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Megathread for news/updates/discussions about Reddit API changes and reactions to it
A lot of people want to talk about Reddit and that will likely continue. This is a place to post minor news updates, so that Reddit topics don't fill up the front page of ~tech.
(Up to you what counts as "minor.")
I've blocked most of the other threads since they were kind of dominating the front page for a while, but to this one I'll add my take/prediction that nobody asked for. This is coming from someone who joined Reddit way back in 2008 (roughly, hard to remember that far back) and had already deleted his account and all posts and comments 5 or 6 years ago when the redesign first rolled out, so take with as much salt as you deem healthy!
Right now subreddit mods participating in the blackout are weighing their options. Staying dark indefinitely means one of two things will happen: 1) Reddit will eject the mods, forcefully re-enable the subreddit, and insert new less-hostile mods, or 2) a new subreddit filling the same niche will arise and gain enough traction to replace them. Both options kind of suck in that not only do they defeat the purpose of the protest, but the mods lose their influence on Reddit at the same time. Some may choose to accept this, but I expect the majority of subreddits will turn back on in a few days (if not right away at the end of the 48 hours). Highly upvoted posts being critical of Reddit will probably stick around on the front page but slowly peter out over the course of a few weeks.
Third party apps are gone for good, minus a select few that cater specifically to people with disabilities because it would be an exceptionally bad look for Reddit to essentially block those users from the site entirely. But even those apps will go away once Reddit has done enough work in-house to claim that they now satisfy those same needs (maybe as a result of purchasing one of the existing apps). There's no reason for Reddit to reverse course on any of this and no indication that they are even considering minor concessions in response to the protests.
I wouldn't be surprised if this whole debacle also greatly accelerates any plans Reddit had to completely retire old.reddit.com. The alternative is to wait until all this API hubbub has died down and then retire old.reddit.com which would only thrust Reddit back into the limelight with a whole new battery of negative press. Might as well get it all over with at once--rip the bandaid off, so to speak. I think it's coming real soon.
Ultimately Reddit will join Quora, Medium, The History Channel, Google, and all the other things that were good back in the day but morphed into shit in order to turn a bigger profit. The internet will be a worse place for it, but that void will eventually be filled by a new contender that scratches the same itch for enough people that it eventually becomes big enough to follow Reddit down the same road to profitability at all costs. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam.
agree.
I remember when we used to say IBM was the worst. Then it was Microsoft that was evil. Then "dont be evil" turned evil, now the whole lot of them seem to be rushing headlong off the same cliff in a hurry.
the thing is, is that the people paying for Reddit have nearly as much disdain for the average user as Huffman. It's been done and it will be done again.
BUT. The best thing to come out of this isn't the mods winning or reddit caving: it will be that power users of the site will stop contributing their time and energy into Reddit. And hopefully when they get over their reddit addiction, these people will spend their time re-engaging with their communities, or find new ones.
Persecution scatters, but scattering also sows seeds.
Originally, I expected them to kill off old reddit in about 3 months but, now, I'm not so sure.
The vast majority of users (and mods) who are upset about the third-party apps have said that they'll only continue to use reddit from a browser and only as long as old reddit still exists.
I think doing a one-two punch of killing third-party apps and old reddit too close together will absolutely fuel a major exodus.
I just don't think reddit stands to gain as much from killing off old reddit before the IPO as they did with third-party apps; reddit is still making money off the users of old reddit (just not as much) and it can't be viewed as funding someone else's business the way the third-party apps could be viewed.
I think people under-estimate how much of the user base is casual and not a power user. So from Reddit's balance sheet perspective, they'd only probably lose like 5-10% of their MAU. That said, this is kind of like the 1% in the wealth distribution. They are small number but an extremely powerful number. I'm just curious to see how powerful they are. I would for sure stop using reddit if the content degraded to Facebook or Twitter quality.
I agree with this. I think reddit just looked at the overall traffic distribution between the desktop site vs. official apps vs. third-party apps and said "yeah, let's just pull the plug because we'll be fine even worst-case scenario where every third-party user stops using reddit."
I really don't think they drilled down deeper to look at how much those third-party app users actually contribute to reddit in terms of activity (voting, reporting, commenting, submitting) vs users of the official apps, or compared the performance of comments/submissions by third-party users vs the official apps, because that's where I'm betting you'd see a much more stark difference.
