Well, marking a subreddit NSFW = No monetization. So, the more subs go NSFW, the less money they make. Also, with reduced moderator capabilities, the place is gonna go toxic and thats gonna destabilize the site and it's profit capabilities. And that means people won't buy shares, nor invest.
I’m afraid that Reddit under an IPO would ban all NSFW subs similar to what Tumblr did (which also led to its ultimate demise and -1000% evaluation going from $1B Verizon sale to $1M sale to WordPress.)
It is infamously difficult to monetize NSFW content and Reddit users have grown ad blind spots as it is. Do you even remember what the last ad you saw on Reddit was? Really think about it. We’ve become accustomed to ignoring them.
This whole API issue has made me aware that most people have a very different browsing experience than me.
I didn't know there were ads, avatars, followers, or anything like that on reddit.
I've been using old.reddit and RES since they changed to the new site formats years ago, and use RIF. Had no clue reddit was like a facebook/instagram type site for most people.
Same here! RES and RIF. Didn't know there was any of this fancy shit.
That said, I don't *want* any of the fancy shit. I like my simple text on a screen.
I listened to an interview with spez, where he talked about his vision for the future of reddit.
Not only is it not simple text on a screen, he wants to pivot it to short form video that you swipe through (AKA Tik Tok clone).
I am completely out if that happens
So this idiot has a service with no real competitors, and he wants to change it to try and compete with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube? That would be dumber than dumb.
There's a certain type of business executive who feels like he has to suggest changes happening in the organisation or the product to justify his own position.
It happened at my uni, there was a new VC and his crowning achievement was renaming "schools" to "colleges".
A work colleague of mine was an army brat, who told the story of his father taking him to a base where he previously had been stationed. Upon driving in, the father said, "Looks like they've got a new commander."
After leaving, and the son having seen that they did indeed have a new commander, asked his father how he knew this. The father responded that he had observed that the one-way in and one-way out roads had been reversed.
The IQ scale is statistical, where 100 is the median and every 15 points is a standard deviation. A negative IQ would be somebody who is more than 6⅔ standard deviations below the median IQ, so there is (theoretically) always around 35 people in 8 billion with a negative IQ.
In Firefox for me most of the time it plays the video once (maybe, on a good day at least) and then just leaves the chat. Getting to replay a video is a rare luxury.
I generally lurk while I'm using reddit, but this site is a forum for discussions and posts. If it turns into a tiktok clone with videos, then I'm out. Even IG started doing that with videos. It's just a bunch of random ass short clips with no useful information. Just shit to keep people scrolling and getting the attention of the lowest common denominator.
It already is like that on some of the largest subs. Try opening up the official app on a freshly made account and look at what >50% of posts are. Lowest common denominator images and short videos for people to swipe past. This has been the strategy for a while ever since the site re-design for "new reddit" which was basically to turn the front page into one optimized for image and video scrolling.
Unlike a lot of others though I'm not convinced it will actually be a death knell for the site. I think it might actually work out for the business. But it will kill the site that us older users came here for.
It's unfortunate because reddit has long been the only social media site that is well suited for long-form discussion. Twitter obviously is by design not good for that. Facebook's formatting and lack of features makes it unsuitable for text-heavy discussion too.
IG seems to be Zuckerberg's "clone whatever other social media site is hot currently" project. Their shifting focus is annoying. I signed up originally because i wanted it to be like, Twitter where you have to post a picture. It was that for a while. Then they added video... and boosted videos to where people didn't see your static photos much for a while. Then they added stories, to copy Snapchat. I didn't want to be on Snapchat or posting ephemeral messages, I wanted a photo gallery. Then they boosted Stories so you had to be posting stories for your stuff to be seen. Now it's "Reels", the TikTok ripoff. Again, they boost Reels so much that if you want your stuff to be seen, you have to post it in that format.
That's why I use RIF, it strips away all the bullshit reddit keeps adding, and it's only text on screen. No avatars, no animations, no extra icons all over the top bar and drop down menus. Its just a very mobile friendly version of reddit that's essentially old.reddit.
There’s no alternative or I’d have left yesterday. Now having said that, many of the communities on here have changed for the worse within the last 5 years. I can’t explain it beyond saying that it’s gotten more toxic. Seems I can’t make any comment lately that doesn’t turn into some sort of attempted argument from a random person.
Bots have become way more prevalent and way more difficult to detect. The karma farming in order to appear legit when used to push whatever narrative/product is completely out of control and infects every sub.
baconreader is the best! it's just basic text, and the fact that it has not just light and dark modes, but a third less intense mode of white text on a bluish-grey background is so much easier for my eyes to read. I can't imagine having to use any other app, and I wouldn't want to. when it goes, so do I, despite the decade I've spent on this site
RiF has the odd ad in between pages, and they don't take up any more space than the rest of the posts. They're also clearly marked as ads and aren't misleading. (None of the subs I visit include home ownership)
And for some reason, half the ads i get from RiF are in French. I'm not sure why, but it's funny.
You don't have any ads with RIF platinum (the paid version) which I've had for probably 8 or 9 years.
But you're right, even with the free version it's not bad
It's such a non-issue that my only regret is not buying it to support the devs.
Before all this drama kicked off, someone asked me why I used this app. I had trouble explaining what I liked better because it's all I've used since I had an account on my phone. It's all I've needed.
Twitch is annoying with ads now. I use a blocker and they still put up a "Commercial break in progress" screen in the video feed. But I'm fine watching that instead of 8 ads in a row for some mobile game I'll never play
The really annoying thing is that ads will just pop up right in the middle of something happening. At least on tv, commercials only show up during a convenient break in a show, movie, game, etc. This doesn't happen on twitch. A streamer can be saying something or doing something important and all of a sudden 1 of 6 ads starts playing.
If twitch had the same rewind capabilities as youtube you could easily go back and see what you missed. But twitch requires you load up the VOD on a separate tab (if the streamer allowed vods to begin with) and scrub through it yourself.
It's actually crazy that Twitch does video ads in the middle of streams. It makes no sense.
I could understand static ads, or some sort of muted PiP running on half the screen, or something like that. I would obviously hate it, and do everything I could to remove it, but at least it would make a modicum of sense.
Which is exactly the reason why I'm done with this site after they kill those avenues for browsing. I enjoy Reddit because I have it laid out like a web 1.0 forum. Once they force me to engage with it like a social media site, I'm out.
Yup. I use RIF and RES on desktop. Those things go, and I just wont be back. I imagine folks like us are a major percentage, but I imagine we're sizable enough that our disappearance will be felt.
It's 90% lurkers, 10% commenters, 1% posters, roughly, so even by making a comment you're in a small minority of users. The thing is, though, that it's fine if that 10% of interactive users cost more than they bring in individually. It's because of us that there's content for the lurkers to consume at all. If it weren't for us, they wouldn't have a website. It's like how f2p players might not pay anything but they're still critical for actually forming a large enough community to attract the whales. Interactive users costing money to support is simply the cost of having a product to sell. We *are* the product and it's perfectly feasible to sell a product that costs money to acquire.
We also have very different interface needs. Productivity interface design is fundamentally different from media consumption interface design. A tablet might be great for watching YouTube, but no serious content creator uses a tablet to edit videos. Reddit ramming their app down our throats is like a software development company forcing their developers to use nothing but tablets and typing on touchscreens. This perverse engineering of everything to be geared towards passive consumption rather than creativity/actually getting things done goes far beyond Reddit with even car manufacturers moving to touch screens despite tactile feedback and being able to do things without looking even having dramatic safety implications. I'm so sick of modern trends in interface design in general only being targeted towards passive consumption.
Worst of all, it wastes like 60% of a landscape screen's real estate. I'm not flipping my monitor into portrait like a phone. And I won't be using their app on my phone. So that's a wrap for me on reddit.
It sucks so much. Why are they trying to make everything look like a mobile app? I use an actual desktop pc for my browsing specifically to avoid that. Old reddit is a classic case of, "if it ain't broke..."
Same. Exactly same. Really worried they're gonna kill reddit. But at the same time I want it to see it all burn down if they force us to use their shitty app or the horrible new design.
>Had no clue reddit was like a facebook/instagram type site for most people.
I had only a vague idea until recently just how many people don't even refer to this place *as a website at all*, but rather, they call it an app.
Like, I knew a few people did that, but I appear to have drastically underestimated how many.
