“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.
I think this is a better place than Reddit already. It’s fairly new and people are excited about creating content. But I think in reality, sooner or later every sub will be forced to open, and everything will go back to normal. Of course some of the users would’ve completely migrated to the Fediverse or other platforms, and it’s up to us whether the Fediverse survives or not.
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.
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.
Thats a great word for it. Doom bait. I hated being surrounded by pessimism on that site
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.
All capitalistic entities aim for a monopoly so they can fully dictate the terms to maximize their profit. I was actually only using the Reddit app and liked it, especially since the update. What I didn’t like was banning anyhow good subs for thought crime and the forever lowering standard of content. Hell, I started getting soft porn in popular in spite of not opting into NSFW. The exodus to Lemmy gave me the perfect reason to fully commit to Lemmy. c:
I fucking hate spez. Will never use reddit again
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.
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.
Removed by mod
really went off the rails there lol. I could tell when you mentioned Snowden/Assange.
Removed by mod
you don’t think it’s nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?
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!
Maximum cope
“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.
See this is another thing, how is Reddit management not in prison and on the sex offenders list? They willfully and knowingly distributed child pornography for YEARS. What the fuck?
From what I remember, jailbait getting taken down was either what they did right before or right after reddit got sold to whoever. And then, iirc, in 2018-ish they got bought by a Chinese company.
What are you talking about? There was no sale in 2018, much less to “a Chinese company”. AFAIK the last company that owned Reddit was Condé Nast (the purchase in 2006). Since 2011 they have been independent of Condé Nast. Since then, they’ve been reliant on venture capital.
Edit to add: Anderson Cooper’s calling out of Reddit for hosting the jailbait subreddit in 2011 is the impetus for it being taken down, not the sale of the company.
Not owned by, but heavily invested in by Tencent.
I think that’s where the confusion lies, however it’s currently owned by Advance Publications.
That’s very interesting. Tencent is not even hinted at in Wikipedia’s timeline of Reddit page. Also, when they say that Reddit was able to “operate independently of Condé Nast”, they’re being somewhat deceitful and implying they were independent. Advance Publications is only mentioned in the footnote/reference, and what they meant that Advance Publications is hands-off compared to Condé Nast.
“It’s expensive to run a company into the ground” - u/spez
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.
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.
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.
Giving and receiving gold was surprisingly, one of my least favourite things. Someone gave me gold once and i felt beholden to say thank you? I didnt ask for it, i didnt comment in hopes of getting given “gold”. I never gave anyone else gold. Why would i give a shit about getting it myself? Its a fucking forum.
Reactions are common in lots of forums though, gold is just a special reaction.
A special upvote if you will, its not really that deep.Waste of money.
he moderated WHAT? So not only is he an idiot, he’s a pedo? What a great image.
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.
It’s probably even more expensive to piss off any investors right before an IPO.
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.
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.
It is, but pissing off the content creators (core of the business) is NOT the way to go.
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.
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.
*Chinese billionaires
Removed by mod
I am asking this in full earnestness: is any critique of the Chinese government assumed to be rooted in xenophobia?
Removed by mod
I feel that maybe you’re reading my question as ‘critique of China is inherently support for the west/US/etc’ which I absolutely do not mean. I think that it’s possible that painting all critique with a broad ‘xenophobia’ brush (while undoubtedly warranted at times) can prevent discussion in good faith.
Removed by mod
If this is the thinking I can expect on this instance, perhaps this is not the instance for me.
I think he’s referring to how Reddit used to operate on Tencent funding.
Tencent is partially owned by the Chinese government.Removed by mod
