I’ve been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn’t last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn’t
To me, Reddit’s sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I’ve never used.
If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I’ve only used Apollo so I can’t speak to the other apps.
I can’t blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn’t make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO’s are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That’s how capitalism works.
In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can’t stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn’t have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn’t been such an uproar. So I’m glad it went the way it did.
I haven’t heard anyone say that they’re upset because Reddit needed money. Actually I’ve heard more understanding people, they wanted Reddit to stay alive and were willing to possibly say yes to subscriptions/ad based content.
But spez completely shit the bed on the entire thing. Giving them the crazy high prices, the incredibly short deadline, hiding the pricing for those 2 months, then trying to blame it on AI, and just everything. Yes, if they had a level headed leader at the front of their corporation I could very well see myself preparing to pay a couple bucks a month to Reddit to get a good experience, they could get their “Residual Income”.
Instead he had to go all megalomaniac and demand everyone bend to his will - and I left permanently.
I used to pay for a reddit gold to support the site because Ai (naively) beloved it was a worthwhile investment in a website that connected disparate, niche communities and served as a repository of knowledge.
Don’t I look like an idiot now. Fuck u/spez
Yup, same. Paid for premium to avoid ads. Have now canceled and poking around Lemmy and Mastedon to fill the niche.
Once my reddit gold ran out from buying Alien Blue, I’ve been paying for it ever since, since I wanted the site to succeed, and I never saw any of the ads. It felt like the right thing to do, but once all this shit with spez being a total dick went down, I cancelled my autopay, so it won’t renew again.
Take that money and contribute it to a worthwhile cause on this instance. :)
We all did.
Take that money and contribute it to a worthwhile cause on this instance. :)
Yep. The headline could have been “Reddit to start charging for Premium if users want to use third party apps” and it would’ve been and gone in a day or two.
Instead, Huffman’s ego stepped in and he gave media cycle red meat with how he’s handled this. The story now is how aggressive, dishonest, and incompetent he looks. I think there’s a lot yet left to be written about a tech company that relies entirely on the health of its community treating members of that community so poorly and so openly attributing that to $$$.
well shoot. this sums it up so well, there’s nothing to add.
Exactly. I was planning to just migrate to their official app after July 1. I mean yes the app may be an ad filled shitty experience but such can be said as well for Facebook and Instagram. Companies need money and I am perfectly fine with that.
It’s Huffman’s AMA that made me actively seeking Reddit alternatives. It was that bad.
The other side of it for me was I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable increase in data collection that Reddit signaled it would be doing to increase ad revenue
I was considering reddit gold, but with everything I felt the money was better placed in running my own kbin instance. bonus points that other people can use it too :3
The thing that I’ve seen pretty consistently from both RIF and Apollo devs is that they’re not disputing the fact that reddit needs to start making a profit. Nobody’s (seriously) complaining about what was free becoming not free.
The fact is, if this was purely about money, they’d be willing to negotiate on price. The price they’re asking is ~70x more than imgur, which hosts images WAAAAAY heavier to host than text, and links etc.
If it was solely about showing ads, they could have given 3PAs access to reddit ads via the api, and enforced showing them.
There are several ways this could have worked for everyone.
Reddit wanted to kill 3PAs. That’s the only logical conclusion here. Hell, if they’d come out and said THAT, as well as fixing the problems with their own app first, I might even have been able see their side of it. I would still be pissed, but it’d be more understandable than this very blatant Twitter-esque death-by-pricing thing they’re trying to do.
The reports were that the amount they are asking 3PAs to pay is 29× the revenue that they would make from a user in advertising. Astonishing.
But I agree. If they had started this out simply by saying “no more 3PAs except for approved accessibility-focused apps”, the protest would never have been able to get the steam it did. That statement would have cut the legs out of the accessibility-focused concerns (even though it doesn’t actually adequately address VI users’ needs). It would have removed the possibility for the huge drama that happened with their awful communication with and lies to 3PA devs. It would have completely mitigated bot devs’ concerns. And it would have made the NSFW issues completely moot. With those issues addressed, there would have been nothing for the protests to really hook on to in quite the same way.
