- cross-posted to:
- snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
- business@midwest.social
Thousands of moderators overseeing the site’s subreddits are on strike. It’s a wrinkle in Reddit’s plan to go public, and a sign that plan is premature, columnist Anita Ramaswamy writes.
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I want all of the scabs and the naysayers to see this. Without the protest, without the exodus, without the blackout, we don’t have Reuters, one of the world’s most respected journalistic institutions, publishing disparaging info on Reddit’s IPO. The longer this goes on, the worst it gets for u/spez and any other rube who feels entitled to make tens of millions off of the backs of the community they neglected.
Lmao I didn’t realise the article was on Reuters until I read your comment. Pretty fucking funny man.
Yeah, I agree. I love the idea of u/spez trying to explain to the potential investors why so many users of the investment are working together to actively disturb and destroy the platform as much as they can, while being way more effective than users of pretty much any other other popular social media platform.
good! I more people see Huffman’s bottom tier communications. Reading his comments do not sound like the CEO of a company, it’s always very embarrassing, like he’s cosplaying what a kid thinks a CEO should be.
I am hopeful more people are starting to see that a vast majority of CEOs are conservative terrorists in human clothing. From Elon to Huffman all of them want to rule over the common person for their benefit.
It’s still disapointing to see media misrepresent the reason for the protests. Nobody went up in arms when Reddit announced they’ll charge for API access, which was announced in April. The protests started because they’re charging a bazillion dollars, aka “the fuck you price” effectively banning 3rd party apps without actually banning 3rd party apps
And the “strike” got extended due to the extremely poor handling of the protests from Reddit, like slandering the Apollo dev
I’m thinking Reddit’s handling of this is going to be a case study for executive MBA programs in the future, as in, “What not to do.”
What I don’t understand is that there are already plenty of these types of cases of what not to do. Then they did it anyway.
I mean some people are complaining about the price. But I don’t care about the price necessarily, as I’m not “protesting”. I’m simply tired of participating in the shittification of social media sites while they seek to monetize us. So them charging anything, or attempting to be profitable, is inherently the turnoff for me, because there is an inevitable path that a for-profit social media website takes.
In my view, or at least why I left Reddit (and support the strike), it’s not about the API charging.
It started as the price. Then it was also about
Lies about the 3rd party apps.
Lies about 3rd party app developers.
The whole process from January (no API changes planned) to announcing there will be a cost, to 6 weeks later giving a 1 month deadline and stating the ridiculous prices.
Back up by years and years of failed promises from Reddit, as well as whatever bullshittery they seem to concentrate on instead (chat, streaming, NFTs)
Hahaha. Marvelous.
I hope the site never sees an IPO until it fades into obscurity.
I hope it does IPO… and wallstreetbets has a field day shorting it
Can you even short an IPO?
I don’t see why not? Not the actual IPO, but as soon as there are shares on the market, you can short them.
IPO stocks can be sold short once they are trading on public markets
There also has to be an uptick in price before you can short… its not like forex where you can short whenever you feel like it… as far as I’m aware I’ve never been much of a stock guy though only played in currency exchanges
Wallstreetbets will find a way.
The primary excuse for the API change, to charge AI companies for Reddit’s data, doesn’t hold water. After the change goes into effect, AI companies can just switch from the API to web scrapers for continued free access. It’ll require marginally more processing power, which AI companies already have in spades.
It’s absolutely, 100% bullshit. They want to make more money if a dev is willing to pay for it, but in reality they want 100% of the users on their own app to monetize them, sell their data, etc.
Fuck em’, I’ve been extremely happy learning more about the Fediverse every day.
The ongoing strike, spurred by Huffman’s plan to charge fees to third-party apps that serve up Reddit content, was supposed to last for 48 hours.
Not just charge fees… Exorbitant fees. Outrageous fees.
If Huffman wanted to target these much higher costs to LLMs, they could have instituted an approval process for 3PAs which got charged sane API fees while they charge much more for LLMs. I’m no dev but I think they could tell the difference between the two by just analyzing the API traffic.
But they aren’t doing that. Maybe LLMs were the primary target but they sure aren’t even trying to keep 3PAs around.
Ai training data gets gathered with scrapers… It literally doesn’t need the api. And they only need everything once. And maybe update it every year or so…
Also the whole nsfw thing…
This is just and only to kill third party clients.
And spez is close to someone that works for “open” ai… So a even more clownshow move.
Huh… I would have thought they’d use the API when available but I honestly know nothing about it. Wouldn’t gathering data via API provide more structured data thereby making it easier to feed into their models?
Often its easier to just scrape everything rather than making a whole code to pull api requests and put them into a database and sort them while doing so. These companies scrape the entire internet, they don’t have time or necessarie to use api, they don’t need permanent access to a two way communication, they just need the data.
Good point.
One option would be to pay mods, or […] reward them in other ways.
Maybe let them use the apps they want to use? Like we had before?
No just burn the website into the ground and leave. Its not worth it.
People with this sort of business mindset fail to see that not all mods do it for monetary benefit or rewards. Some people just want to build and be part of a genuine community that shares their interests, and that is all the motivation and reward they need.
The only way to align the interests of mods with those of investors is to merge the two groups. Give the mods shares (preferably few enough that even if every invested mod bands together, they’re below 30% of the float), and allow outside investors to become mods on any subreddit they choose. That way, mods have a dog in the financial fight, which has not historically been the case.
allow outside investors to become mods on any subreddit they choose.
I see this going very badly almost as soon as it’s implemented.
While I understand your concern, I’m not sure I agree. Investors have an incentive to make their investment profitable. Therefore, if they have to maintain a level of effort for an investment, they’ll do everything to make it grow. That means they’ll work to widen the community without making it too broad for advertising, work on building in organic advertising, etc… Having given it thought for six hours, I really do believe that keeping mods and investors in alignment will be important. It’s the reason why the fediverse tends to work; those who have the financial investment are the moderation team.
Keeping the interests of mods and investors in alignment is important. However, if people can buy their way into a moderator position, particularly if they get to choose the community they mod, it would be extremely easy for bad actors to take over communities, such as those that promote political activism, or offer support for marginalized groups.
A much better option would be to only offer investment to moderators who have been active for a period of time / gained a level of trust with their community.