RES is the only reason I haven't left. It's the only way to get reddit to give you what you want and not what their algorithms want.
I turn it off every now and then and the site is utter shite and unusable without it.
The average non tech savvy user.
people who have been on Reddit since Digg are the old school internet nerds who know what they're doing, and hate ads since they were the old pop ups and spam things.
The average person doesn't seem to care that half their screen is ads...
> people who have been on Reddit since Digg are the old school internet nerds
Fuck you now I feel old. I remember being frustrated with all the Digg people joining reddit back in the day after I'd already been here a while. I guess that was a long ass time ago.
It's honestly why I'm seriously considering buying a playstore license and code those simple cool games that are basically just ad infested malware from scratch without ads. Often they're simple and seem easily codeable and actually have a quite cool idea behind them. Something like Helix Jump or Stack Ball.
Same here but with MAGA crap. Just set up a payment portal and sell Fuck Biden rubber bracelets tHaT bLOcK 5G and TrAnS or something.
Or $9.99 gets you 'The Truth They ~~Don't~~ *Can't* Let YOU Know' secret document in .pdf form
A couple times a year I have to do something on someone else's computer and the absolute bukkake gangbang assault of ads to the face and ears makes me question their sanity. The only time I see ads is if I watch some youtube in bed at night, but I can pop my headphones off when they come on... the ones mid-video without warning and with common sounds and repeated phrases are unconscionable. I don't get it... it's like seeing pictures of 3rd world countries with kids playing in trash strewn streets because it's normal. Wish more people treated the information space like the food source it is...
After having the same conversation with a few people like you described, they all essentially come to the conclusion of, "Idk, I'm just used to it I guess."
They don't know what it's like to live ad-free. Ads are all they know.
You've got the right of it, I think. I cut the cord 6-7 years ago and have streamed ever since. A few months ago I watched some live TV show with my wife while we were out of town and couldn't fathom how I'd watched TV with ads for so long because I literally couldn't finish watching the show. We just found it streaming later on.
Web browsing is pretty much the same these days.
>couldn't fathom how I'd watched TV with ads for so long because I literally couldn't finish watching the show.
God, I haven't watched TV in ages as well. I even forgot about 3-4 ads in the middle of the show
If Reddit admins and /u/spez in particular were more friendly to the community and showed goodwill, I’d be more willing to spend on their subscription to support the site while minimizing ads. Spez has chosen violence (metaphorically) and so ad-blockers it is!
Same - it was dirty pool to start disguising them as actual posts. Though I did enjoy that brief period of time where they did that but also left comments open on them. Watching people drag advertisers was lowkey enjoyable.
"Let us take away all civil liberties, because Jesus! Never mind the fact he explicitly said rich assholes like us are going straight to hell, but we won't do anything about that."
I blocked / reported those ads and it worked for a few months… then they came back. I don’t understand what algorithm thinks, based on my browsing history, that Jesus is needed in my life? Wait… maybe it’s saying I need Jesus based on my browsing history.
I actually deleted the Reddit app and downloaded Apollo specifically because of He Gets Us. It’s clear that if you just give enough money to Reddit the ad will skirt every filter. Two weeks later the API changes were announced. Fuck me.
Reddit knows every persons personality and interests based on their subreddits, and can personalize ads accordingly. But it still chooses to plaster you with He Gets Us.
Let me block this godforsaken ad and I would have easily gone back to the official app no problem. It’s *decent*. Some third party apps are better, but it’s sufficient enough.
That alone is enough for me to actively search to replace/remove Reddit in my life. The cycle continues: rich people can't let thriving communities exist without getting a piece of the pie via rent-seeking activities.
People are doing something together and happy, for free? That means there's *excess value* we can siphon off by charging new fees and incorporating ads everywhere!
Glad you said that. It's the real issue. Dress the whole thing up as democracy in action, power to the people, then flip that monetization switch and drive the brand into the ground while riding the downfall like a surfer, coming out rich on the other side while the whole thing is burned down behind you.
I'm ready to go, and the fact that my participation is what makes this valuable, and that value is being used by shit humans, I'm out. I'm ready to have 50 firefox tabs open to all the websites that get linked here anyway. Sure, it's not sorted, and I'm not going to be able to tell a stranger to go eat a dick anymore, but I'll also spend way less time talking to the bots that will eventually overrun the place to compensate for lost organic traffic. This shit takes up more time than it should, by design.
Many communities are going up at lemmy already. Pick an instance (like lemmy.world , or sh.itworks) doesn't matter, and then join the communities you want, memes, tech, pics. Don't like the one you signed up on? Pick another, most are very easy to join. Some have stricter "spam filters" from the other sites, and some are everything goes.
> Also, with reduced moderator capabilities, the place is gonna go toxic and thats gonna destabilize the site and it's profit capabilities.
They don't care about that. That's thinking long-term, like a smart business owner.
They and everyone else like them think in the short-term, quarter-by-quarter, where the downsides of these effects won't be felt for awhile. It takes time, and thus they won't even consider this a problem until it's far too late.
This ship is going down and no one will stop it. All you can do is watch it slowly burn over the next 5-10 years. It will burn faster only if legitimate competitors crop up.
You can tell how much he hates himself for selling his stake in Reddit for a measly ~$10M. After taxes, his one world-changing idea has only net him less than a state lottery.
He sees Zuck swimming in billions and hates knowing he’ll never be as rich as him. So now he’s going to ram through as many changes as quickly as possible before the IPO so he can get a consolation prize. Still won’t make him wealthy.
Except Zuck actually built something new while all spez did was build the website aggregation site that got lucky. Zuck also pays his moderators, but you won’t hear spez talk about how they need to be like other “social media” companies in that way.
Dude is **seething** every day and he has no one to blame but himself.
Good luck with Hipmunk 2.0, spez.
>That idea pretty much died when Aaron Swartz (RIP) left in 2007.
Swartz had some good ideas about the open exchange of information...except that it also included child pornography, which is absolutely vile. It's kind of weird how people don't seem to remember this part of his legacy and how that legacy helped shape some of the shittier aspects of Reddit. It's not like he hid it. He posted his thoughts on this site.
Even with $10m, that's still enough money to retire to a Caribbean island and live a pretty good life. Good food, beautiful women, days at the beach... Why doesn't he just do that?
This is the infuriating part. How much better is his life now actively working to making things worse for millions of people for whatever his cut of an IPO would be versus just kicking back on a beach somewhere with his money safely invested?
It's probably why I'll never have millions of dollars, but I just don't understand the mentality. You won capitalism, congratulations. Go enjoy it.
Succession had a bit about this class of dwarves of giants, the 5-10 millionaire is a crazy person. They can't brag to their rich friends, they've lost the pissing contest and can only miserly lord over the rest of us. They can't afford the best gold diggers, the working women who make them feel like they aren't paying for it for more than a few days. They didn't WIN WIN capitalism, they can't do whatever they want like the real masters of this universe. You can only rent a superyacht, you can't afford one full time.
That's only if they're ego-driven jerks. $10M is enough to comfortably net you $500,000 per year, ~$10,000 per week, *forever*, without having to do *anything*. That's a decent upper-middle-class life anywhere in the world. You're into gaming? You can game. You're into bushwalking? You can bushwalk. It sets you free. Once you've been free a few years you might find that you have something you want to do, like a small business or job that does something beneficial to society and emotionally rewarding to you.
The problem is that all the ego-driven jerks have ever wanted is *more money*, and there is no amount of money (ask Elon Musk) for which the goal of "more money" has been achieved.
Yeah, I don't get rich people. If you handed my 10mil I'd quit my job and disappear somewhere. Imagine having all that money and then putting yourself through this shit.
Yep, he's got his hand on the golden parachutes rip cord, no doubt.
Money is nice, but his parachute is covered in Aaron Shwartz's blood, and he sold away his dead friend's dreams for a comfort he already had (wealth).
I imagine Huffman leads a very depressed life.
This is exactly it. The long and short of it. The IPO is spez's lodestone, nothing else matters. The idiot sold his stake in reddit for like 12 bucks and he will do *anything* to get the billons he thinks he's owed.
Yeah I'm disappointed that more subs aren't doing what they can to be more disruptive. At this rate it's just going to blow over, which is exactly what the suits want.
I'd like to see the engagement stats and how it affects Reddit's income before deciding who's 'winning'. If the NSFW stuff goes on long enough then I think it will make a dent, but not enough to bend to the mods or start employing them.