The price they’re asking is ~70x more than imgur, which hosts images WAAAAAY heavier to host than text, and links etc.
The apollo dev got a very discounted price for the imgur api. Still, general imgur prices are about 3-4 times cheaper than the amount reddit is asking for now. That is if you stay in your quota. Exceeding the imgur quota costs about $1 per 1000 read requests, though. The value talked about for reddit is a flat rate of $.24/1000 or ~$1/3000 requests, no discounted plans are known to me.
The fact is, if this was purely about money, they’d be willing to negotiate on price.
That still holds true, though.
While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.
What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.
For developers:
- Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
- Lied about making the API cost reasonable
- Gave developers very little time to adjust
- Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
- Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer
For moderators:
- Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
- Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions
For users:
- Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
- Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
- Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do
Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I think Reddit might have a long-term plan here.
-
Hike up the API price to a point where 3P apps like Apollo will have to shut down, making them worthless, after so much was invested in them
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Get users upset with the lack of features on the official app
-
Make the 3P app developers look like bad guys
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Wait a month or so
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Publicly offer to buy a popular, and now worthless, 3P app ^for way too little money^, in order to use the features for the official app
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Point out that the 3P dev is a monster if they don’t sell, since it would help users so much, and Reddit is a Community, after all
They couldnt do this because apollo dev already offered to sell apollo for 10m, half the cost it would have costed them for continued api usage.
The precedent is already there to buy one and reddit missed it.
Didn’t they buy alien blue before that?
It was the most popular, before Apollo even existed I think.
They bought that, turned it to shit despite it starting from a beloved, yet now unrecognizable mess. Even if they bought Apollo, RIF, Relay, Sync and Baconreader tomorrow, their goal with the site conflicts with what people enjoy about using it and anything they do will be shittier and shittier.
People would always flock to another community focused app as long as that’s a possibility, so they decided to nuke the whole concept.If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.
they hurt themselves here though because Apollo’s dev gave them the buyout option and they said he was trying to extort them. I doubt any of the app developers would be too keen on this now without covering their ass to pretty extreme extents
Large corporations regularly buy up small firms to get their product. You may be less tin foil hatty than you think on that one.
From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?
The Apollo dev may want to make apps in the future, and ruining their reputation by selling their app for a dollar might hurt them in the long term.
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And to pile on top, Reddit has been around since 2005. Why is there a SUDDEN and sloppy push towards profitability? It’s like someone clued them in just recently that an IPO means you’ll have to publicly show profit/loss. The way they’ve gone about it suddenly and sloppily doesn’t scream long term plan, but instead a crash change.
Mostly the same feeling. Was surprised how he “communicated” with mods, who helped Reddit to grow a lot.
Excellently said! Can I nominate you to represent me in the fediverse?
Thank you! Sure, I’ll do my best lol.
If Reddit just charged the AI people for API access and left 3rd party apps alone I doubt anyone would have given a shit, but they had to go and two-birds-with-one-stone it. Then they insisted on digging their hole deeper by running their mouths and making the situation worse.
I suspect they have signed an exclusivity deal with some kind of third party to use the API. It could be for “AI” or it could be for more nefarious purposes.
That’s why it’s important to go back thru our comment history and replace them with linguistic garbage. To ensure Reddit can’t profit off our donations. I’m not in the business of subsidizing Reddit, after all.
“Plonked up behind the radio them ready the plastic manuscript who observe Jerry’s can.” Or whatever.
If I were implementing this nefarious Reddit I probably wouldn’t have edits wipe out the original data. It’s certainly not necessary to implement edits that way.
In fact, the editing log itself can be used as more data.
We actually know for a fact they don’t do it that way, since Reddit has already been caught undoing peoples “delete” edits after they’ve gone
Maybe a script that uses ai generated content. If done at scale it will destroy their output due to inbreeding.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat on the reddit board for years and was briefly CEO for 8 days.
OpenAI is another dumpster fire waiting to happen, then.
Why else would they make access to OpenAI/ChatGPT/etc so cheap? So others can build businesses on the tech that get locked in before they jack up the price.
