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…
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It isn’t even about the API drive out anymore of why I’m not going back to Reddit. It’s the CEO though and though
thoroughly agree that the api stuff is just one symptom of a broader underlying issue
Yeah I was trying to convey this feeling to my wife the other night. It’s not just that I won’t be able to use my favorite app (rif) anymore, it’s that the CEO has been lying and gaslighting about what they’ve said. In that AMA thread where he said they want to work with devs who want to work with them and like three devs were like “hey we’re fine with paying but you haven’t answered our attempts to contact you” (not to even mention Apollo’s Dev’s bombshell recordings lol) really shows they don’t give a shit.
I feel like they want that AI money and are furious all these models scraped their content. I get it but it’s not even their content. Regardless of how you feel about artists being mad about their art being used to train models I think we can all agree that a site that merely hosts content being mad that the content was used is laughable.
Because the goal was never to get some kind of fair price for using the API. That’s why they priced it at “Fuck You.”
Ultimately what they want is for people to stop using 3rd party apps entirely because 3rd party apps either don’t show advertisements, or they show advertisements that give ad revenue to the developer.
They want everyone using their app because the valuation of tech companies directly correlates to the number of eyeballs they can serve ads to. Old.reddit will be next, and I bet they’ll try to start blocking ad blockers after that.
The only thing stopping 3rd party apps from showing reddits adds though was reddit never including them into the api. They actually HAD an agreememt with the rif author to take a cut of rif’s ad revenue but as soon as spez took over as ceo he quietly axed that.
Investors wanted to see “app growth” for multiple quarters not underatanding that the app isn’t what maked reddit, and so
spezspaz is doing what he is in a desperate and stupid attempt to claw up some numbers so he can cash out when the ipo hits.Reddit app use DID see some grown during the pandemic, but can’t sustain that because its app is shit. They haven’t improved it ever. It began as a 3rd party app and they purchased it from the original dev. The only changes were to add that pathic coin shop and some sticker/avatar crap to sell you.
There was never any chance at a “fair price” as far as the vast majority of users were concerned. Basically any API cost is going to end up on the user side and the vast majority of users will immediately lose their shit… and then the app makers will redirect all of that to reddit. So the API costs are almost entirely for research and data scraping. This is why the app developers almost IMMEDIATELY turned this into a holy war and are just noping out the moment the bills come in.
But yeah. There is the “Oh, we’ll try to meet you in the middle and still make all apps unsustainable. Because we care” response that maybe involves some token contract work for one of the top app developers to improve the official app. And then there is the “Fuck all y’all addicts. Don’t like it? Not like you’ll do anything about it” response. And THAT is what has made me decide I don’t want to engage with reddit anymore.
Getting fucked in the ass is just the way of life. But I at least expect the companies to lube up first.
Imgur has fair API prices and they serve images and video. Reddit serves goddamn text (or at least that’s their core business and if they can’t afford picture and video they shouldn’t do it).
Sure users would have had to pay some money and/or the 3rd party devs would have had to funnel some of their ad revenue to reddit. But if it was a reasonable amount, I doubt many people would have complained about it (there are always some). Everybody knows Reddit has to make money somehow.
This wasn’t designed to make money though. This was designed to kill all third party apps. I don’t even see the upside from a business perspective. This seems like a petulent manchild move by Spez, just like his idol Elon would make it…
Absolutely. I was waiting it out to see how it would pan out, but after spez’s AMA I dropped Reddit immediately. That was before I even found Lemmy as a replacement. Now that I’m here I’m not missing Reddit in the slightest.
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.
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.
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.
I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.
I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
Well said. Couldn’t agree more.
Same, I just miss some of the interest based communities I was in, but they’re growing well on Lemmy right now. Optimistic for the future.
For real. Even though my groups on lemmy are smaller, they’re made up of more dedicated people that participate in discussion alot more. So it’s all great for me!
The only thing that had me back on Reddit was searching for something on DDG and getting 99% Reddit results. I see why they are un-deleting people’s comments and posts when they close their accounts. Hopefully other forums take those spots.
That explains why I kept trying to purge my history and having some posts keep popping back up.
Get yourself banned. I don’t think they restore content of banned accounts.
I was an early adopter of Reddit back during the digg days and I had over a decade of post history there and to see that go… I couldn’t care less. It was all ephemeral bullshit.
Same here. Liking Lemmy like I liked Reddit at the beginning.
16 years and almost 300K comment karma here…
I totally agree. I’m on Android and never used Apollo, but I’m using the wefwef web app and it’s fantastic. People are saying it feels like Apollo!
wefwef is changing my mind about how good webapps can be. The UI is a copy of Apollo but the execution in web tech is absolutely top notch.
Try
phanpy.localphanpy.social for Mastodon! It blew my mind on how well designed, fast and efficient it is. It’s better than the Mastodon local apps - at least on the basic functions.Do you mean phanpy.social?
I did! Thank you.
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
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.
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 🙁
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
How does nitter work? Does it scrap the data, or use an API?
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
That needs to be the word of the year.
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.
enshittification
Now there’s a lovely new word to add to my vocabulary.
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.
Honestly feels kinda like the pre 00’s internet. Barely any bells and whistles.
Reminds me of Usenet. In a good way.
Kind of like how reddit used to feel
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Here’s hoping spez keeps following in his idol Elon’s footsteps!