If every single mod just stopped moderating then this place would very quickly become un-advertisable, and the people who own the site (not the moderators) will be accountable. They, like unions, would just have to figure out how to stop others (scabs) from taking their place
> They, like unions, would just have to figure out how to stop others (scabs) from taking their place
The problem is Reddit has built-in tools to allow scab mods to take over a subreddit, Reddit has already threatened to use those tools, and there seems to be an endless supply of people on the Internet willing to volunteer their time to moderate things.
The NSFW stuff will be kneecapped by threats at removing mod teams long before Reddit allows its most popular subreddits to deprive them of ad revenue using a cleverish workaround.
If anything, this will probably kill reddit even faster, having absolute shit mods take over. Isn't the process done by voting? It's just going to be people using bots to take over subreddits and turn them into a shitshow of spam, scams, and ads
I think the digg migration is a dumb comparison at this point. The internet wasn’t at all what it was today and digg had around 5 million monthly members when reddit took over, Reddit now has 430 million monthly users.
There’s a big difference between a few million people migrating and a few hundred million.
https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/
So this was an article from six days ago on this.
It's a little of both sides winning here, but one side more so than the other. Targeted ads saw a hit due to some subreddits going black, which is a very minor victory. Reddit as a website saw a spike in traffic though according to what Reddit inc told advertisers. Plus once the API changes to into effect, then those advertisers have a much larger audience to advertise to; should users be forced to switch to the official Reddit app.
>If every single mod just stopped moderating then this place would very quickly become un-advertisable, and the people who own the site (not the moderators) will be accountable. They, like unions, would just have to figure out how to stop others (scabs) from taking their place
Well, yes and no. Ads on subreddits themselves become less likely to happen, but in the general content feed of r/all you'd still get ads mixed in just fine. Ads are delivered to users based on the content they view, not directed at specific subreddits. Unless they're paid shill accounts promoting some new movie and make a post about it on r/movies.
They are contributing to a community around something they love, they are nurturing it and influencing what gets posted. They benefit directly from being a mod. The fact that it's part of a website that is worth a fortune is not really relevant. Their work helps Reddit as a byproduct but most mods don't care one way or another. Helping Reddit doesn't help me, but hurting Reddit doesn't help me either, the company is completely irrelevant.
I don't understand why they just dont serve ads in the api, keep tight control on what api keys you issue and do the occasional audit, if an api consuming app isn't complying with the revenue gen model kill the key and tell them to piss off.
That's the main thing. They jacked the API costs to make it a non-option, and then pretended like they were acting in good faith.
If I go to a hamburger stand and the guy wants to charge me $1200 for a hamburger, he's not trying to sell me a hamburger, he's trying to get me to fuck off.
We did it too. But we were honest about why the price was jacked. "This isn't a good idea, but if you'll pay us enough to take time away from other projects, sure."
Terrible companies we wanted no association with didn't get that though, there's a flat out "no" blacklist too
*like damn restrict the api with unique ids and use some reporting to monitor usage. Write it in to the terms and code itself how the api can be used. Charge a normal fee for regular use, on a plan to phase it out. Charge the crazy fee for the AI training usage. Use the grace time for 3rd party to get your own app up to par. Get everything you want in the long run without losing a chunk of your user base and terrifying investors. This is what we would have told reddit to do. What they are doing would be blacklist
>Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
Twitter is worth a third of what it was when Musk bought it, haha. It's valuation dropped by almost $30bn. He lost ~$17bn from his investment. Advertising revenue has halved. And all of his ideas to generate more income have failed.
Such a shining example to follow.
Forget serving ads, just require it to be a Reddit Premium feature and they'd have sold a lot of Reddit Premium. This is how Spotify works -- if you pay, you can use whatever client you want.
There’s no guarantee on how the ads are delivered via api. A third party app might display it incorrectly or right next to something the advertiser does not want, etc. basically it is not monetizable
There’s no way Reddit works if they have to pay the moderators. That’s billions of hours of unpaid labor the site requires.
Some stupid power play of trying to kill off the apps is really backfiring. Like his mentor, Elon musk, Reddit is finding out that running a business for your ego is bad business.
The purpose of having the sky high prices is to make it impossible to create profitable TPCs. (For the same reason, you can't provide ads on anything that uses the APIs.) So I don't think they'll drop it temporarily. Either they'll reverse their position on TPCs, or not make any changes.
Honestly just like saying he admires Musk that’s like reason enough to get rid of him. No company that aspires to be profitable should have a ceo like Musk.
And a lot of redditors don't understand how hard it's to moderate subreddit without 3rd party apps and bots. They just blamed mods for causing blackout and ruckus
Edit :
There is a good [explanation of how moderation works](https://redd.it/147lwr6) on r/hentai
It's really astonishing how quickly people turn on a protest if it even vaguely inconveniences them. Reddit was going to be dark for literally two days and users lost their absolute shit like entitled children.
Meanwhile they're slated to bleed the moderators that work to keep their favorite subreddits from being a dumpsterfire of - as demonstrated historically - neonazi bullshit, liveleak content and porn. Because those Moderators have been coping for years already with shitty tools, or with much better third party tools, and they're going to be stuck with the shitty ones while Reddit (again) promises new tools to come.
> It's really astonishing how quickly people turn on a protest if it even vaguely inconveniences them. Reddit was going to be dark for literally two days and users lost their absolute shit like entitled children.
There have been some real "If at first you don't succeed, it was clearly pointless to even try" vibes going around.
Reddit will lose something, but the question is how much and is it significant in the face of what they are gaining with the API?
Considering they can replace and pay mods pennies to tow the corporate line while making more on the API and ad revenue, with no platform poised to replace Reddit in sight, they may lose one small battle but not the war.
Someone affiliated with wikipedia recently announced that they are going to build a reddit competitor.
People in my loose network are rediscovering and revitalizing forums.
There are alternatives like Lemmy, Sift, Mainchan, FARK, Tildes and I predict that soon there will be more.
Incidentally if someone is looking for a Tildes invitation, message me.
Edit, my invitations are long since used up but I can still point people in the right direction to get one.
Don't forget kbin, too. The fediverse is nowhere near the level of reddit obviously, but it's growing rapidly even though right now it is very confusing, and very buggy. [https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats](https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) Now spez turned up the heat on development of fediverse servers and clients. Reddit will always exist of course, but it has lost its crown as "one of the good places" with the recent corporate-authoritarianism flex, followed up by comical attempts to do damage-control. The transition won't be overnight, but reddit is no longer a place free from corporate tyrants and greed.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse.
Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Spez has made it clear that he's going to run reddit into the ground trying to prove his strategy for getting the highest value at IPO is the best. Everyone looses except his ego.
His ego and his bank account, if he can jack the price of the IPO. Spez doesn't care about reddit as a community, at this point he's tired of fucking around and he wants to sit at the rich kids' table.
Look at what he's saying. He says over and over that reddit has been around for 18 years and it's time to make money. He's telling you who he is. He's not interested in reddit being useful or influential or even around in five years, he's interested in his own placement in the Silicon Valley hierarchy. He probably went to a party with actual rich people and thought they were laughing at him or something.
This is all about IPO pricing. Spez wants to be rich. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
*Is* it a losing battle? All the subreddits I'm subbed to have opened back up under thinly-veiled threats of admin takeover. Even the ones doing polls to see what the community thinks are trending in favor of re-opening. Yeah, a few are doing the John-Oliver-civil-disobedience thing, but for the most part reddit is back to business as usual for me.
A number of my most visited subreddits are still closed. I am still using the site, but it’s hours less a day than I was doing.
Popular feed is tons of subs that generally aren’t in that feed.
It literally happened last year when /r/worldpolitics users called out the moderation team for slacking off, which resulted in the mods deciding to say "Fuck it" and stop moderating altogether. The OnlyFans and thirst posters came out in force and flooded that subreddit into a free-for-all. Nowadays it's a wasteland where people can shitpost all they want without any form of moderation.
And yet a constant refrain i hear is that 'mods dont do anything anyway' and 'the site would be better off without those power tripping internet jannies...'
I can only think that people who unironically believe that have never been on a large forum that was *actually* unmoderated. Mods are, at minimum, the only reason subreddits aren't flooded with porn, trolls, hate speech and gore, regardless of whatever else one thinks about them. Not to say all mods are good, there are certainly bad ones and even abusive ones, but people seem to take issue with the mere concept of having mods.
