert over here before to long and get a taste for how a message board should be.
Stockholmed into thinking ads are acceptable. They’re not. No social contract says that you have to put up with ads, they’re simply unregulated in the USA and people have mostly given up.
Reddit ads are way too intrusive and irrelevant.
why did it have to be aaron swartz
why couldn’t it have been huffman…
I have an article Aaron wrote about the Freemont GM plant business case that I read every few months to remind me of the point he was making. And every time I read it, I am reminded of the ridiculous sequence of events that took him away. Sometimes, it really does seem like only the good die young.
" A policeman beats up a protestor and we think “what an awful person,” not “what terrible training.”
Yeah… that aged like milk.
Good people do good things and get punished by bad people.
Bad people do bad things and get rewarded.
Conspiracy theory time. Huffman murdered Aaron and made it look like a suicide because he didn’t want Reddit to sell out.
oof. Kinda dark and morbid. But I get it.
The beatings aren’t improving morale, you say? I guess we just need to increase the beatings then.
It is basically “if you refuse to work for free, then we won’t let you work for free. Ha, that’ll teach them”
You can’t quit! YOU’RE FIRED!!
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it’s nice to see!
So they really are following Twitter’s example. Twitter’s lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It’s stunning how stupid companies can be.
Just noticed today that Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts. It’s like these two platforms are competing on which one can destroy their reputation first.
They hope to monetize the content by selling it to AI companies.
To be honest, if this field really picks up, they(Reddit, twitter) might not even need the users anymore. That level of classified content is the real good mine
They’ll need the users if they hope to keep generating new content though.
Scraping the data becomes less relevant the older the data gets
I don’t think that matters much if the purpose is LLM. Not for years anyway. Sure, the information might be stale, but the language part remains the same
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I’d just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn’t realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn’t seem to work anymore 🙁
How does nitter work? Does it scrap the data, or use an API?
Nitter no longer works because sign in is required now.
hm, do edits not propagate through federated instances? I edited that comment an hour or two after posting when I realized, but I’ve had several replies today that seem to be based on the original version, all from users on different instances.
nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂edit: sorry for the misinformation, I’d just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn’t realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn’t seem to work anymore 🙁
Edits, comments, etc can take a bit to shuffle through
No worries though, thank you for the clarification
Same here because of a Lemmy post. Truly 2023 is the year of rapid enshittification for the large websites that have dominated the internet for the past decade or so.
enshittification
Now there’s a lovely new word to add to my vocabulary.
enshittification
That needs to be the word of the year.
Wiktionary calls it a hot word
Google right there alongside, going from useful results to sponsored ads and replacing the useful basic sections in their nav bar (i.e. “News”) to whatever random categories their algorithm thinks fit your query.
Honestly, I’m worried that people will be put off by extra level of complexity but I really hope the fediverse takes off, this feels like the only part of the internet moving the right direction at the moment.
I totally agree regarding Google. I work in IT and the entire reason I got into my career is because I grew up with Google and I was good at it.
Google’s search results suck now. It’s actually incredible how much clutter and algorithmic nonsense it shovels at you now instead of legitimate results. Once there became companies that specialized in SEO, it was just a race to the bottom and now it’s all bots fighting for the search rankings instead of real content.
Honestly feels kinda like the pre 00’s internet. Barely any bells and whistles.
Kind of like how reddit used to feel
Reminds me of Usenet. In a good way.
My 2¢
Lemmy will never be ‘reddit’. The simple act of having to choose an instance (and taking the time to understand instances + how they interact with one another, something even I’m not crystal clear on) is not something your average Joe Schmo will be willing to spend the time on. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc are all one massive endlessly scrolling feeds of ‘content’ whereas lemmy asks you to dedicate your account to one instance. You can make another account of course, but even the process of choosing an instance will be enough to stifle growth and keep lemmy smaller in the long run, in my estimation.
Wether that’s a good or bad thing depends on how you view the internet and what you want from it, to me it’s a little of both because I bet I won’t see any of the niche communities I subbed to on reddit pop up here for a good long while (ex a community for the model of car I own, smaller videogames, hobby work, etc). But also it means that there will be less low-effort content - theoretically. You win some you lose some, I’m interested to see the state of both Reddit and Lemmy in a year from now.