We’ve seen this rodeo plenty of times now.
I don’t disagree with your saying that is why they’re doing it - but I wonder how well it will actually work out for them. Natural Language Prompting is hard to “lock in” someone on. Sure, the complex jobs with custom trained models are going to get locked in for sure - but the companies that are just adding “chat bots” to their apps? I don’t see the difficulty in migration.
I use OpenAI for one of my projects, and frankly there’s little that would keep me from being able to migrate to another service if one came along that gave a better value. An AI platform isn’t like an IaaS platform, there really isn’t a lot of platform-specific workflows involved, and prompts that work on one LLM should work just about as well on another.
Even for custom trained models, most training data is stored in json, and should be easy to feed into another LLM, though of course tweaking will be required
Spez knows he can create ‘traffic’ of user comments and answers with AI. He also knows he can use AI to moderate subreddits. He doesn’t care about the quality of the site, just the numbers that get him his payday. He’ll burn it to the ground and cash-out, leaving a mess in his wake.
The widespread adoption of AI isn’t to do anything better, its to do something worse than a human does, because people will buy close enough. The WGA is 100% right about AI, and I say this as an avid Midjourney user.
The ai people aren’t using api
They would have gone straight to scraping if they couldn’t reach a deal. Sam Altman is on the board of reddit. He knows which way the wind blows there.
LLMs are already relying on web scraping and always have. They are getting data from the entire Internet, do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?
It’s complete FUD.
do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?
This is such a great point that I hadn’t even considered. These API changes will have exactly zero effect on LLM’s and similar services.
There may be some complexity with legality here though. Obviously Google and other search engines already have most of Reddit’s content indexed, but there are some legal arguments as to whether they can use the content to create derivative works.
If Reddit opens up its API and specifically allows AI companies to use the content to create LLMs and other AI tools then from a legal point of view they may find this much more preferable to facing potential legal action further down the road.
Reddit could reach the same agreement without an API, too. Legality isn’t going to change because of the technical implementation.
Since spez said that one objection was that other people were making money where reddit wasn’t, one thing I’d have been okay with is if the API worked only for those who were reddit premium. (To be open, I was already paying for the lowest tier of premium.)
Although this is a reasonable solution, it’s also reasonable to just let the apps charge a subscription and pay the API fees, which is what the app devs planned. The only issue is that Reddit set their API fees so high that the app devs can’t possibly charge enough to make it profitable, certainly not in the time frame they were given.
The controversy started when their API fees were astronomically high as to constructively end all 3rd party apps.
I think the real anger started when Steve Huffman lied about the Apollo developer and the dev started posting the recordings to prove that Huffman was lying through his teeth.
After that, Huffman stepped onto multiple rakes as he does a poor job of crisis management. They don’t know where the value from their product comes from.
The protest is not about the fact that they are charging for it. The protest is about the fact of how much they are charging for it. When compared to imgur the rates are absolutely insane.
I keep seeing this incorrectly reported and it drives me crazy. No developer is upset about Reddit charging for the API access. What they are upset about is the fact that Reddit has jacked the price of that API access up so high that no third party apps could ever afford to use it.
At this point of time though, it has grown to be less about that though, and how disrespectful Spaz is treating everyone. Even if he reversed his decision, who can trust the guy now?
He’s made it clear that even if you spent the last 10 years working on promoting your community making it successful, that he’ll happily ban your account and hijack your community, for a silent takeover. There are some serious shadow government vibes happening.
Given the way Spaz lied about the Apollo developer, even if API access was only $1 per month I wouldn’t pay anymore (because I don’t feel Spaz should have the money)
I understand that, but framing it as “reddit users are mad because reddit wants to charge for API access” paints reddit users as entitled, when what is actually happening is “reddit users are mad because reddit decided to charge for API access with only 30 days notice and set the prices so high that third party app developers would have to pay potentially millions of dollars per year in order to access it”.
There is a massive difference between those two statements. One makes reddit users look like a bunch of entitled assholes, and the other frames the situation correctly and truthfully.
