This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The blatant astroturfing is what really icked me out. From day one of the API changes, it was clear that Reddit had spun up the spin machine and had begun to misrepresent the issues.
The main one was how they tried to push the "they just want the API for free", "we're entitled to charge for our services" narrative.
I legitimately would've paid for the reddit subscription if it meant keeping Reddit Sync. It's nonsense. They just wanted the apps out of the picture.
My Reddit use has declined 70% because I only access it from my computer or through Firefox for Android (which is damn near unusable).
My reddit use has declined 100% because I refuse to go to that website. And I was spending hours on it a day.
I would have happily paid $5 a month for baconreader, probably as high as $10.
In both time and quality, I used it far more a month than netflix, hbo, or hulu.
I don't know what it would have cost to keep baconreader active with the API changes, but from what I read the price was intentionally design to be unsustainable.
It wasn't about making 3rd party access to the api profitable, it was about making 3rd party apps go away to push ads and harvest user data.
In the final weeks, myself and many others said we'd be happy to pitch in to keep baconreader alive, and the feeling I got was that just wasn't an option.
Oh well, I'm here now, and can watch the whole mess from the sidelines while getting to be part of a new and growing community, instead of a bloated dying one.
Yes, I loved it when Christian Selig let Hoffman (fuck spez) know his lies were exposed because he (Christian) had recorded their conversation.. and provided proof. Would love a video of Hoffman's reaction.
There was one comment that really gave me the 'holy shit, ick corporation' reaction... in an article about reddit's traffic going down, a reddit spokesperson said "we do not comment on incorrect statistics from third parties". Like please, calm down, you're not a lawyer for a politician on trial here.
They said this about The Verge. Big "you're liars" energy when journalists reported factually.
The narratives you mention in your last para are completely true, that's what annoys me, IF they had engaged in good faith with users. As it is, it's like a shopping centre that's been free to enter saying "right, it's now €100 to enter and any underwear shops are closed to you unless you wear our uniform."
Just completely crazy prices for a poor service. No shit that's unworkable. Just be honest and say you want to bring those users in-house, just fucking say that rather than trying to gaslight everyone into believing that all these competent developers are all unreasonable arseholes who are screwing you, a multi-billion-dollar corporation over.
Yeah that's my point. The fact they were suddenly asking for astronomical fees was conveniently skimmed over in favor of this 'greedy 3rd parties want stuff for free' narrative.
The funny thing is... for me it wasn't even the API changes, it was how Steve reacted to the community feedback. If you need to make your app profitable that's fine by me, but don't ignore your customers so bluntly. They could've easily worked politely with devs to find an agreeable API price, find alternative funding streams for those devs, etc. They did none of that, instead Steve acted like a jerk.
Honestly if they’d worked with the Apollo dev and he’d turned around and proposed something reasonable like $2 a month to continue using it I’d still be on Reddit.
Treating Reddit users like shit, treating devs who have made their whole business about making Reddit better like shit, fucking with unpaid mods, and finally, this weird manifest destiny attitude that Reddit will succeed despite all of the above turned me to the Fediverse.
100%, I was mad about the api changes but realistically I would have stayed
But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn't say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk? Fuck spez
But seeing the interviews he gave was just too much. Especially when he was talking about monetizing people who say things on Reddit they wouldn’t say to their therapist. Like, that group specifically you want to milk?
Wow, I actually hadn't heard that 🤯 It seems believable based on his other behavior though. It's honestly a shame, Reddit is a cool forum, but it's kind of like a nice restaurant where you know the owners are just awful people... And that really just ruins the experience of being there.
I remember when reddit gold was there to pay server costs. There was a little bar on the side to show how much % was covered per day. I had it for quite awhile. But then I hit financial trouble and had to cancel. By the time I could afford to give back they got greedy and I couldn't in good faith keep giving them money.
Reddit could have been a non-profit like Wikipedia. But they wanted all the money.
This precisely. It wasn’t about charging for the API. It was about charging an exorbitant amount for the API, giving devs a tiny amount of time to come up with a solution, and then belittling the user and moderator communities.
I don’t want to be a part of a website that treats its own community with so much disdain and spite.
Reddit lost its identity a long time ago. It is no longer the place Aaron Schwartz made it to be.
Too late? It already has. Where are the volunteers who contributed precious time to it?… im certainly gone.
They have TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE working at Reddit and Memmy for Lemmy is a superior product with how many people working on it?? 3?
Spez is an impossibly incompetent Elon Musk wannabe (the person who just flushed $44 BILLION down the toilet due to incompetence). He needs to be drawn and quartered tbh
Elon flushed 44B and made 96B just this half year.
The game isn't right somewhere.
Haha never has been
There's one interesting thought that never comes up in history class...
What happened to the aristocracy?
They didn't give back their land holdings (basically anywhere), they didn't pay reparations, they didn't give up their investments... In some places, they never stopped getting a stipend.
France and Russia. They killed the aristocracy (although others filled the void). In the Americas, if they existed they were killed and replaced with Europeans. In much of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, locals were raised up to the position.
The US is organized into counties (Counts), territories (Marquis), and states (Duke). There's a couple commonwealths like Virginia too... Why? What does landowners mean? It's all over the constitution. A jury of your peers sounds a lot like a group from the peerage. A redress of grievances from the federal government isn't an option for the common man, but it's in the bill of rights.