The response spez recently gave to the backlash is what finally led me to decide to delete my reddit account and all posts in it (not letting reddit profit off my free content).
If I really need to follow a subreddit feed I'll just go with good old rss.
Good riddance and wish I had realized how unimportant it all really was.
FOR SURE. I never realized how much Reddit really stole my time. Since I left I read more, I’m more engaged with my family and those around me, and I don’t have a sudden urge to pick up my phone only to realize I’m completely wasting my times 10 minutes later. I am thankful to have found this community where the discussion is so much more fulfilling without a plethora of memes, photos, GIFs, and videos that consume my attention. My hope is that these megacorps will walk themselves right off the cliff due to greed and then have to walk back their models to produce a high enough level of content if they’re ever going to win users back. Either way, it’s liberating to walk away from certain forms of entertainment because they can’t meet my standards instead of falling victim to the dopamine machine.
Yup, the main thing I realized is how much of my phone usage was dominated by reddit. I'll be honest after I deleted my account I picked up my phone multiple times a day just to open reddit even though it wasn't there. It took a while for that habit to die down but I have so much more free time to be productive or do other things that actually make me happy.
It's terrifying how these apps lock you in such a vicious cycle. I'll definitely be more careful to curate how I consume my content in the future so I don't get trapped in again.
I mod a couple of subreddits that I inherited when my brother (the former mod and creator of those subreddits) succumbed to his colon cancer.
I took over the subs when he died to keep his creations alive and running, they're about things that I'm also interested in but I don't have the same passion for them that he did. Now I'm not certain what I will do about their continued existence. I'm probably leaving the site, absent some major about-face from the fuckwits running that clown-show. I'm going to leave my posts and content around because I figure that one day those posts and comments will be of value to those who knew me once I'm gone, but I'm torn on the prospect of destroying one of the last things he put into the world that until recently I still saw on a day to day basis. I won't be around anymore to see the subs, and I figure that he'd also be pretty upset about the turn that Reddit has recently taken if he were still here since he was an avid 3rd party app user, but I don't know that I would want to turn the spaces over to someone else who would probably one day remove his inactive account as a mod and I'm also not certain what good I would do by burning them down in spite since they're pretty niche communities and I'd likely just be harming the communities that he loved in that action and Reddit obviously wouldn't care.
My inclination is to just leave them be and walk away, but I'm very torn about parting ways with something that was so important to him. This whole Reddit drama has really made me sad, but what really makes me hate the decisions that the leadership team there is committed to is the fact that they're forcing me to contemplate severing this last string I had to my late brother and the things we enjoyed together. Honestly fuck Reddit and FUCK Spez.
While you're deciding what to do, there are some things you could do in the meantime to preserve your brother's legacy:
https://web.archive.org/ (bottom right, enter the link for the profiles and subreddits into the 'Save page now' box)
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information-
Hope that helps. And I'm very sorry for your loss.
For people getting up to speed:
Explainer: Reddit protest: Why are thousands of subreddits going dark? (Reuters)
If you want to see the big picture in real time, have a look here: https://reddark.untone.uk/ (compare that list to https://blog.oneupapp.io/biggest-subreddits/)
The real question is what happens after the "temporary" blackout ends tomorrow (14th). If enough subs stay dark I think things have a chance of actually moving.
I doubt there is any chance of things moving. There was a time when AMA was almost deleted by the owner of the sub, and reddit took control. That’s more likely what will happen here if things continue to extend.
The only chance of things moving is if users leave en masse, which is doubtful. While lemmy, kbin, and tildes have seen more users it doesn’t even scrape the iceberg of reddits population.
Plus, it’s unfortunate for me to say this, but moderators likely won’t want to give up their power to migrate to a new site. Moderator positions tend to attract somewhat egotistical people who, while they do it for free, simply won’t want to give up power that they wield.
except if they do that, they will need new mods. At some point it becomes a job. People that do it because they want to do it and love their communities are one thing, people doing it because they're being asked to do it will be a different situation entirely.
A lot of moderators do it for the power trip (some do it for the community). There is a line up of people that would not mind gaining that power.
I am not saying that the quality will be the same (they could be replaced by better or worse moderators) but they are, in fact, easy to get rid of. Remember, 5 moderators control 92 of the 500 most popular subs. You don't have to replace many to keep a lot of the traffic reddit gets on a day to day basis.
The niche subs with some good mods that reddit might lose? Reddit doesn't care about them because they don't make money.