Also hey its my first comment ever
I agree that the extra step of having to choose an instance is a hurdle that will turn some people away. In my own experience with it I had to apply to the first one I tried to join (never got a reply), had a timeout on the second one, and didn’t successfully create an account until my third attempt. That’s more effort than some would be willing to put forth.
However I really don’t think the confusing nature of the Fediverse is that big of a deal. I don’t think I understand it at all, and it doesn’t seem like I need to for now. Download Jerboa, make account, switch feed from ‘Local’ to ‘All’, and oh look it’s basically my RIF experience again.
Over and over on Reddit I saw people say “Lemmy will never take off because it’s too confusing for average users,” but I just don’t think that’s the case.
Also hey it’s also my first comment ever
Yeah this shit is easy. I made an account and also use jerboa. No problem.
Sure it will put off some users, but those are the lowest effort type of users anyway. I think most people who were online enough to be heavy reddit posters will not have much of an issue grasping how Lemmy works
It needs everyone to be part of it. I’m no idiot (arguably), but I still don’t quite get why I need an account for Kbin and for Lemmy and… just to use it properly. The concept was that I needed one account which linked to everything, yet that’s not the case. I’m in the process of deleting all my reddit posts with Power Delete Suite and it’s taking a while, but this needs to be better if it wants to get people like myself (and those who aren’t so tech-savvy) across.
People have had no problem choosing email providers.
A few dominant servers will emerge, just like with Gmail, and there may even be an ebb and flow of what the dominant ones are (remember @aol emails?). But it seems to already be hitting the magical critical mass of adoption. Will be interesting to see if it continues
It’s early days. Who knows? Maybe in a year or two, when the Federation aspect is a bit more developed, we’ll have a seamless, less fragmented experience.
In my case, whenever I tell one of my friends about Lemmy, they feel like they’re going to be isolated on their own little island (instance), and that they’ll probably be missing out on a livelier community somewhere else. This misconception is probably the result of relying on centralized platforms for decades. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but Reddit is the perfect example of what can go wrong when you put all your eggs in one basket.
I had better luck showing them the Memmy app in action. Hope they join the community soon.
Once people come around to it being reddit but the accounts look and feel more like email, it’s going to take off (or continue to). It’s not such a great feat that it’ll be insurmountable for average internet users.
Ultimately, if the content is here, people will follow.
I don’t think one need a good idea of what an instance is to use lemmy. It js just like reddit but without reddit mods and decentralized.
By easing the access through abstracting some of the more complicated ideas like instance but focus on the aggregated part, it is possible for your regular people to access.
I first saw “enshitification” used in a blog post by Cory Doctorow about TikTok. Love the term. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys.
It’s like they never learn. They’re trying to turn the internet into cable TV… I guess they didn’t get the hint when a lot of us said “Fuck TV”
Also, Youtube and Twitch have been fucking up a lot lately, helping out sites like Rumble and Twitch.
Tbh I kind of.understand ads: you have server costs that needs to be paid. What I absolutely do not understand is charging ridiculous api prices when they could send those ads like the desktop website does. It makes me really think that the main issue here was to kill 3rd party apps more than monetization
Different takes I’ve heard was the API was setup in such a way it was going to a massive legal liability in the near future especially for EU regions. They no longer have the know how to fix it and close the gaps, they needed a way to cut off the API. And since legal terms of how that API was setup they can’t simply turn it off, they instead resorted to unrealistic demands and costs on the third party to get everyone to stop using it so they can quietly turn it off.
Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts
I’m actually kinda liking this. Maybe it’ll encourage people to stop reposting “Tweets”. Folks need to think about Twitter the way most of us think about Digg: Rarely.
Just noticed that today too, fucking bullshit.
Here’s hoping spez keeps following in his idol Elon’s footsteps!
Cant see reactions Fixed it!
Just vile
I don’t understand why the CEO thinks this is some 4D business move. This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets. There must be records and archives proving that it is unwise to treat a community as negatively as it has … because it’s too easy for internet folk to just up and move to a new place of interest. Time is wrought with soo many examples:
For those of you who are ancient, there were the bad days of AOL and Yahoo, and then time moved on with ideas like social networks and board systems like 4chan. But how did they not know? Just look at what is in store for future Reddit by heading to the front page of Digg.
