So, Reddit Screwed Itself

[Alyce: Old Media Enthusiast]

Thousands of pages have locked themselves and the site is straight up broken right now.


www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/tech/reddit-blackout/index.html

Monday’s protests reflect widespread outrage over a Reddit plan to charge millions of dollars in fees for some third-party apps to continue accessing the platform. The plan has already forced several of Reddit’s top app-makers to announce they are shutting down because they cannot afford the new costs, which are set to begin as soon as next month.

The confrontation between Reddit’s corporate management and its users and developers marks a turning point for the platform as it reportedly looks to go public later this year. For years, Reddit users could browse posts, write comments and share pictures and video on Reddit from third-party apps.

Now, however, Reddit is seeking large payments from app makers to maintain that same level of access through its application programming interface (API), in a move apparently aimed at better monetizing Reddit users. Last week Christian Selig, developer of the popular Apollo app, said Reddit wanted to charge him $20 million a year to keep his app running. He later said he has no choice but to close down the app.

Reddit further inflamed tensions with some in its developer community by appearing to misrepresent the details of its private conversation with Selig to suggest he had blackmailed the company. Selig, however, recorded his phone call with the company, a fact Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman later acknowledged in a Q&A with users.

Selig’s app is just one casualty of the coming changes. Critics of Reddit say the platform’s steep fees will kill off all third-party competition against Reddit’s proprietary app, which many users have derided as slow, buggy and inferior. They also fear the moves will decimate a volunteer community that relies on third-party tools to do the critical work of moderating Reddit forums — responsibility Reddit delegates to users of the site rather than to its own paid employees or to contractors, unlike some other large social networks.

[Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!!]

Yup and theres also rumbling they're getting rid of porn too. If that happens I'm gone.

[The Dark Order Inferno]

They desperately want to get the userbase to use new Reddit and the mobile app so have been pulling up the ladder for some time now. they made the mobile browser version unusable a while back, they killed the condensed version people were using as an alternative a couple of months back, the mobile apps were always going to follow and old.reddit is next on the chopping block. Reddit have had an IPO in mind for some time, and management have been doing a terrible job, having failed to make either the web or the app interface useful enough to get the userbase to migrate by choice, plus they pissed away a lot of money on things like NFT avatars and crypto integration that the users soundly rejected and were only really visible to people using the management preferred version of the site.

With vc money evaporating, they're facing doing their IPO in the real world where the company needs to be profitable to justify it's share price and they're freaking the hell out.

[bob]

sounds like Reddit wants to out do Musk in destroying their platform

[Cyno]

I said this in the Twitter thread already, but it's incredible that Reddit looked at Twitter's pissing off most of their userbase with the API charges and going "let's be even worse about it."

Silicon Valley is broken.

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

Unfortunately it doesn't appear that there is any clear next move after Reddit, like there was with the great Digg -> Reddit migration.

I suspect this will just end with Reddit continuing on, making money, and being worse.

[Deleted]

I wonder if we will see a mass exodus from /r/squaredcircle coming here.

[Renslayer]

These tech guys come up with a good service, and because they can't help themselves, manage to f*** it up and destroy any bit of goodwill they had. Unserious cast of characters

[Push R Truth]

Their mobile app (soon to be about the only option) and "new" site is straight up garbage. This is one of the worst decisions I've seen witnessed since I last ate Arby's.

If they got rid of the old.reddit option a lot of the desktop users would even leave. And most people think that's the next option they will kill.

It's so interesting watching a company kill itself for a dollar in such a public venue. But the CEO and a couple suits will make a pile of money and then bail. IMHO that's the entire plan anyway. Burn it all for a dollar... but spez isn't in it for the money. He's in it for a shitload of money.

[KingPooper]

I didn't know there were third-party apps.

[Alyce: Old Media Enthusiast]

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

Jun 12, 2023 10:35:43 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Yup and theres also rumbling they're getting rid of porn too. If that happens I'm gone.

All joking aside, porn bans are always an early sign of platforms going real shitty real fast and caring only about sucking up to advertisers. These bans often affect artists as well because, whether they make NSFW work or not, the blanket rules and algorithm BS that are put in place to fight porn almost always end up burying art content and outright banning it to an extent, particularly because a lot of these platforms don't want to think too hard about where to draw the line between artistic nude and erotic nude, and whether non-pornographic art that happens to include sexual elements should be allowed, so better be massively oppressive than sorry.

But hey, at least these platforms still love to exploit artists' work with NFTs and AI without giving them a dime in return, so there's that.

[Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!!]

Jun 12, 2023 13:49:47 GMT -5 SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman said:

Jun 12, 2023 10:35:43 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Yup and theres also rumbling they're getting rid of porn too. If that happens I'm gone.