This protest was toothless. If they wanted to hurt reddit they would have wiped their wikis, sidebars, custom CSS, mod tools, and kept things open but let the bots just run wild and let things descend into anarchy. They then would have immediately migrated their useful content and posts elsewhere.
Reddit has no reason to bow to their demands or, at most, give some token concession to quiet things down before continuing down whatever vision they currently have anyways.
Maybe some, but I'd need some more fact-based information to be willing to believe it rises to the level of "a lot" when compared with the total universe of mods. However, I do believe that this is a common perception held by people who are not themselves handling moderation of comparable sized subs.
My largest one is around 100k users; not huge, but not tiny, and that's a common belief in our community (so much so that a spin-off community was formed explicitly to complain about the mods). And while I understand if others won't take our word for it, I will say with absolute certainty that none of the people on the mod team are there to feed any kind of power trip.
Oh, I know a few people who would literally kill for that kind of mod power. They create multiple accounts and do their best to weasel their way into every subreddit they can, like the mod bits are pokemon for them to collect. Then they use their green flairs as an excuse to bully users and throw their weight around - it's incredibly petty. We used to have threads in /r/defaultmods about some of these people, tracking their accounts so we could keep them out of our teams. One persistent fellow tried to get on the listentothis team no less than five times. His grammar always gave him away. They aren't all that hard to keep out if you care to stop them, but that's the issue - some teams don't care.
I don't think you run into these people very often until your sub is hitting the front page on the regular or has hundreds of thousands of users. I never ran into them myself until our sub went default at 200k users, and then they came out of the woodwork.
If reddit were to use these people to replace mods that are striking, these people absolutely would step up and take over those communities. That would honestly be the best thing ever, because judging by the way these people acted when they had mod power, they will antagonize the users more savagely than reddit admins ever will. It won't end well for reddit to go that route, but reddit leadership is probably too dumb to care about it until it's a firestorm on their front door.
To learn more about what might happen next, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
I think that privatizing every Tuesday is really smart in how disruptive it is to Advertisers, SEO, and the community can still stay connected and what not.
Does that really say "8314/8829 subreddits are currently dark"?! I've been avoiding Reddit so haven't logged in but is that really 94%? That seems way, way too high.
94% of the subreddits who agreed to blackout.
Good point. I just edited my comment, but a list of the top subs can be found here: https://blog.oneupapp.io/biggest-subreddits/
While there are plenty of big names that are dark - AskReddit,WorldNews, News, Movies... are missing - and I assume live.
r/politics which is a massive sub is also still live.
For what it's worth, I don't plan on going back to Reddit. Reddit has seen a steady decrease in comment quality over the past 10 years and a steady rise in people trying to farm karma. I've been really impressed with the quality of comments here on tildes and plan to stay.
I’ll probably keep it in my rotation for the smaller subreddits I was apart of. Like I just became mod of my local neighborhood subreddit that was dead for three years and built it back up to the point that people are posting regularly and even meeting up in person.
But I’m probably done with mobile since Apollo is gone and will be sticking with RES on desktop as along as that keeps going.
The blackout technically ends in 20 minutes from time of writing.
Just sent out this link to RIF users who haven't uninstalled yet, on RIF's last day: https://www.talklittle.com/rif-is-fun/whats-next
It's a short goodbye message, plus a brief plug for Lemmy and Tildes.
It's been a pleasure, talklittle! Thank you for everything! I'm looking forward to your new app!
It may never work again, but i'm never uninstalling.
Mine just died, thanks for everything Talklittle :( not gonna lie a little part of me died inside when I saw that "error loading reddit data"
I was a long-time Apollo user, so I never experienced RIF. But I respect the hell out of your work and dedication to your app and its users. Thanks for all the work you did on it, and thanks for working on a Tildes app.
Thanks! You seriously had the best app for moderation and often I'd even prefer it over the desktop experience to just casually browse Reddit. Far less stuff going on and much better to quickly view a specific sub.
I can't wait to see what you come up with for Tildes.
I keep thinking about what this would be like if instead of the blackout, the mods essentially walked off the job forcing reddit to deal with all the bots, spam, rule violations, etc of the huge subs. Let their advertisers see all the horrible junk appearing alongside of their ads on the front page and see how quickly things change.