For one, I mean, look at this sad, sad, sad thing! Further, have you wandered to see Myspace… not sure who that audience is, but hey, to each their own. Hell, I can assure you that most of us only keep FB to keep some contact with family and old friends. I suppose the root of what I am saying is
I doubt spez cares about reddit. He cares about money. If he has to throw the site under a bus to make some more money he will gladly do it
If investors have any memory at all though, they aren’t going to give him tons of money, because he triggered the Reddit collapse before he sold out.
The Online Ad Game is not a long one. It’s about getting people to show up to your site when the ad is shown. No one is paying Reddit to grow brand recognition.
IPOs are all pump and dumps. No exceptions.
Omg I just popped into dig for 10 seconds and it’s so bad.
I worked at reddit during the Digg transition. We all were amazed at how utterly tone-deaf Digg was, how they had already taken some of their problematic features (higher karma users votes being stronger, votes being public, etc) to the extreme (letting companies literally purchase front-page space that wasn’t marked as an ad, etc).
Fast forward 12 years and reddit is somehow upping the ante and being even worse. At least Digg 4 ran well on the browsers of the time. new.reddit can kick up the CPU on an M2 Max fully loaded with RAM
I was an avid user of yahoo chats. Those were my peak ‘get influenced by strangers’ period. Was 10 or something in those and on basic neopets. Yup we move on.
Out of all the platforms to leave, leaving Reddit was ridiculously easy. There’s zero lock in. I don’t care about preserving my post history. My account is not connected to my real life. My conversations were with strangers. Deleting my account meant nothing to me and I was using Reddit since the very beginning.
It’s not like Facebook where some events are only there and there are some people I can only contact there, and it’s not like email where I have all my accounts connected to it and all my contacts have that address. Reddit had literally zero lock in for me. I’m not missing it one bit. Lemmy has fulfilled everything I got from Reddit. Only issues is that it’s unstable from all the new load but so was Reddit when I first switched to that.
The hardest part of leaving reddit is the niche communities it fostered. If you could think of a topic there’s probably a fairly active subreddit (or two) following it. But that existed before reddit in the form of BBBs and lemmy looks to have a great path to recreate that.
The only thing reddit has ATM is users. Losing them is a huge blow to their value.
This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets.
Some of us were there when Digg died, ended up on Reddit. This whole scenario is not feeling too different. I think it’ll take a little longer, the IPO might be the real catalyst, or the monetisation and cannibalisation of the platform that comes from new owners afterwards. But it’s going to come.
Reddit sat for a very long time in the shadow of Digg until it made its final blunder. Lemmy’s communities will do the same, a dual-power in the wings waiting for a catalyst to come.
I was there and felt the same way about digg. My accounts on these platforms are not connected to my real life so I don’t care about abandoning them.
But I’m really excited about Lemmy because it’s not just a new site, it’s a protocol and standard so no one instance can control it all and you can switch instances without being locked out of the platform.
Lemmy has a different kind of potential compared to Mastodon and some of the other fediverse projects too. In my opinion Twitter’s rise was created by corporations and media jumping on board with it. It was directly promoted in the media promoting hashtags and the like for the things they were doing. The issue is that these corporate entities and their supporters in the media won’t jump on board with Mastodon as it’s an anti-corporate project.
Lemmy on the other hand? A platform for communities? Communities existed before reddit in the form of forums and it was reddit that disrupted that market, killing off forums. There is no requirement for corporate involvement in the success of Lemmy and communities can emerge and succeed entirely on their own. As long as people dual-use it for long enough for reddit to repeatedly create catalysts that send users here there is an inevitable future.
In the meantime it’s very important for people to make it good here on its own merit.
“Oh yeah Plebbit? What are you gonna do next, hack my PC and force me to read nothing else than random reddit content for the rest of my life?”
Steve: “Uh… hey Elon, I have an idea for your new Neuralink thing, can we talk about it? I’m positive it’s gonna be a great success…”
Elon: Do I know you?
deleted by creator
Death to reddit!
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
I’m glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don’t care. It’s a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can’t take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo’s perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don’t seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut “unnecessary expenses”.
It’s worth mentioning the article said prior to the blackout ads saw ~14,500 clicks so they’re currently down 40-50%
That’s significant, and it doesn’t surprise me. Even if I wanted to keep using reddit, the content has taken a nose-dive and the mood sucks now, so I bet people have cut their usage down.
Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.
I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.
I was apprehensive of moving over to Lemmy, but I’m starting to get the feel of the fediverse and finally made the switch over.
I think the community can grow over time. It honestly feels like early Reddit, I’m quite enjoying Lemmy!
Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
I have accounts on a bunch of instances, just in case the traffic takes some down.
Sorry, another newbie here, what’s the point of having accounts on different instances? Can’t I post on any instance with the same account?
Where did you see an announcement about RIF for Lemmy? That’s awesome!
As far as I know, talklittle is focused on making a Tildes app called Three Cheers for now, and had been working it even before the announcement from Reddit. As much as it would be nice to have a Lemmy successor to RIF, the closest we’ll probably get any time soon is an app that’s just inspired by the RIF design.
Thanks for the info!
I can’t wait for Slide for Lemmy. Always loved that app!
But it’s awesome to see so many developers already working on stuff for Lemmy. It’s simply bonkers to me that reddit looked at all these people who created so much for them and basically told them to go fuck themselves.
While I want to it be a little bit busier, I’m pleased that we’re not at the low-effort comment point e.g. every other comment being a pun or a shitpost or “this”
“Came here to say this”
I’m old enough to remember the Eternal September on Usenet when AOL allowed their users to access it and there was a huge influx of people just posting “me too,” often in replies to replies to replies to replies of someone saying “me too.”
Let’s hope Lemmy never reaches that level.
^^^ THIS X 10000000 xDDD
🤣
Actually, I like the small community vibe of Lemmy. It’s the dead sub vibe I have a problem with. There are lots of really interesting communities, but you don’t see people posting anything yet.
I like a lot of the tiny vibe but I miss girl Reddit. It was such a unique social media atmosphere and I haven’t managed to find it here. I hope more of the women from Reddit come here
I miss GirlGamers, honestly. It was such a refreshing perspective compared to the constantly angry/circlejerky dudebro vibe of 90% of gaming communities
Took a long time for that to become a thing.
It’ll come here though for sure. I think most people are trying to filter into whatever communities exist right now to get a feel of how federation works but once everyone has a decent idea I think you’ll see an explosion of communities.
Are you looking for more girly communities? Maybe consider starting one if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.
- The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
- Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
- Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn’t set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.
I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn’t worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren’t at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I’d be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it’s just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.
In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it’s probably a waste of money anyway.
I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they’re in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn’t surprise me.
This was my experience. Almost every ad I clicked on was a mistake; either I thought it was a real post and wasn’t paying close attention, only to navigate away in disgust, or I clicked on it purely by accident. I had like 50k+ karma (to give you some idea of much I used reddit) and might have honestly clicked an ad once.
Reddit ad targeting is a joke and I dont even understand how. How can they not tell what my interests are when I’ve literally subbed to them? It’s the easiest targeting set up in the world and they still can’t make it work.
(1) Because the more irrelevant ads they show, the more accidental clicks they can collect, and the more ad revenue. There will be individual clients (e.g. Adobe) who probably have some measurable results, but my guess is that most of their advertisers show pretty good metrics in terms of “cost per click” etc, and aren’t paying close enough attention to realize that their real return on ad spend is extremely low.
(2) Reddit’s just as incapable / uncaring about writing good ad targeting as they are about constructing the rest of the site.
Pick one. Aaron Schwartz would be furious at the current state of reddit.
Personally the redditbusiness page marketing to advertisers reads like wishful thinking or something straight from /r/boringdystopia.
“Look there’s places where people come to discuss flashlight options and other users/google results trust them! Pay us money to look like you’re part of that! It’s not creepy to try and co-opt at all!”
I’m not surprised that their interface isn’t great, they haven’t paid for developers to do anything other than try to look more like twitter/facebook in a long time.
I had no idea about this. This is the weirdest goddamned thing. I found so much that I made a whole separate post. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had no idea.
Hey, I loved watching people nerd out on their flashlights! Actually, I was there to get insight on how they were building their own awesome lights, and trying to understand what the difference between lights was.
Exactly, that is a useful resource. It came to mind because I used it to figure out what was worth it when I needed to buy a new one. A flashlight company pretending to be part of it makes it less useful.
IIRC the vendors were obligated to identify themselves. Some of the vendors were just people making hardware mods, too.