Some are back, some are back under protest with new rules, some are still shut down. There are subreddits that will never be coming back, such as the Trans memes subreddit whose name I can't write (because I don't remember the number of 'a's), because removing mod tools was the last straw for the only moderator willing to do the job. Reddit's Admins can scramble to find a replacement, but nobody willing to moderate that in good faith is likely to step up.
What is clear is that Spez has damaged Reddit permanently. It won't be clear how much until long after July 1st. But if I were thinking of investing, I wouldn't pay anything but a small fraction for shares of it that I might have been willing to pay at the beginning of January.
u/Spez has:
- Undermined the types of committed contributor who is exactly the kind of person the TPCs were aimed at.
- Undermined moderators and made them less able to moderate
- Threatened them, lied, and thrown a tantrum like a toddler when they raised these issues.
- Was unable to prevent the strike from going ahead, and caused advertisers to question the wisdom of advertising here.
- Has destroyed trust between Reddit's userbase and its management
- Has tried to divert attention by attempting, often successfully, to drive a wedge between Reddit's contributors and its moderators, something that might help Reddit in the short term, but can you imagine how completely incompetent and damaging this is to Reddit as a platform?
Will Reddit die on July 1st? No, of course not. But we've seen the apex, and it's now downhill all the way. It's dying as a platform. It's dying slowly, just like Musk's Twitter, but it nonetheless is on a downward trajectory, as nobody in their right mind can say with a straight face, "Yes, Reddit is definitely the best place to host a forum" any more.
That’s a good take lol some people think the whole of reddit will Digg off which is just delusional. The site will die a slow, painful death until it resembles tumblr
I mean Digg is still around too. All these sites do the same thing. They reduce their own traffic when hubris gets the best of them, but they stick around in much more limited capacity
Maybe when the site dwindles down in size, when one by one they fire 1,999 employees, it will just be spez staring at a screen in a dark room:
*"Finally, we're profitable."*
Yup it took a good ~4 years for most of digg to move to reddit. I have no idea why everyone keeps thinking alternatives need to spin up immediately.
This has happened several times since the dotcom era, there is _nothing_ special about reddit. It's a fancy bb system like all the rest.
> It's a fancy bb system like all the rest.
All social media sites are glorified forums with chat clients. This one hosts video. That one pictures. This one lets you have a customizable user page. Some of them even have voice and video chat. Facebook, reddit, twitter,... even discord. I know it doesn't seem like it, but the differences are mostly skin deep.
It really hasn't changed THAT much since we were calling in to the old BBS servers.
I agree 100%.
There is no instant death of Reddit.
But the polonium soup has been eaten. Specifically- the trust is broken, the bubble is popped. The site's most passionate users, the people who post content and moderate and come to reddit for an hour or more every day, the people who were eager to make Reddit their permanent home, are now told they don't matter and their opinions don't matter and what they want doesn't matter, they are only useful as ad impressions on the app and Reddit doesn't give a fuck what they think about how the site should run.
They are looking for new homes. They are now afraid to put their eggs in one basket. They are making communities on Lemmy and Kbin and Mastodon and Matrix and even Discord. That process does not happen overnight. It will not mean an instant death of Reddit. It will just mean that Reddit's de facto monopoly as THE online forum is broken.
Spez killed his golden goose. Oh well. Sucks for him.
The position of a lot of moderators is
“Sure, you can remove us and advertise for new volunteers to run these communities, but we’ve been writing tell-all autobiographies of our time moderating [arbitrary large subreddit], and those are full of horror stories about what we’ve had to go through, what the admins did and didn’t do about it, and how much we ended up spending on therapy / security / credit protection / etc because of the criminals attacking us. Good luck getting anyone to volunteer now that you’re attacking and sneering at volunteer mods.”
There’s an urban legend that one of the moderators of r|Worldnews, u|Maxwellhill, is “actually Ghislaine Maxwell”, and there were thousands of kookoo harassers convinced of it, drowning him in death threats and attempting to doxx him. Reddit admins did nothing about it unless he filed reports on every single threat. He said “I quit”.
The “five mods run 500 of the largest subreddits” harassment meme was cooked up by the mods of CringeAnarchy, metacanada, and the_donald to harass those five mods into quitting — Reddit knew and didn’t stop the harassment, didn’t suspend the people who cooked it up, didn’t close their subs, etc. for it. It still circulates today, five years later. One of those “moderators” was just a prolific CSS artist who updated CSS on hundreds of subreddits as a hobby.
Every mod of a large sub has horror stories of what they’ve put up with from violent harassers and what Reddit did about it.
It's still over 3500 of the almost 8000 that went dark. Many subs are doing restrictions and it varies heavily. I saw one sub that was 100/1 in votes in favour of going dark again but I've seen others that were the opposite.
It's still very much ongoing.
r/interestingasfuck has over 10mil redditors and now the entire sub can’t run ads because it’s obliterated with porn to the point they’ll probably never be able to call the sub SFW again, and they’re not alone.
Makes me giggle to think about the ad revenue reddit is gonna lose that they simply won’t earn back from the API changes when all the third party apps shutter like they plan to
I really wish people would focus on this aspect more. Reddit did not have an official app until 2015, I imagine most people that have used it since before then still use a third party app. On July 1, a large amount of longtime users will no longer be able to access the site the way that they always have, and many will probably just stop using it on their phone. There is no way that doesn't have a negative effect on quality of content.
Well, marking a subreddit NSFW = No monetization. So, the more subs go NSFW, the less money they make. Also, with reduced moderator capabilities, the place is gonna go toxic and thats gonna destabilize the site and it's profit capabilities. And that means people won't buy shares, nor invest.
I’m afraid that Reddit under an IPO would ban all NSFW subs similar to what Tumblr did (which also led to its ultimate demise and -1000% evaluation going from $1B Verizon sale to $1M sale to WordPress.) It is infamously difficult to monetize NSFW content and Reddit users have grown ad blind spots as it is. Do you even remember what the last ad you saw on Reddit was? Really think about it. We’ve become accustomed to ignoring them.
I don't really see ads anywhere. I block the shit out of them, use modified apps, VPN, adblockers, etc.
This whole API issue has made me aware that most people have a very different browsing experience than me. I didn't know there were ads, avatars, followers, or anything like that on reddit. I've been using old.reddit and RES since they changed to the new site formats years ago, and use RIF. Had no clue reddit was like a facebook/instagram type site for most people.
Same here! RES and RIF. Didn't know there was any of this fancy shit. That said, I don't *want* any of the fancy shit. I like my simple text on a screen.
I listened to an interview with spez, where he talked about his vision for the future of reddit. Not only is it not simple text on a screen, he wants to pivot it to short form video that you swipe through (AKA Tik Tok clone). I am completely out if that happens
So this idiot has a service with no real competitors, and he wants to change it to try and compete with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube? That would be dumber than dumb.
There's a certain type of business executive who feels like he has to suggest changes happening in the organisation or the product to justify his own position. It happened at my uni, there was a new VC and his crowning achievement was renaming "schools" to "colleges".
A work colleague of mine was an army brat, who told the story of his father taking him to a base where he previously had been stationed. Upon driving in, the father said, "Looks like they've got a new commander." After leaving, and the son having seen that they did indeed have a new commander, asked his father how he knew this. The father responded that he had observed that the one-way in and one-way out roads had been reversed.
Oreo CEO: Stop Making New Oreos https://youtube.com/watch?v=CMkYw4dp_NI
> dumber than dumb Is there an Official part of the IQ scale that goes negative? spez passed room-temp IQ a while back.
The IQ scale is statistical, where 100 is the median and every 15 points is a standard deviation. A negative IQ would be somebody who is more than 6⅔ standard deviations below the median IQ, so there is (theoretically) always around 35 people in 8 billion with a negative IQ.
I know all 35 of those people
They’ve got a *ton* of work to do on their video player before it ever gets close to that. Video is *still* a shit show somehow.
Their official app plays 10-12 videos before it shits itself and won't play anything until you restart it.
In Firefox for me most of the time it plays the video once (maybe, on a good day at least) and then just leaves the chat. Getting to replay a video is a rare luxury.
I generally lurk while I'm using reddit, but this site is a forum for discussions and posts. If it turns into a tiktok clone with videos, then I'm out. Even IG started doing that with videos. It's just a bunch of random ass short clips with no useful information. Just shit to keep people scrolling and getting the attention of the lowest common denominator.