I agree in many ways… Good or bad phrasing though, I think mostly everyone is on the same page. I also love the fact here that its easy to avoid toxic admins or communities, so we’re no longer controlled by whatever makes reddit profit (and admins can do what’s right instead)
As of 3 weeks ago, I would’ve been willing to:
- Pay for reddit premium in order to use a third party app.
- Stuck around even without a third party app, using only the old.reddit interface for as long as that was going to work with Reddit Enhancement Suite.
- Allowed ads to get through my ad blocker on Reddit.
- Kept my old comment/link history accessible on the site.
- Continue to use reddit.
Now I’m basically unwilling to do any of those things. The interviews they gave up through the first 2 days of the blackout made me pledge not to actually pay reddit any money (and I’ve paid for gold from when it was first announced, as a “charter member,” till when they decided to dramatically increase the price in exchange for a complicated “premium” offering).
And since then, the hamfisted way they’ve dealt with mods and protests are getting me to leave the site early, too, and going out of my way to delete my old comments and posts that actually added information to the site, plus deleting or otherwise breaking the URLs of my content that have been linked from anywhere on reddit (whether in a post by me or reposted by someone else).
The way I see it is since I’m not a reddit customer, then I’m the product.
Except, if I’m the product, you’re probably not supposed to nickle and dime me.
It’s kinda like if McDonald’s was trying to charge cows for the privilege of being ground into patties, but relied on them to go through the process of their own free will.
Without user content, reddit is just an empty husk, a waste of data center resources, yet they behave like they’re somehow entitled to my engagement on the platform.As for how they’ve handled things, it’s been a train wreck.
Just requiring reddit premium to have access to the API/3rd party apps would have made a few waves, but nothing like this. Keeping their mouth shut would have been more useful than almost everything they’ve done… whatever their strategy was…Even without any of that though, they’ve been working hard at making the experience worse for a while. The redesign focuses on the user consuming ads instead of content, dooms scrolling instead of reading or commenting.
TL;DR: They were going to shit regardless, they just decided to use more fans.
People are sufficiently pissed off enough to do what you have done and it’s unlikely they’ll ever get over it and go back. The same goes for the treatment of the mods. Huffman has pissed off all the wrong people, people that important to the site. He’s chosen the best way possible to destroy Reddit, not that it will actually do so.
I think there’s a lot they could have done better. They could have injected ads into the API feeds directly so they could still get revenue and make it part of the terms that a client can’t remove them, and offer a paid version of the API that doesn’t have ads. That could work with the clients who could then continue to offer a free ad supported version or a subscription that removes them with Reddit getting a cut. I would have been totally understanding of that and reddit could have gotten a ton of subscription revenue by leveraging the existing distribution channels.
They’re a company, they have to pay the bills, I get that, but they went over the line with their deception, greed, and hunger for power. This wasn’t just about making money, it’s also about control. This was all just an underhanded move to kill 3rd party apps without outright banning them. They want total control so they can continue to make ui decisions that make then more money at the expense of the user experience with their users not having an alternative client to go to. They clearly don’t have any respect for their users so why would I use them?
I can’t blame reddit for wanting to be profitable,either. They just went about it in the worst, most confrontational way possible. They insulted the people who gave reddit all of its content, and alienated their core users.
Even if Huffman had been nicer about it, though, no amount of diplomacy would make up for the fact that their API pricing is ridiculous. Nor would it make their complete inflexibility and stubbornness more palatable. The arrogance and disrespect they’ve shown is astounding. Trying to “fix” that with pretty words, but without actually changing their plans, would be like trying to polish a turd.
I think there would still be a massive protest. The only difference would be the tone.
Notice how Reddit haven’t engaged in any positive damage control at all? It’s just been hit pieces against devs, an AMA with completely canned responses and unprecedented wide-spread hostile action against it’s content creators/power users/mods?
Reddit is in full-blown sell out mode right now and nothing but money matters anymore. It’s all down hill from here.
