Reddit protest by its community moderators has impacted user engagements, traffic and visits to its ad portal since its beginning on June 12.
  •  EeeDawg101   ( @EeeDawg101@lemmy.ml ) English
    10•1 year ago

    I think it’ll take a while for us to know the real overall impact spez’s decision has made on Reddit’s user base. Until then, it’s really just speculation unless something concrete comes out (like financial reports etc).

    •  n33rg   ( @n33rg@beehaw.org ) English
      3•1 year ago

      Yes, exactly my thoughts as well. I’ve noted the following: I started exploring options and landed on Lemmy as many of us did around the time the API changes were announced At that time, there were a lot of test posts here and loads of Reddit complaints. It was challenging to find real content, but it was clear the community and interest was growing.

      I continued to open various Lemmy apps over Reddit, but still peaked into my Reddit feed periodically and noticed that Reddit was definitely still alive, with the occasional flare up that made browsing annoying. Not much different than when any other viral topic would take over the top posts everywhere, but more regular and less amusing from an entertainment point of view. Those days I had no problem coming to Lemmy almost all day. But that left me with using Lemmy more and more frequently.

      The last couple days, I’ve found that Lemmy is still growing and becoming much more interesting to browse and view, though I definitely see the added complexities and early nature of apps as a limiting factor for the general use at the moment. So going to Reddit now seems to be largely filled with lower effort posts as most users that haven’t migrated are those that felt it was too much work to join a Lemmy community and get reestablished (in my opinion). However, there is still definitely a functional and lively community over there. At least for the time being.

      Whenever I check in on Reddit, I am still using third party apps. Those apps will go dark July 1, so if that actually happens, I likely will stop checking in. And I have no idea how many else will be doing the same.

  •  Hazzard   ( @Hazzard@lemm.ee ) English
    2•1 year ago

    Don’t love the framing of this paragraph from TechCrunch. It’s not that they’re charging for the API. That’s understandable and obvious, and we all wanted the platform to survive. I’ll be happy to volunteer to contribute to lemmy development/server costs/app development one day. It’s that they’re grossly overcharging for the API to such an extreme degree that paid subscriptions to third party apps actually lose money.

    In April, Reddit announced its plans to start charging developers to access data through its API. The move was obvious — to restrict third parties from accessing Reddit data that can help build text-generating machine learning models such as OpenAI’s GPT 4. Developers building apps and bots to assist people using Reddit and researchers who wish to study the platform for noncommercial purchases were among the few exceptions. However, as a result, third-party apps, including popular Reddit client Apollo, found it difficult to pay for those charges and decided to go offline. Various popular subreddit moderators came in support of those apps and developers and started protesting against the API pricing move.