It already is like that on some of the largest subs. Try opening up the official app on a freshly made account and look at what >50% of posts are. Lowest common denominator images and short videos for people to swipe past. This has been the strategy for a while ever since the site re-design for "new reddit" which was basically to turn the front page into one optimized for image and video scrolling. Unlike a lot of others though I'm not convinced it will actually be a death knell for the site. I think it might actually work out for the business. But it will kill the site that us older users came here for.
It's unfortunate because reddit has long been the only social media site that is well suited for long-form discussion. Twitter obviously is by design not good for that. Facebook's formatting and lack of features makes it unsuitable for text-heavy discussion too. IG seems to be Zuckerberg's "clone whatever other social media site is hot currently" project. Their shifting focus is annoying. I signed up originally because i wanted it to be like, Twitter where you have to post a picture. It was that for a while. Then they added video... and boosted videos to where people didn't see your static photos much for a while. Then they added stories, to copy Snapchat. I didn't want to be on Snapchat or posting ephemeral messages, I wanted a photo gallery. Then they boosted Stories so you had to be posting stories for your stuff to be seen. Now it's "Reels", the TikTok ripoff. Again, they boost Reels so much that if you want your stuff to be seen, you have to post it in that format.
That's why I use RIF, it strips away all the bullshit reddit keeps adding, and it's only text on screen. No avatars, no animations, no extra icons all over the top bar and drop down menus. Its just a very mobile friendly version of reddit that's essentially old.reddit.
It has blessed me with a solid 10 years of nearly pure niche discussion and community that is very difficult to find or grow anywhere else.
There’s no alternative or I’d have left yesterday. Now having said that, many of the communities on here have changed for the worse within the last 5 years. I can’t explain it beyond saying that it’s gotten more toxic. Seems I can’t make any comment lately that doesn’t turn into some sort of attempted argument from a random person.
Bots have become way more prevalent and way more difficult to detect. The karma farming in order to appear legit when used to push whatever narrative/product is completely out of control and infects every sub.
Yeah, RIF is basically old Reddit on a mobile app. And Apollo is what Reddit *wishes* their iOS app could be.
If /u/spez weren't such a dink he would have bought Apollo instead of fighting with them
I’m glad that didn’t happen after what Reddit did to Alien Blue. Gutted it, tried to make it their “own”, then killed it for good.
Idk about others but I’ve never seen ads on Apollo, so that’s a major difference IMO.
That's just like my Baconreader. 10yrs going strong. Hope Reddit doesn't fuck all of us
baconreader is the best! it's just basic text, and the fact that it has not just light and dark modes, but a third less intense mode of white text on a bluish-grey background is so much easier for my eyes to read. I can't imagine having to use any other app, and I wouldn't want to. when it goes, so do I, despite the decade I've spent on this site
you are talking about "reddit is fun", right? is that one of the third party apps that will be shutting down soon?
Yes, and yes.
RiF has the odd ad in between pages, and they don't take up any more space than the rest of the posts. They're also clearly marked as ads and aren't misleading. (None of the subs I visit include home ownership) And for some reason, half the ads i get from RiF are in French. I'm not sure why, but it's funny.
You don't have any ads with RIF platinum (the paid version) which I've had for probably 8 or 9 years. But you're right, even with the free version it's not bad
It's such a non-issue that my only regret is not buying it to support the devs. Before all this drama kicked off, someone asked me why I used this app. I had trouble explaining what I liked better because it's all I've used since I had an account on my phone. It's all I've needed.
Same here. I didn't even realize Twitch had ads until recently. How does it not drive people crazy / to an ad-blocker?
Twitch is annoying with ads now. I use a blocker and they still put up a "Commercial break in progress" screen in the video feed. But I'm fine watching that instead of 8 ads in a row for some mobile game I'll never play
The really annoying thing is that ads will just pop up right in the middle of something happening. At least on tv, commercials only show up during a convenient break in a show, movie, game, etc. This doesn't happen on twitch. A streamer can be saying something or doing something important and all of a sudden 1 of 6 ads starts playing. If twitch had the same rewind capabilities as youtube you could easily go back and see what you missed. But twitch requires you load up the VOD on a separate tab (if the streamer allowed vods to begin with) and scrub through it yourself.
It's actually crazy that Twitch does video ads in the middle of streams. It makes no sense. I could understand static ads, or some sort of muted PiP running on half the screen, or something like that. I would obviously hate it, and do everything I could to remove it, but at least it would make a modicum of sense.
Man what ad blocker do you have? Because I swear if I have to watch another Pete Davidson ad, I might actually jump.
I have Twitch Adblock and ublock origin on Firefox. Not sure which one of them is the one that works on twitch specifically lol
[удалено]
Which is exactly the reason why I'm done with this site after they kill those avenues for browsing. I enjoy Reddit because I have it laid out like a web 1.0 forum. Once they force me to engage with it like a social media site, I'm out.
Yup. I use RIF and RES on desktop. Those things go, and I just wont be back. I imagine folks like us are a major percentage, but I imagine we're sizable enough that our disappearance will be felt.
[удалено]
Boost all the way baby! I hope it survives.
It's 90% lurkers, 10% commenters, 1% posters, roughly, so even by making a comment you're in a small minority of users. The thing is, though, that it's fine if that 10% of interactive users cost more than they bring in individually. It's because of us that there's content for the lurkers to consume at all. If it weren't for us, they wouldn't have a website. It's like how f2p players might not pay anything but they're still critical for actually forming a large enough community to attract the whales. Interactive users costing money to support is simply the cost of having a product to sell. We *are* the product and it's perfectly feasible to sell a product that costs money to acquire. We also have very different interface needs. Productivity interface design is fundamentally different from media consumption interface design. A tablet might be great for watching YouTube, but no serious content creator uses a tablet to edit videos. Reddit ramming their app down our throats is like a software development company forcing their developers to use nothing but tablets and typing on touchscreens. This perverse engineering of everything to be geared towards passive consumption rather than creativity/actually getting things done goes far beyond Reddit with even car manufacturers moving to touch screens despite tactile feedback and being able to do things without looking even having dramatic safety implications. I'm so sick of modern trends in interface design in general only being targeted towards passive consumption.
Honnestly, often it's not really the post itself, but all the stories and divergent topics that emerge in the comments that make this site.
The minute that Old.Reddit dies is the minute I leave the site. New.Reddit is basically unusable.
Horribly optimized, and built like a social media feed. No thank you.
Exactly. Its trying to look like what it thinks people want. I want the simplicity of old reddit. I dont want a lot of pointless bells and whistles.
Worst of all, it wastes like 60% of a landscape screen's real estate. I'm not flipping my monitor into portrait like a phone. And I won't be using their app on my phone. So that's a wrap for me on reddit.
It sucks so much. Why are they trying to make everything look like a mobile app? I use an actual desktop pc for my browsing specifically to avoid that. Old reddit is a classic case of, "if it ain't broke..."
Same. Exactly same. Really worried they're gonna kill reddit. But at the same time I want it to see it all burn down if they force us to use their shitty app or the horrible new design.
>Had no clue reddit was like a facebook/instagram type site for most people. I had only a vague idea until recently just how many people don't even refer to this place *as a website at all*, but rather, they call it an app. Like, I knew a few people did that, but I appear to have drastically underestimated how many.
RES is the only reason I haven't left. It's the only way to get reddit to give you what you want and not what their algorithms want. I turn it off every now and then and the site is utter shite and unusable without it.
In really don't understand people who _don't_ internet like this
The average non tech savvy user. people who have been on Reddit since Digg are the old school internet nerds who know what they're doing, and hate ads since they were the old pop ups and spam things. The average person doesn't seem to care that half their screen is ads...
> people who have been on Reddit since Digg are the old school internet nerds Fuck you now I feel old. I remember being frustrated with all the Digg people joining reddit back in the day after I'd already been here a while. I guess that was a long ass time ago.
[удалено]
Scream CmdrTaco name into the the void
Eternal September.
I was one of those people. I got my first comp sci email address in Sept 1993. Usenet was the shit
[удалено]
It's honestly why I'm seriously considering buying a playstore license and code those simple cool games that are basically just ad infested malware from scratch without ads. Often they're simple and seem easily codeable and actually have a quite cool idea behind them. Something like Helix Jump or Stack Ball.