Yeah, I don’t care about third party apps or API anymore. Their handling of it became very clear that they are headed in the direction of a Zuckerberg run type multi billion dollar company fully monetizing and extracting data from users, so I don’t feel like using their sketchy app like I would never use a Facebook app or Tiktok app, or make an account for either of those two. And don’t want to provide location based behavioral data they get from ip addresses and what type of interests I’m into so they can sell that type of demographic data to companies.
People share way more on reddit than they do to people they know because of pseudonyms, so yeah I don’t want to directly provide anymore than I have to towards the profits of a large corporation.
It does certainly seem like it, but what exactly are they trying to achieve? They don’t have an IPO yet and even if they got one now it would be devalued over before the shit show. And with every new day reddit shows potential investors that they have absolutely no control of the situation, and just doubles down on idiocy.
How is it supposed to make money at this point?
Ad revenue should convince the investors. Who cares if there’s no real content besides automated reposts and bot spam, as long as there are some users who they can shower with an endless stream of ads.
Yeah, and with ip logs and ad click throughs and people also providing comments that can form a personality type that type of data can be useful to marketers to see what people with certain interests go on to buy. Add downloading the official app on smartphones with the permission requests, and that’s even more data to provide. Especially if the app is able to get info like your email address or phone to then connect to a public directory.
Memory is short on the internet. Reddit are hoping for this to blow over “quickly” (i.e. in a month or two) because they know the bulk of their users will continue to show up (out of inertia or a lack of viable alternatives). If they can keep the front page showing decent posts, they think they’ll make it through.
I think the knock-on effects of losing mods and “power users” will take some time to play out. The real long term effects won’t be known until it becomes clear that the loss of those key users has effected the quality of the posts and therefor usage by your “average Redditor.”
Like others have said, there are multiple factors at play:
- The official reddit app sucks in terms of basic usability
- The offiical reddit app has poor accessibility
- The official website, while generally well optimised for mobile, keeps forcing users to use the reddit app - see point 1
- Reddit is trying to position themselves as an ad company (see here for one user’s explanation), so it’s in their benefit to get people using the mobile version where they can hoover up sensitive information for serving ads.
- Reddit are trying to grow their ad platform. Third party apps interfere with that. Reddit understandably wants to kill them off.
- Reddit are aware that people like third party apps and people don’t like their official app.
Now, if Reddit had been honest and transparent throughout the entire process and just killed off the APIs without charging for it and gave the straightforward explanation, I think people would be sad as they are emotionally invested in their apps, and there would be some people who would go for good. But a lot more people would come back to Reddit - let alone seek alternatives like Lemmy, KBin, Tildes, etc.
What has happened is that the CEO has tried to make apps “the villain” and reddit the “poor little company” - sort of like DARVO but for 3rd party apps, so they could paint their official Reddit as the “wholesome” one.
Except the reddit community is large and pretty smart - technically and legally too. Receipts were kept, the CEO was exposed for his blatant lies, and then he has become incredibly unhinged and angry that things haven’t gone his way, giving incredibly aggressive interviews. And the Reddit community notices, because whenever Reddit is in the news, it’s very rarely for a good reason. The CEO was shown to be wearning no clothes after all.
I’ve seen Reddit go through drama, but never quite like this. It’s quite incredible and astonishing how one person could fuck up a transition this badly. Spez has repeated that the Automod is going to be killed, but given the blatant lies that came before, it’s no wonder why folks aren’t trusting him on his word. He’s made his bed, he has to lie in it.
Reddit isn’t an ad company, reddit is a sock puppet company. They are selling the ability to control the narrative.
What this is really about and people are just starting to realize is: the interests of the shareholders and CEO who want to get rich is not compatible with volunteer content and a volunteer modded site. People aren’t eager to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just exposing it.
The weird thing is that they ARE compatible. They could have charged slightly more per user than they make on the official app and everything would have been fine. This move reduced shareholder value and user value.
Reddit makes $350m a year in advertising revenue, it is in theory a fantastically successful business that could make plenty of profit for its shareholders.
The problem is solely down to them raising more and more capital the latest at a $10B valuation. Because of this they need to increase the revenue even further to try and justify the inflated valuation and that is what has led to the latest situation.