I agree, the blackout is a misguided attempt to sabotage Reddit's traffic (due to lack of participation), but a better way would've been to let the seedy side of Reddit float to the front. Investors won't care if Reddit has 1.1M users or 1M users (they'll just value Reddit slightly less), but they sure won't invest in a cesspool of unmoderated crap.
Users would still downvote the most egregious violations, unless there was an organized effort to encourage users to post and upvote junk. Then reddit would be faced with the decision of banning some of their largest subreddits, as is their policy for unmoderated subs, or replacing the mods.
I think it could be much more disruptive as it would be actively destroying their advertising value and there is more pressure on admins to act quickly.
True, but how much garbage would you wade through to find the good content?
Reddit will boot the old mod teams: there are plenty of quislings in the community who would happily step up to replace old mods in exchange for a little power over their fellow redditors, regardless of the principles involved.
I see your point, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Mods are already discouraged by Reddit not taking their concerns over mod tools seriously. Bringing in a bunch of rookies off the bench wouldn’t turn things around in time for their (assumed) IPO.
Oh, it's a terrible idea. Which is why I have no doubt that a massively intelligent and big-brained tech CEO will seriously consider it.
Oh hey, that aged really well.
The admins are now nuking entire mod teams for malicious compliance. /r/InterestingAsFuck, /r/MildlyInteresting, and /r/ShittyLifeProTips have had their entire mod teams removed, and suspended for 7 days.
It seems they're currently targeting subs that have switched to NSFW and allowed pornography, but things are now escalating dramatically.
They appear to have backtracked /r/MildlyInteresting, the mods list is populated again and it appears to be by the same people who were there before. Guess they realized that they weren't allowing full on pornography like they alleged and that they went off half cocked.
Either that, or it was a show of force: "Hey, human cattle, see what we can do when you don't behave? Back to work! And don't make us crack the whip again!"
Less of a reaction to API changes, more to how reddit has handled the backlash, but I work in marketing at my company, and we've decided to stop running ads on reddit.
It's not a protest move. Reddit has never been great for immediate ad conversions compared to other platforms (for us), but we kept running ads as part of our awareness campaigns as we did measure modest indirect conversions. With this small exodus of users, especially from the content creators and moderators on the platform, we've decided we're better off spending that budget elsewhere.
We're a small fish, we won't move the needle, but I doubt we're the only company making this decision
Apollo developer debunks many of the complete lies Spez has been peddling to the press over the past week.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about
Casey Newton's "Platformer" newsletter today: Reddit Doubles Down
But that defeats the point.
The only sustainable business model for Apollo is to create their own reddit clone, and seamlessly transition users over to it.
But if they gave Apollo 6-12 months, as suggested in the article, it would be a risk.
Funding might be sought. Engineers might donate their time for free.
The longer Reddit allows free API access, the more likely a third party app is to try and steal the users or the content.
These sorts of risks have to be documented in the S-1, and in theory at least, might impact the valuation.
You can argue with the premise (that Reddit wants to kill off third party apps) and you can argue with the reasons (maybe they are just angry that Apollo is profitable/ stealing their advertising revenue/ didn't agree to be bought out) but you can't argue that one dude can't create a Reddit clone on Tildes... :)
The creator of modtoolbox is leaving reddit. (sorry @creesch had to let everyone else know)
That's absolutely okay :) Also directed some people to Tildes and there are quite a few ex-mods on here anyway.
Unfortunately, this comment can't be read on mobile outside of the app. I'm definitely not going to download the app to read it.
I added the text of the comment to the above post. Totally understand that mobile frustration.
The "reopen or we'll reorder the mod list / force you open" came for my relatively small (50k to 100k range) meme subreddit today. Well, joke's on them, there are a grand total of two active moderators and both of us are on board, so they can have at if they want.
O7
reddit user-base has become so mainstream and casual. I can't possible imagine a situation where individual users have a great effect. however, if moderators continue to protest (and stick to their commitment to black out) maybe we see some compromise from Reddit leadership.
Just bumping to remind people if you have some minor news about the ongoing Reddit API changes and ensuing moderation drama, this is still a great place to post it.
Because Tildes uses activity sort, posts have a longer lifespan than sites like Reddit.
So this is kind of interesting I was googling some wine questions last night and ended up clicking on a link to /r/lutris.
I wasn't able to view the content because the subreddit was banned yesterday due to lack of moderation. Seems like the mods have stepped down and they couldn't find replacements?
Admins force /r/Steam to reopen
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/14bxad1/admins_force_rsteam_to_reopen/