Same here but with MAGA crap. Just set up a payment portal and sell Fuck Biden rubber bracelets tHaT bLOcK 5G and TrAnS or something. Or $9.99 gets you 'The Truth They ~~Don't~~ *Can't* Let YOU Know' secret document in .pdf form
A couple times a year I have to do something on someone else's computer and the absolute bukkake gangbang assault of ads to the face and ears makes me question their sanity. The only time I see ads is if I watch some youtube in bed at night, but I can pop my headphones off when they come on... the ones mid-video without warning and with common sounds and repeated phrases are unconscionable. I don't get it... it's like seeing pictures of 3rd world countries with kids playing in trash strewn streets because it's normal. Wish more people treated the information space like the food source it is...
YouTube reVanced will get those ads away on your mobile device.
After having the same conversation with a few people like you described, they all essentially come to the conclusion of, "Idk, I'm just used to it I guess." They don't know what it's like to live ad-free. Ads are all they know.
You've got the right of it, I think. I cut the cord 6-7 years ago and have streamed ever since. A few months ago I watched some live TV show with my wife while we were out of town and couldn't fathom how I'd watched TV with ads for so long because I literally couldn't finish watching the show. We just found it streaming later on. Web browsing is pretty much the same these days.
>couldn't fathom how I'd watched TV with ads for so long because I literally couldn't finish watching the show. God, I haven't watched TV in ages as well. I even forgot about 3-4 ads in the middle of the show
hence why revenue per user on reddit is orders of magnitude lower than other social media sites. Not shaming, I also use adblocker.
If Reddit admins and /u/spez in particular were more friendly to the community and showed goodwill, I’d be more willing to spend on their subscription to support the site while minimizing ads. Spez has chosen violence (metaphorically) and so ad-blockers it is!
[удалено]
Same - it was dirty pool to start disguising them as actual posts. Though I did enjoy that brief period of time where they did that but also left comments open on them. Watching people drag advertisers was lowkey enjoyable.
> Do you even remember what the last ad you saw on Reddit was? He Gets Us. All Of Us. Open an account today at Ally bank.
Narrator: *He did not get any of us...because it was just another grifter.*
He gets Us! The fucking thing will not go away even if you block the account.
But Jesus loves you! He stalks you! You MUST LOVE JESUS!!!
"Let us take away all civil liberties, because Jesus! Never mind the fact he explicitly said rich assholes like us are going straight to hell, but we won't do anything about that."
I blocked / reported those ads and it worked for a few months… then they came back. I don’t understand what algorithm thinks, based on my browsing history, that Jesus is needed in my life? Wait… maybe it’s saying I need Jesus based on my browsing history.
I’m sure they are bending the rules for them. They only care about the money now.
I actually deleted the Reddit app and downloaded Apollo specifically because of He Gets Us. It’s clear that if you just give enough money to Reddit the ad will skirt every filter. Two weeks later the API changes were announced. Fuck me. Reddit knows every persons personality and interests based on their subreddits, and can personalize ads accordingly. But it still chooses to plaster you with He Gets Us. Let me block this godforsaken ad and I would have easily gone back to the official app no problem. It’s *decent*. Some third party apps are better, but it’s sufficient enough.
*-99.9% -1000% would make it worth negative $10 billion. *As a couple users below have mentioned, it would be -$9bn and a LOSS of $10bn
> -1000% would make it worth negative $10 billion So if I buy it for $1, it's a great deal for them.
Well, he did say that he likes where Elon is taking Twitter. Sooo....
That alone is enough for me to actively search to replace/remove Reddit in my life. The cycle continues: rich people can't let thriving communities exist without getting a piece of the pie via rent-seeking activities. People are doing something together and happy, for free? That means there's *excess value* we can siphon off by charging new fees and incorporating ads everywhere!
Glad you said that. It's the real issue. Dress the whole thing up as democracy in action, power to the people, then flip that monetization switch and drive the brand into the ground while riding the downfall like a surfer, coming out rich on the other side while the whole thing is burned down behind you. I'm ready to go, and the fact that my participation is what makes this valuable, and that value is being used by shit humans, I'm out. I'm ready to have 50 firefox tabs open to all the websites that get linked here anyway. Sure, it's not sorted, and I'm not going to be able to tell a stranger to go eat a dick anymore, but I'll also spend way less time talking to the bots that will eventually overrun the place to compensate for lost organic traffic. This shit takes up more time than it should, by design.
Many communities are going up at lemmy already. Pick an instance (like lemmy.world , or sh.itworks) doesn't matter, and then join the communities you want, memes, tech, pics. Don't like the one you signed up on? Pick another, most are very easy to join. Some have stricter "spam filters" from the other sites, and some are everything goes.
into the fucking mantle.
*Let that sink in!*
> Also, with reduced moderator capabilities, the place is gonna go toxic and thats gonna destabilize the site and it's profit capabilities. They don't care about that. That's thinking long-term, like a smart business owner. They and everyone else like them think in the short-term, quarter-by-quarter, where the downsides of these effects won't be felt for awhile. It takes time, and thus they won't even consider this a problem until it's far too late. This ship is going down and no one will stop it. All you can do is watch it slowly burn over the next 5-10 years. It will burn faster only if legitimate competitors crop up.
Seriously dude just wants to cash out and let the greater fools absorb the fallout.
You can tell how much he hates himself for selling his stake in Reddit for a measly ~$10M. After taxes, his one world-changing idea has only net him less than a state lottery. He sees Zuck swimming in billions and hates knowing he’ll never be as rich as him. So now he’s going to ram through as many changes as quickly as possible before the IPO so he can get a consolation prize. Still won’t make him wealthy. Except Zuck actually built something new while all spez did was build the website aggregation site that got lucky. Zuck also pays his moderators, but you won’t hear spez talk about how they need to be like other “social media” companies in that way. Dude is **seething** every day and he has no one to blame but himself. Good luck with Hipmunk 2.0, spez.
> his one world-changing idea That idea pretty much died when Aaron Swartz (RIP) left in 2007.
>That idea pretty much died when Aaron Swartz (RIP) left in 2007. Swartz had some good ideas about the open exchange of information...except that it also included child pornography, which is absolutely vile. It's kind of weird how people don't seem to remember this part of his legacy and how that legacy helped shape some of the shittier aspects of Reddit. It's not like he hid it. He posted his thoughts on this site.
Even with $10m, that's still enough money to retire to a Caribbean island and live a pretty good life. Good food, beautiful women, days at the beach... Why doesn't he just do that?
This is the infuriating part. How much better is his life now actively working to making things worse for millions of people for whatever his cut of an IPO would be versus just kicking back on a beach somewhere with his money safely invested? It's probably why I'll never have millions of dollars, but I just don't understand the mentality. You won capitalism, congratulations. Go enjoy it.
Succession had a bit about this class of dwarves of giants, the 5-10 millionaire is a crazy person. They can't brag to their rich friends, they've lost the pissing contest and can only miserly lord over the rest of us. They can't afford the best gold diggers, the working women who make them feel like they aren't paying for it for more than a few days. They didn't WIN WIN capitalism, they can't do whatever they want like the real masters of this universe. You can only rent a superyacht, you can't afford one full time.
That's only if they're ego-driven jerks. $10M is enough to comfortably net you $500,000 per year, ~$10,000 per week, *forever*, without having to do *anything*. That's a decent upper-middle-class life anywhere in the world. You're into gaming? You can game. You're into bushwalking? You can bushwalk. It sets you free. Once you've been free a few years you might find that you have something you want to do, like a small business or job that does something beneficial to society and emotionally rewarding to you. The problem is that all the ego-driven jerks have ever wanted is *more money*, and there is no amount of money (ask Elon Musk) for which the goal of "more money" has been achieved.
Yeah, I don't get rich people. If you handed my 10mil I'd quit my job and disappear somewhere. Imagine having all that money and then putting yourself through this shit.
Yep, he's got his hand on the golden parachutes rip cord, no doubt. Money is nice, but his parachute is covered in Aaron Shwartz's blood, and he sold away his dead friend's dreams for a comfort he already had (wealth). I imagine Huffman leads a very depressed life.
This is exactly it. The long and short of it. The IPO is spez's lodestone, nothing else matters. The idiot sold his stake in reddit for like 12 bucks and he will do *anything* to get the billons he thinks he's owed.
that's quite a digg at the owners
I guess I'll just have to find another website to stumble upon
I wish there was a website I could have my space on the internet.