I am sure they could use less drastic ways to rise revenue, clearly without spreading lies about Apollo creator and alienating moderators. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. And than there is very wrong, Reddit way to do things.
What really told me that reddit was squandering its revenue sources was when they shuttered redditgifts two years ago. Maybe there were issues behind the scenes, but they had commissions from the storefront and from elves, and something reddit has never been particularly good at: Good publicity. And instead of figuring out how to make it profitable, they just killed it.
They didn’t even bother to answer questions why.
It was at that moment I knew the current leadership was rudderless, and now everyone’s finally come around to it.
A slight profit is compatible, I think we all get that you can’t run at a loss. But it’s no longer “look at this neat thing we can do with everyone”. They’re not building goodwill with the unpaid creators and mods. Everything they’ve said and done is oozing with “Get back to work you unpaid peasant! We need to IPO and get rich!” They’ve shown nothing but disdain towards users, mods, and developers.
Why not slightly less? That would make more sense to me.
A user on a third party app isn’t as valuable to the company. They miss out of all the valuable spying and tracking they can do by installing their own software on your phone. Plus just the presence of this party apps means you can’t demands extra permissions on your own app and tell users to deal or suck it (in nice PR speak). So it makes sense to charge TP apps more for reducing the “value” of a given user.
Charging less is basically subsidizing third party apps out of your own pocket - which was exactly the complaint in the first place. Although it would’ve been better to gradually ramp up prices to less-subsidized and eventually to a profitable partnership.
The counter-argument is that the users that gravitate towards those apps are less valuable anyways (we were the first to jump ship for e.g.) so a discounted rate just to keep them around and contributing/adding value for the “whales” on the official app.
The other thing is that they’ve just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.
I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made “the front page of the internet” a pretty honest claim. Their software isn’t worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they “win” rather than “reddit seizes control” even if that’s what it is).
Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn’t even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you’re “very sorry” about all the “confusion” and you’ll be “putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions”. You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it’s not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or… did they completely forget that the community even mattered?
If Reddit has an employee on staff as a mod that can approve posts, then they lose safe harbor protections. Anything that mod approves is considered representative of Reddit, giving them editorial control and causing them to be handled more strictly. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1856011.html
Further, if Reddit gave bonuses to mods, then mods would be considered unpaid employees. Any kind of “swag” or quid pro quo for being a mod of a big subreddit increases the chances that those moderators will be considered unpaid employees by the Department of Labor. AOL famously got in big trouble for giving free/discounted internet access to their volunteer moderators. https://casetext.com/case/hallissey-v-america-online-inc-sdny-2002 (Settled in 2009 for $15 million in back pay.)
Combining the two is terrible news for Reddit and would make their business model absolutely unsustainable. Every mod would be an employee and every post would be representative of Reddit as a company. If a mod approves a link to copyrighted material, then Reddit could be sued.
Respectfully, I think you’re overreading the meaning of the Mavrix Photos case. That case involved the most popular LiveJournal community, moderated by a team led by a literal employee, where the mods reviewed the submissions by users before posting, and only posted about 1/3 of the submitted content. It was a human-required process for anything to be posted at all, and it went through the moderation team that was arguably controlled by LiveJournal. And even then, the appellate court sent it back down to the trial court to figure out whether a jury would determine whether that procedure counts as content being posted at the direction of a user, rather than at the direction of the company. It also made clear that some pre-posting review would still be OK even by the company’s agents/employees, such as when they manually review for pornography/spam/etc.
And after this year’s Supreme Court decision in Twitter v. Taamneh, which reversed the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that Twitter and similar companies could be liable for user activity on those services, it’s pretty clear that having paid/employed moderators doesn’t actually make services liable for what they fail to stop on their platforms. Liability will only happen when an employee actually does the thing that gives rise to liability (e.g., posting infringing material themselves).
So no, I disagree with your analysis that paying or compensating moderators gives rise to risk of liability. Especially after the most recent Supreme Court cases on Twitter and Google, which call the Mavrix reasoning into question.