Agreed. I deleted my 15 year account. Mods should just leave.
Reddit can’t exist without the free labor.
Other side is I don’t know what the mods that stick it out get. I’m guessing there is some monetary benefit to the bigger community mods I don’t know about.
It’s too late for you, but I’d suggest anybody who wants to delete their account consider first editing all of their comments to overwrite the data, there are lots of reports of deleted comments being restored, I’ve not heard of reverted edits though. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
A few weeks ago I used PDS to edit my comments - using the fork with the 5 second delay. Random pockets of older comments started reappearing after few days. I’ve been checking all 45 pages of my history every few days and editing the random comments that have reverted from the edited message. It seems like it has mostly stuck now.
I guessing there’s probably some broken code/process somewhere that isn’t always able to commit changes and once caches expire the comment returns.
I just tried Power Delete Suite about an hour ago. I beleive reddit has slowed down the allowable edit rate, something like one every 5 seconds. PDS runs through as fast as it can, meaning it’s a 1 in 10 success at best. I tried Redact as well, but that just blanks out white after giving it permission. I’m not having much success. But Shreddit seems to work OK? Though that doesn’t address the undeletion possobility
Try the fork in this comment. It has the 5 second delay put in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/comments/mgshmh/a_heads_up_for_those_who_are_using_the_edit/jpkpdhq/use the PDS fork with the 5 second delay. it’ll take forever but it’ll get the job done!
why did it have to be aaron swartz
why couldn’t it have been huffman…
Conspiracy theory time. Huffman murdered Aaron and made it look like a suicide because he didn’t want Reddit to sell out.
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.
oof. Kinda dark and morbid. But I get it.
Good people do good things and get punished by bad people.
Bad people do bad things and get rewarded.
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I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn’t another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.
They had no lockin. Other social networks are connected to your real identity and real life friends and connections. Or they have content creators that you could only find on their platform. Reddit had neither. Leaving it was the easiest thing ever.
Of the places I’ve been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn’t just in the software but also in the community.
Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I’m trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.
The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.
I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)
Understand that Spez is so out of touch he even managed to piss off gigantic pacifist nerd-communities like r/startrek to leave and switch over to the open source side! These subs inevitably take dedicated users and quality memes with them. The users and mods create the value. Honour to you and your house Lemmy. Qapla’
I think moderation and community will be much better on Lemmy. On Reddit you got some power tripping mods because they’d control the only sub with a clean name that got all the subscribers. There’s no such monopoly on Lemmy so it will be the best communities that win. Monopolies corrupt in all their forms.
yIlop! wa’IeS chaq maHegh!
Outnerd me! I dare you!
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“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?
Death to reddit!
Reddit’s not just happy with user’s content and labor, but now also wants compliments. Slavery with extra steps.
Ooh La La, Someone’s Going To Get Laid In College…
Just vile
I feel like old af now that I’ve watched two huge sites implode due to mismanagement. I was a Digg refuge way back, and now here I am on lemmy…
Heh, I go back to Usenet. Architecturally, Lemmy is closer to Usenet, but Usenet did not have an authentication mechanism.
Yes. At the end of the day it is always corporate greed and shortsightedness that does them in.
Crazy that even Google seems to be realizing that it’s search really leaned on Reddit for decent results nowadays… I’m curious to see if a bunch more things start to implode over time
Google basically monetized user-generated content and discussion (those obscure FAQs and technical discussions), now Reddit wants to get it on it, too. The only ones getting truly shafted is the average user.
I remember the day that Slashdot sold out.
What happened to Slashdot? There wasn’t really one particular event that made me stop using that site, I just sort of drifted away. Was there an “enshittification” moment there, too?
1999, Malda & Bates sold it to Andover.net. It didn’t become terrible, but there was a sense that it went corporate. It’s been sold and resold since then.
I guess I mostly used it after the sale, then. I started in 1998 or 1999 (when the hype for The Phantom Menace was building up) and used it until the early 2010s.
Now this is the real nerd cred here lol. Yea. Same. We’re old now. Has its benefits and disadvantages.
I rarely go to slashdot anymore, but still do occasionally. What did they do?
They were independent then they weren’t. I don’t recall any deeply controversial scandal beyond that. But the content and vibe was never the same after they “sold out”. They are a shell of their former self… they used to be “the thing”. Now they’re just something some people know about.
Exactly. It started feeling corporate.
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I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Newsvine -> Reddit -> Lemmy
I spent the most time on Reddit, but I think I had the “best” time on Newsvine. Their website was extremely slick, and the fact that they encouraged long-form articles from their users was awesome
Same.
That’s how I got my username…
3 sites if you include Twitter . Twitter and Reddit seem to be in a mismanagement competition right now. Not sure who’s winning
We’re all losing, sadly.
Tumblr also kind of got ruined a few years ago too for some people if you were into that platform.
I was in art school when Tumblr was at its peak. Looking back it was dumb, just resharing pictures and gifs but I had so much fun. I met so many people through Tumblr that I’m still in contact with.
I really enjoyed tumblr in a way I don’t really understand now. I think I enjoyed creating something to share of my own out of bits and pieces of everyone else. Idk.
Myspace, digg, tumblr, reddit, twitch, could maybe count 9gag and places like gfycat
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!!