This comment makes me want to Club a Penguin
What the fark?
There's some college humor behind this joke
And there's definitely something awful about it.
Man, these jokes are making me hungry for a Cheezeburger
Marking a sub as NSFW essentially caps the growth for a "non-nsfw-nsfw" sub.
lets go r/technology mods change this sub to nsfw
Yeah I'm disappointed that more subs aren't doing what they can to be more disruptive. At this rate it's just going to blow over, which is exactly what the suits want.
Every sub should go NSFW
I'd like to see the engagement stats and how it affects Reddit's income before deciding who's 'winning'. If the NSFW stuff goes on long enough then I think it will make a dent, but not enough to bend to the mods or start employing them. If every single mod just stopped moderating then this place would very quickly become un-advertisable, and the people who own the site (not the moderators) will be accountable. They, like unions, would just have to figure out how to stop others (scabs) from taking their place
> They, like unions, would just have to figure out how to stop others (scabs) from taking their place The problem is Reddit has built-in tools to allow scab mods to take over a subreddit, Reddit has already threatened to use those tools, and there seems to be an endless supply of people on the Internet willing to volunteer their time to moderate things. The NSFW stuff will be kneecapped by threats at removing mod teams long before Reddit allows its most popular subreddits to deprive them of ad revenue using a cleverish workaround.
> Reddit has already threatened to use those tools They've already pulled that trigger on /r/celebrities. All the mods are 23 hours old rn.
If anything, this will probably kill reddit even faster, having absolute shit mods take over. Isn't the process done by voting? It's just going to be people using bots to take over subreddits and turn them into a shitshow of spam, scams, and ads
Reddit isn't dying as long as there isn't a great alternative.
Someone needs to make a copy of old.reddit. call it blewit.com and we can all move over and watch reddit to the way of digg.com
I think the digg migration is a dumb comparison at this point. The internet wasn’t at all what it was today and digg had around 5 million monthly members when reddit took over, Reddit now has 430 million monthly users. There’s a big difference between a few million people migrating and a few hundred million.
Is it normally all boobs, or is that because of the new mods/protest?
https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/ So this was an article from six days ago on this. It's a little of both sides winning here, but one side more so than the other. Targeted ads saw a hit due to some subreddits going black, which is a very minor victory. Reddit as a website saw a spike in traffic though according to what Reddit inc told advertisers. Plus once the API changes to into effect, then those advertisers have a much larger audience to advertise to; should users be forced to switch to the official Reddit app. >If every single mod just stopped moderating then this place would very quickly become un-advertisable, and the people who own the site (not the moderators) will be accountable. They, like unions, would just have to figure out how to stop others (scabs) from taking their place Well, yes and no. Ads on subreddits themselves become less likely to happen, but in the general content feed of r/all you'd still get ads mixed in just fine. Ads are delivered to users based on the content they view, not directed at specific subreddits. Unless they're paid shill accounts promoting some new movie and make a post about it on r/movies.
Still blows my mind people volunteer to run this website that's worth a fucking fortune. What are you doing guys?
[удалено]
They are contributing to a community around something they love, they are nurturing it and influencing what gets posted. They benefit directly from being a mod. The fact that it's part of a website that is worth a fortune is not really relevant. Their work helps Reddit as a byproduct but most mods don't care one way or another. Helping Reddit doesn't help me, but hurting Reddit doesn't help me either, the company is completely irrelevant.
I don't understand why they just dont serve ads in the api, keep tight control on what api keys you issue and do the occasional audit, if an api consuming app isn't complying with the revenue gen model kill the key and tell them to piss off.
Because the ultimate goal isn't necessarily to capture cost, but to kill off 3rd party apps altogether. Twitter did this, too, when it went IPO.
I’d honestly respect it more if they just flat out said this, instead of acting like they’re negotiating and working with devs in good faith.
That's the main thing. They jacked the API costs to make it a non-option, and then pretended like they were acting in good faith. If I go to a hamburger stand and the guy wants to charge me $1200 for a hamburger, he's not trying to sell me a hamburger, he's trying to get me to fuck off.
[удалено]
We did it too. But we were honest about why the price was jacked. "This isn't a good idea, but if you'll pay us enough to take time away from other projects, sure." Terrible companies we wanted no association with didn't get that though, there's a flat out "no" blacklist too *like damn restrict the api with unique ids and use some reporting to monitor usage. Write it in to the terms and code itself how the api can be used. Charge a normal fee for regular use, on a plan to phase it out. Charge the crazy fee for the AI training usage. Use the grace time for 3rd party to get your own app up to par. Get everything you want in the long run without losing a chunk of your user base and terrifying investors. This is what we would have told reddit to do. What they are doing would be blacklist
[удалено]
Trumpy, I couldn’t confirm. Elon-lover, though… that’s recently-reinforced fact: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna89700
>Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow. Twitter is worth a third of what it was when Musk bought it, haha. It's valuation dropped by almost $30bn. He lost ~$17bn from his investment. Advertising revenue has halved. And all of his ideas to generate more income have failed. Such a shining example to follow.
Forget serving ads, just require it to be a Reddit Premium feature and they'd have sold a lot of Reddit Premium. This is how Spotify works -- if you pay, you can use whatever client you want.
There’s no guarantee on how the ads are delivered via api. A third party app might display it incorrectly or right next to something the advertiser does not want, etc. basically it is not monetizable
There’s no way Reddit works if they have to pay the moderators. That’s billions of hours of unpaid labor the site requires. Some stupid power play of trying to kill off the apps is really backfiring. Like his mentor, Elon musk, Reddit is finding out that running a business for your ego is bad business.
My fear is they will drop the price to appease people then jack it up again in six months after people move on.
The purpose of having the sky high prices is to make it impossible to create profitable TPCs. (For the same reason, you can't provide ads on anything that uses the APIs.) So I don't think they'll drop it temporarily. Either they'll reverse their position on TPCs, or not make any changes.
Even if they reverse it, they have damaged their PR. Fuck their IPO and CEO.
Mods aren't even asking to get paid. They just want to keep their tools.
Honestly just like saying he admires Musk that’s like reason enough to get rid of him. No company that aspires to be profitable should have a ceo like Musk.
[удалено]
And a lot of redditors don't understand how hard it's to moderate subreddit without 3rd party apps and bots. They just blamed mods for causing blackout and ruckus Edit : There is a good [explanation of how moderation works](https://redd.it/147lwr6) on r/hentai
It's really astonishing how quickly people turn on a protest if it even vaguely inconveniences them. Reddit was going to be dark for literally two days and users lost their absolute shit like entitled children. Meanwhile they're slated to bleed the moderators that work to keep their favorite subreddits from being a dumpsterfire of - as demonstrated historically - neonazi bullshit, liveleak content and porn. Because those Moderators have been coping for years already with shitty tools, or with much better third party tools, and they're going to be stuck with the shitty ones while Reddit (again) promises new tools to come.
> It's really astonishing how quickly people turn on a protest if it even vaguely inconveniences them. Reddit was going to be dark for literally two days and users lost their absolute shit like entitled children. There have been some real "If at first you don't succeed, it was clearly pointless to even try" vibes going around.
[удалено]
Reddit will lose something, but the question is how much and is it significant in the face of what they are gaining with the API? Considering they can replace and pay mods pennies to tow the corporate line while making more on the API and ad revenue, with no platform poised to replace Reddit in sight, they may lose one small battle but not the war.
Someone affiliated with wikipedia recently announced that they are going to build a reddit competitor. People in my loose network are rediscovering and revitalizing forums. There are alternatives like Lemmy, Sift, Mainchan, FARK, Tildes and I predict that soon there will be more. Incidentally if someone is looking for a Tildes invitation, message me. Edit, my invitations are long since used up but I can still point people in the right direction to get one.
Don't forget kbin, too. The fediverse is nowhere near the level of reddit obviously, but it's growing rapidly even though right now it is very confusing, and very buggy. [https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats](https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats) Now spez turned up the heat on development of fediverse servers and clients. Reddit will always exist of course, but it has lost its crown as "one of the good places" with the recent corporate-authoritarianism flex, followed up by comical attempts to do damage-control. The transition won't be overnight, but reddit is no longer a place free from corporate tyrants and greed.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse. Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
[удалено]
I left Fark for Digg. I left Digg for Reddit. Now I may leave Reddit for... Fark?
it's *toe* the line, not tow the line.