All the drama and pisspoor management by spez aside, ultimately the way I used reddit is through RiF. To me, that’s reddit. I can’t stand their official app and their official website is horrendous.
They forced my app to close down so I guess that’s that.
I stopped using RiF and consequently reddit in protest. I held out hope this was a shitty negotiation tactic by Reddit and they’d eventually back off somewhat. But they’ve tripled down on it.
This forced me to reevaluate my relationship with the platform and I decided to check out Lemmy kbin and mastodon. I also checked out some old forums I frequented before reddit took over.
I reinstalled a newsreader and set up RSS feeds for my favorite things.
Basically, I’m realizing I don’t need reddit as much as I thought I did. I actually have enjoyed the fediverse,beehaw in particular, more. I never used Twitter but mastodon has really great content and engagement as well.
I’m not saying I’d never go back to Reddit. I probably would if RiF somehow survived, but reddits lost its luster for me and I don’t trust it anymore. So why waste time actively participating there so I can have the rug pulled from under me again?
Reddit may not see a mass exodus like Digg or Myspace, but it’s been poisoned and over time the rot will set in and it will fester. This will be the moment people point to as the turning point.
I am almost a mirror-image of you regarding Reddit, except to me Reddit was Apollo rather than RIF. I too have cancelled Reddit Premium, which I paid to support a platform I used a lot. LIke you I am trying out the fediverse via lemmy, kbin, and mastadon; and, like you, I am enjoying mastodon and using it much more than I ever used Twitter. Finally, like you, I have gone back to RSS feeds and old forums I used before my Reddit habit overshadowed them. And other people I know are doing the same, albeit they tend to be the more techy inclined.
I used to use Tweetbot to read my Twitter feed. I would read the latest 100 tweets every day. When the plug got pulled on the app, I just stopped reading Twitter at all and don’t miss it. In the case of Apollo, I scroll through my feed for an hour or more if I’m bored with nothing else to do. I mostly looked at funny, wtf, and photos. It was mostly a waste of time, however entertaining it might be. So when Apollo shuts down, like you, I may not need Reddit as much as I thought.
For me it wasn’t about the money, I pay for plenty of things in order to escape ads. The CEO all but came out and said that they don’t care about anything except money… That’s just business and I understand it, I don’t like it, but I understand it.
The issue I saw was Reddit made no attempt to understand the situation third party app devs were in, or to honestly work with the devs to find an equitable solution. That much has been clear before the CEO began to gaslight both the devs and the users about it.
If he’d announced that they were going to force the app developers to share ad revenue or charge users a reasonable monthly fee for ad-free access and share that with Reddit, I think the backlash would have been far less.
But that’s not what Steve wants. He wants to get all the ad revenue AND be able to track user activity to sell to the data brokers/advertisers. This was never going to be a situation that we users found reasonable.
I pay YT premium, I can listen to hours and hours of music, or watch hours of videos, plus I can download them and go to a poor connection area.
I don’t mind they hooked me with a free service and then offered me the option of ad free.The move from reddit is if you start to use more the service, if you want to see more posts, if you have more subs, if you upvote/downvote more, if you send more messages, if you comment more, if you post more, if you have more moderation actions to help a sub stay on focus and remove spam then you have to pay more.
Edit: damn it, I again replied to a comment instead of the post hahaha
Personally I used to pay for YouTube Red (back when it was called that). I stopped in protest against YouTube’s changes to their partnership programme screwing over smaller users (when they introduced the recurring viewership hours to qualify for partnership). That was the final straw after their abhorrent attitude towards copyright over a long period of time.
On Android, formerly Vanced, now ReVanced, get me everything I could want out of the official app with YouTube Premium, but for free.
I HATE ads with a passion. Even taught my kid from a very young age to put his hands over his ears, look away, and say “la la la!!” until an ad ends.
Once Vanced shut down, I was devastated. ReVanced really saved my experience, though, and I’m so thankful it exists.
Steve, in fact, was part of the BoD when Reddit stopped the revenue sharing scheme that some apps had up until… 2021? Something like that, don’t quote me on it.