This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
I wouldn't say it's a better product, but it is quicky moving in that direction.
I'm so happy user funded and user controlled is a viable market strategy.
The official Reddit app is just a miserable experience. Take away the ads and bugs and I still don’t like it. Navigation, layout, voting are all inferior to Memmy already and the gap is only widening
Damn.
Is that 2,000 paid employees or does that include moderators?
Of course it doesn't include moderators. Moderators are users.
Also, there are way more than 2000, especially once you call all the very tiny subs that technically have moderators. But even if not, Reddit's biggest treasure are all the niche subs.
Reddit would implode instantly with only 2K moderators. According to this Reddit post, six years ago there were almost 75K moderators working in subreddits with more than 500 subscribers (i.e. this number only includes moderators who actually have to do some work because their subs are decently active). That number is certain to have grown since then.
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.
Just make it part of reddit premium! Ugh, why wasn’t that the solution.
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.
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
The API change did not affect me personally, I use old reddit anyway, but the reaction showed that he will run this site into the ground since he just does not really get it or is extremely greedy and does not care.
This is the business world in general. Consumers need to say to businesses in no uncertain terms that they cannot just do whatever they want and still remain profitable. Without users, there is no profit. Charging for the API would be completely acceptable and expected, but they decided to go the most cartoonishly villainous route possible. This is what a lot of companies are doing now. They have gotten far too used to the profits being free. We should teach them a lesson, collectively.
I'm 43. I lived a good amount of my life without the Internet and even more of my life without smart phones. Even after gaining reliable Internet access, I remember the times when the Internet was not just a few big companies. I just rediscovered one of the old forums I used to hang out on is still operating. They have an active IRC channel as well. Don't think we can't go back, big tech. It would be so easy to go back. Don't tempt me with a good time.
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'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.
Yeah the risk has definitely already materialised. Reddit is forever changed even if it’s still alive.
Can you elaborate on this? Which landmarks have permanently fallen?
I know that Minecraft left. Based on what I've read here recently, the r/android mods moved to the fed as well. BotDefense just closed up shop.
The AMA subreddit mod team gave up on support and recruiting people to give AMAs. /r/pics and /r/videos are gone, almost certainly not coming back. Many companies, like mojang, that used reddit as a semi-official forum have left. Numerous small and medium subreddits have migrated over here. Not API related, but april fools this year was literally just a potato. Other than maybe /r/askreddit, there's not much there anymore that I can think of that still makes it unique.
Not OP, but /r/AMA was one major casualty - mods just basically said F this we're not dealing with this crap anymore. /r/Pics is fighting the admins on the NFSW tag, along with /r/cyberpunk. /r/interestingasfuck was another one.
As a long time ex-Redditor, the impact is definitely felt - it's just become another link aggregator. I no longer feel any attachment to the site, especially after finding the Fediverse a much richer source of intelligent content and commentary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit lost its identity a long time ago. It is no longer the place Aaron Schwartz made it to be.
They've already lost their identity. The parties over, spez has turned it into corporate garbage no better than Instagram
Too late? It already has. Where are the volunteers who contributed precious time to it?… im certainly gone.
Lemme fix that title, s/risks losing/lost
There ya go :D
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.
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.
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.
Whatever they've lost, they still retain their hard-earned reputation as being a cesspit of trolls and bigots.
They already did. They killed so many things.