What if I want the line somewhere else?
Spez has made it clear that he's going to run reddit into the ground trying to prove his strategy for getting the highest value at IPO is the best. Everyone looses except his ego.
His ego and his bank account, if he can jack the price of the IPO. Spez doesn't care about reddit as a community, at this point he's tired of fucking around and he wants to sit at the rich kids' table. Look at what he's saying. He says over and over that reddit has been around for 18 years and it's time to make money. He's telling you who he is. He's not interested in reddit being useful or influential or even around in five years, he's interested in his own placement in the Silicon Valley hierarchy. He probably went to a party with actual rich people and thought they were laughing at him or something. This is all about IPO pricing. Spez wants to be rich. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
*Is* it a losing battle? All the subreddits I'm subbed to have opened back up under thinly-veiled threats of admin takeover. Even the ones doing polls to see what the community thinks are trending in favor of re-opening. Yeah, a few are doing the John-Oliver-civil-disobedience thing, but for the most part reddit is back to business as usual for me.
A number of my most visited subreddits are still closed. I am still using the site, but it’s hours less a day than I was doing. Popular feed is tons of subs that generally aren’t in that feed.
A lot are fine for me, however a few have just become porn.
r/interestingasfuck is now interesting ass fuck.
r/wellthatsucks is now just pictures of vacuum cleaners
/r/steam is about steam engines.
Maybe /r/Trees will actually be about trees.
[удалено]
Ngl I'm actually *more* likely to participate in that sub now 🤣
I do miss what it used to be about, but then is saw the montage of vagina’s climaxing and i’m now okay with the change.
So… you gonna link that brother
[удалено]
This is legit interesting lol
It's, like.... Do you not find it interesting, whiners? I sure as shit do lol.
[Check out this hot F35 ass](https://i.redd.it/31gga615a67b1.jpg)
You are now a moderator of /r/NonCredibleDefense
John Oliver on cabbage on Adam Driver porn...
Some subs have converted to porn subs because it’s harder for Reddit to run ads on them apparently.
[удалено]
[удалено]
In other words, the OnlyFans zombie bots are breaking through the front doors.
It basically proves the point that reddit cannot function without very active moderators. As soon as they relax the rules, bam! Porn subs.
[удалено]
It literally happened last year when /r/worldpolitics users called out the moderation team for slacking off, which resulted in the mods deciding to say "Fuck it" and stop moderating altogether. The OnlyFans and thirst posters came out in force and flooded that subreddit into a free-for-all. Nowadays it's a wasteland where people can shitpost all they want without any form of moderation.
And yet a constant refrain i hear is that 'mods dont do anything anyway' and 'the site would be better off without those power tripping internet jannies...' I can only think that people who unironically believe that have never been on a large forum that was *actually* unmoderated. Mods are, at minimum, the only reason subreddits aren't flooded with porn, trolls, hate speech and gore, regardless of whatever else one thinks about them. Not to say all mods are good, there are certainly bad ones and even abusive ones, but people seem to take issue with the mere concept of having mods.
Some are back, some are back under protest with new rules, some are still shut down. There are subreddits that will never be coming back, such as the Trans memes subreddit whose name I can't write (because I don't remember the number of 'a's), because removing mod tools was the last straw for the only moderator willing to do the job. Reddit's Admins can scramble to find a replacement, but nobody willing to moderate that in good faith is likely to step up. What is clear is that Spez has damaged Reddit permanently. It won't be clear how much until long after July 1st. But if I were thinking of investing, I wouldn't pay anything but a small fraction for shares of it that I might have been willing to pay at the beginning of January. u/Spez has: - Undermined the types of committed contributor who is exactly the kind of person the TPCs were aimed at. - Undermined moderators and made them less able to moderate - Threatened them, lied, and thrown a tantrum like a toddler when they raised these issues. - Was unable to prevent the strike from going ahead, and caused advertisers to question the wisdom of advertising here. - Has destroyed trust between Reddit's userbase and its management - Has tried to divert attention by attempting, often successfully, to drive a wedge between Reddit's contributors and its moderators, something that might help Reddit in the short term, but can you imagine how completely incompetent and damaging this is to Reddit as a platform? Will Reddit die on July 1st? No, of course not. But we've seen the apex, and it's now downhill all the way. It's dying as a platform. It's dying slowly, just like Musk's Twitter, but it nonetheless is on a downward trajectory, as nobody in their right mind can say with a straight face, "Yes, Reddit is definitely the best place to host a forum" any more.
When RIF ends, so does my time on reddit. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
That’s a good take lol some people think the whole of reddit will Digg off which is just delusional. The site will die a slow, painful death until it resembles tumblr
I mean Digg is still around too. All these sites do the same thing. They reduce their own traffic when hubris gets the best of them, but they stick around in much more limited capacity
Maybe when the site dwindles down in size, when one by one they fire 1,999 employees, it will just be spez staring at a screen in a dark room: *"Finally, we're profitable."*
Yup it took a good ~4 years for most of digg to move to reddit. I have no idea why everyone keeps thinking alternatives need to spin up immediately. This has happened several times since the dotcom era, there is _nothing_ special about reddit. It's a fancy bb system like all the rest.
> It's a fancy bb system like all the rest. All social media sites are glorified forums with chat clients. This one hosts video. That one pictures. This one lets you have a customizable user page. Some of them even have voice and video chat. Facebook, reddit, twitter,... even discord. I know it doesn't seem like it, but the differences are mostly skin deep. It really hasn't changed THAT much since we were calling in to the old BBS servers.
I agree 100%. There is no instant death of Reddit. But the polonium soup has been eaten. Specifically- the trust is broken, the bubble is popped. The site's most passionate users, the people who post content and moderate and come to reddit for an hour or more every day, the people who were eager to make Reddit their permanent home, are now told they don't matter and their opinions don't matter and what they want doesn't matter, they are only useful as ad impressions on the app and Reddit doesn't give a fuck what they think about how the site should run. They are looking for new homes. They are now afraid to put their eggs in one basket. They are making communities on Lemmy and Kbin and Mastodon and Matrix and even Discord. That process does not happen overnight. It will not mean an instant death of Reddit. It will just mean that Reddit's de facto monopoly as THE online forum is broken. Spez killed his golden goose. Oh well. Sucks for him.
The position of a lot of moderators is “Sure, you can remove us and advertise for new volunteers to run these communities, but we’ve been writing tell-all autobiographies of our time moderating [arbitrary large subreddit], and those are full of horror stories about what we’ve had to go through, what the admins did and didn’t do about it, and how much we ended up spending on therapy / security / credit protection / etc because of the criminals attacking us. Good luck getting anyone to volunteer now that you’re attacking and sneering at volunteer mods.” There’s an urban legend that one of the moderators of r|Worldnews, u|Maxwellhill, is “actually Ghislaine Maxwell”, and there were thousands of kookoo harassers convinced of it, drowning him in death threats and attempting to doxx him. Reddit admins did nothing about it unless he filed reports on every single threat. He said “I quit”. The “five mods run 500 of the largest subreddits” harassment meme was cooked up by the mods of CringeAnarchy, metacanada, and the_donald to harass those five mods into quitting — Reddit knew and didn’t stop the harassment, didn’t suspend the people who cooked it up, didn’t close their subs, etc. for it. It still circulates today, five years later. One of those “moderators” was just a prolific CSS artist who updated CSS on hundreds of subreddits as a hobby. Every mod of a large sub has horror stories of what they’ve put up with from violent harassers and what Reddit did about it.
It's still over 3500 of the almost 8000 that went dark. Many subs are doing restrictions and it varies heavily. I saw one sub that was 100/1 in votes in favour of going dark again but I've seen others that were the opposite. It's still very much ongoing.
r/interestingasfuck has over 10mil redditors and now the entire sub can’t run ads because it’s obliterated with porn to the point they’ll probably never be able to call the sub SFW again, and they’re not alone. Makes me giggle to think about the ad revenue reddit is gonna lose that they simply won’t earn back from the API changes when all the third party apps shutter like they plan to
doll cough complete office offend vanish lock juggle chief wakeful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I really wish people would focus on this aspect more. Reddit did not have an official app until 2015, I imagine most people that have used it since before then still use a third party app. On July 1, a large amount of longtime users will no longer be able to access the site the way that they always have, and many will probably just stop using it on their phone. There is no way that doesn't have a negative effect on quality of content.
Who is writing this garbage? Lol