All joking aside, porn bans are always an early sign of platforms going real shitty real fast and caring only about sucking up to advertisers. These bans often affect artists as well because, whether they make NSFW work or not, the blanket rules and algorithm BS that are put in place to fight porn almost always end up burying art content and outright banning it to an extent, particularly because a lot of these platforms don't want to think too hard about where to draw the line between artistic nude and erotic nude, and whether non-pornographic art that happens to include sexual elements should be allowed, so bett be massively oppressive than sorry.

But hey, at least these platforms still love to exploit artists' work with NFTs and AI without giving them a dime in return, so at least there's that.

Yeah and I need to make this clear, my own prurient interest aside, porn bans actively f*** over sex workers. Reddit was a great place for them to advertise their websites, OnlyFans etc. Considering how absolutely scummy the mainstream porn industry is, platforms where people could market their own shit without having to involve themselves in that bullshit are essential. So I also consider such bans a harmful act against sex workers.

[Bo Rida]

I already have to add "reddit" to anything I want to search for online. It better not die or searching for anything that's not purely factual will be even more of a nightmare. Hopefully forums will make a comeback.

[Cyno]

Jun 12, 2023 13:05:53 GMT -5 @coolio1234 said:

I wonder if we will see a mass exodus from /r/squaredcircle coming here.

Don't put that evil on us.

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

Jun 12, 2023 13:56:33 GMT -5 Bo Rida said:

I already have to add "reddit" to anything I want to search for online. It better not die or searching for anything that's not purely factual will be even more of a nightmare. Hopefully forums will make a comeback.

I really hope so. In general, we really need to promote individual, independent sites and platforms designed to cater to very specific audiences. It's crazy how the Internet is way bigger than it used to be and yet feels so much smaller because everything is just the same regurgitated content being passed around between the same handful of sites. I remember as a kid searching for something and no matter how obscure, you'd always, always find some fansite made by one passionate guy or gal with a ton of surprisingly reliable information and rare media. Nowadays, if you google anything, the first page will be basically nothing but glorified advertisements and everything afterwards will be irrelevant. I miss Lycos and AltaVista, man.

I swear, playing Hypnospace Outlaw a while back kind of gave me a minor existential crisis because with how accurate to early Internet it is, it's made me realize just how much we've lost and how superficial the Internet has become. Not that there wasn't any superficiality back then, of course but at the same time, the reason why it was so fascinating is that every time you looked something up, you found a treasure trove of content and information that you otherwise would have never come across.

It's why I love efforts like NeoCities that try to bring back the concept of personal sites with people just doing whatever just because they feel like it and because they hope that someone, somewhere will find it interesting and/or useful, not chasing clout, not being constantly pressured to react to everything all the time (and said reaction had better be extreme!) no matter how irrelevant it is to you or how unqualified you are to discuss the issue.

It's also why, for all of its problems, I really do love Tumblr. It's one of the few things that have that feel of really being able to customize your own little corner of the Internet and just do and talk about whatever, indulge in your passions, even turn it into a weird digital art project.

[Cyno]

I give Tumblr a lot of credit trying to build itself back up since WordPress acquired it. That Verizon/Yahoo ownership period was an unmitigated disaster.

Still not quite what it was at its peak and I don't think it ever will be. But it's at least better now. Twitter's troubles have helped it out some too.

[Bang Bang Bart]

Jun 12, 2023 14:26:01 GMT -5 Cyno said:

I give Tumblr a lot of credit trying to build itself back up since WordPress acquired it. That Verizon/Yahoo ownership period was an unmitigated disaster.

Still not quite what it was at its peak and I don't think it ever will be. But it's at least better now. Twitter's troubles have helped it out some too.

About the only tumblr issue now are the random spambots that follow you.

[animaniac]

I was wondering why so many of my subreddits were gone. Completely forgot about this.

I'm actually fine with the official app but the other stuff is shitty. I mainly use it for buying, selling and trading for sports cards. Can't leave Reddit at the moment because I have a few pending deals.

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

Jun 12, 2023 14:26:01 GMT -5 Cyno said:

I give Tumblr a lot of credit trying to build itself back up since WordPress acquired it. That Verizon/Yahoo ownership period was an unmitigated disaster.

Still not quite what it was at its peak and I don't think it ever will be. But it's at least better now. Twitter's troubles have helped it out some too.

At least it got all the asshole to migrate to Twitter. It's actually really nice now (although as mentioned above, I'm still not gonna approve of any sweeping porn ban), to the point that a lot of users are actually worried that said assholes are going to come back if Twitter comes crumbling down.