When did it end? Because Lord Fairfax isn't a title held anymore, but Fairfax county VA most certainly still hosts the Fairfax family, who are extremely wealthy landlords. They called capitalists who rose up from the common people "robber barons" only a few generations ago... Maybe not because they stole from the people (Carnegie and Rockefeller most certainly gave back to the community), maybe because they didn't come from a certain social class? Name a billionaire or a senator that didn't come from the "I never have to work" class...I can't.
Yeah, the game is rigged. It has been since Rome. The lines have been blurred, but they're still clear if you look for them
FOSS does not have an inherent detriment versus corporate products. If enough people want to do it, development of FOSS can in principle move just as quick or quicker than corporate development (and more efficiently too).
The recent interest in Lemmy, largely thanks to Reddit's incompetence, means that not only is the core software moving very quickly but the app scene is growing quickly as well.
Too late for that already right? Just like imgur, correct?
I wish people would stop using imgur. It's entirely unnecessary for posting single images. Also, I use noscript and the number of external websites imgur loads scripts from tripled sometime last year, and now it doesn't even work to display a single image unless you enable who-knows-what sites (most sites, it's easy to tell which ones are necessary - for imgur, it isn't). Even worse it flashes the image and then it disappears without JS enabled for whatever domains it needs. So people using imgur is enabling all sorts of ad tech/privacy invasion companies to track whoever clicks on their photo, for no real reason.
Do you have a suggestion for an alternative?
I use https://postimages.org/, it is completily free and almost unlimited (not if you just spam) but idk about their privacy policy or the sites it loads
What's the likelihood of them sticking around? There were plenty of image sharing sites before imgur but they were not reliable to last.
I learned about catbox.moe recently. It's pretty great. Simple interface, uploads up to 200mb, files are kept forever, and when you upload a picture, it gives you the actual direct link to the image; not like every other image hoster that gives you a link to the "image page", then you have to right click on the image and copy the link address to actually get the direct link.
Only thing that sucks is it doesn't strip exif data from the pictures uploaded, but not a huge deal since I just use it for memes and random pics anyway.
Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having a billion dollars in advertising dollars coming in every year? And someone thinks that spez should remain in charge?
My gut reaction is that a multimedia website the size of reddit must be a juggernaut of server and hosting expenses.
Reddit basically lost any semblance of respect the community should have for it. You know, the people who give them all their content and do all their moderation for free.
Fuck 'em high.
This is what the API protests revealed as well, as a mod team could decide to go dark without input from its own users
No, just no. Nearly all mod teams had polls about this, and all of those polls with dominating majority selected to shut down. Who is this guy? Is he getting paid by Reddit? If anything the protests revealed that Reddit admins would do anything, including disbanding the moderator teams to bring subreddits back, to suppress protests.
Came here to say the same, it's BS, all mods asked their communities, most with polls, other with closely monitoring feedback in the blackout announcement threads, no mod acted on their own, they were all supported by the overwhelming majority of their communities.
I've contributed and made more replies on here than I ever did on reddit in a decade. Feels a bit more genuine and accessible. Also trying to close the door on insta, my only other social. Tired of that shit.
Risks? They already have. FUCK Spez & Reddit. The latter had a good run but I’ll be happy to watch it burn as greedy spezbags deserve whatever shitstorm happens next.
The lost this a while back because they wanted to turn into a social media platform like twitter and facebook. It was originally set to oppose those things and we made memes about those platforms and then we ended up becoming one. Will reddit die? No, i dont think so. But just like Facebook i'll just not use it.
This article is mostly useless. It states the problem, but doesn't have anything new to add.
They have a new identity that they keep reinforcing with every new decision. They've lost their previous identity and become just another web service looking to get the most money possible out of the users they can still attract.
Who cares. IT WILL BE MAKING PROFITS!
XD :D
I'd argue reddit lost their identity days ago. Several iconic communities and features died with the API slaughter. Now it's just another link aggregator without the things that made reddit unique.
"Risks" assumes it hasn't happened yet, the truth is this happened many years ago.
Reddit has changed more than once. But this is very different. Your comment struck me as cynically dishonest. Almost dismissive of what has brought me and many people to even hear about lemmy let alone discover it even exists.
Nothing like this has ever happened to reddit before. Full stop. To act otherwise shows both ignorance and also insensitivity to the millions of people who feel like they just got evicted from their portal to the rest of whats happening in the world.
Because i can still use reddit if i use it differently, that barrier of usability shows what a vast number of people who use reddit want. Perhaps it also shows how invasive our digital habits have skewed or affected our physical world behaviours.
And perhaps my bias is showing, i have been on reddit for longer than some, if not many, reddit users have been alive.
It was a place i learned a lot about the world around me and now have to try to figure out how to live without it. And im old now. To quote the simpsons "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!
I think unfamiliar and confusing is more accuarate than weird and scary but it seems a strangely prohetic quote.
Fun fact. I can remember watching the simpsons on a black and white 12" CRT TV (KVOS TV 12)
Im 42
In summary this did NOT happen years ago your truth does not match my reality
It lost its identity a long time ago.
