This was probably the most cynical move Reddit could have made. A big part of what made r/place special was that it was so rare. I have such good memories of the first one.
It’s also just incredibly boneheaded. The API changes happened three weeks ago. People have not forgotten, they are still removing/threatening mods even today, hell there are almost 2000 subs still protesting. And now they give people a microphone during an incredibly public event that they coordinated with twitch?
The way a lot of dot-com startups work, they have high fixed costs -- stuff you pay no matter how many users you have, like programmers -- and low marginal costs, stuff you pay based on how many users you have.
That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. The resulting effect is called economy of scale.
So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.
Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint.
If money becomes tight, then it's harder to get investor dollars to operate at a loss with to grow userbase.
My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.
That affects a bunch of companies, including Reddit.
"That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.
Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint."
This kind of reminds me of how Legos are made. Creating the plastic molds from a molding machine to make a single Lego is extremely expensive, but if you make millions of Legos in mass production it reduces costs to make them dramatically to a point where the Lego Group has basically no operating costs to make them anymore. That turns Legos into an investor's dream.
if you make millions of Legos in mass production it reduces costs to make them dramatically to a point where the Lego Group has basically no operating costs to make them anymore
That's how economies of scale work in general, across many, many industries.
On a somewhat related note, your Lego example is more gloriously intricate than you may realize. So, you're spend a lot of money to make a machine to produce Legos at close to zero cost. What happens if someone the next city over thinks they can make a better machine and undercut you?
One way to protect yourself is with the law. You set up intellectual property protection for your Legos and sue everyone who makes "Lehos". This works for a while.
But problems come up. Intellectual property protections have a time limit. They also have a jurisdiction limit, as some guys in a different country, say, Xhina, don't respect your country's laws and start making those Lehos.
What do you do? How does your company survive?
Well, you can leverage the other valuable part of your company, the brand reputation, to do things that Lehos can't, like make deals with other intellectual property holders to make themed Lego sets. So, you strike deals with Disney to make Star Wars and MCU sets, with Warner Brothers for those Harry Potter designs, with Microsoft/Mojang for Minecraft Legos (because they're a perfect fit). That's something that some random plastic injection mold company in China can't do. You're motherfucking Legos, not dipshit Lehos. You can do that, as well as open company stores and theme parks that are tourist destinations.
So, Legos survives, and not just that, but prospers.
Actual Legos are fairly cheap. You can get a box of 790 for $60, which is like $0.07 per Lego. The expensive sets are the licensed sets. They pay for that licensing fee somewhere. A Star Wars themed republic fighter tank is $40 with 262 pieces, which comes to about $0.15 per piece.
Definitely some greed in there but when you're a recognized brand with the ability to license you can get away with that because you already have the contracts so nobody can compete.
This is a great write up, but what I don’t get is why do these companies stick to these idiotic measures instead of turning to their users for help in an open dialogue.
Like, I get that Reddit needs to make profit, and I actually wouldn’t have minded paying for Reddit premium to use my api key with Apollo. Instead Reddit made me and I’d guess a lot of people like me leave and never want to return. Just left with a lingering bitter aftertaste.
Did they think that they wouldn’t get enough funding that way? Well then how about giving it a test run to see if it works? Didn’t work? Well how about asking your users what they might be missing and what they might want to be more happy to subscribe, and adding features/addressing those issues? Working with developers to establish a revenue sharing agreement? There were so many alternative paths.
No, apparently nfts and shitting on your users is where it’s at.
Have a conversation, run polls, A/B test, etc. And be transparent while you’re doing it. These tools are nothing new when developing a service. Why ignore everything?
I mean, is it really just a competence/arrogance thing alone?
I think it's more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - "I'm smart, I'm sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money".
Yeah, there seems to be an inflection point in the lifecycle of businesses nowadays where the leadership loses any interest in what the company actually does. The products it makes or services it provides are considered almost irrelevant.
Exactly this. Companies like Reddit these days are so disconnected with their userbase it's insane. Of all the millions of things Reddit could do to make their platform a better place, they choose to basically remove the services that everyone liked (the 3rd party apps) and not only that, lie to their users (as with the case of Apollo "blackmailing Reddit for $10 million") and double down on them. It sickens me how ignorant they can be, but I guess that the hard lesson we can all take away is that with money and power comes corruption.
Have a conversation, run polls, A/B test, etc. And be transparent while you’re doing it. These tools are nothing new when developing a service. Why ignore everything?
I mean, based on how dramatic the increasing in price the API was, I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit already knew what the public reaction would be, considering they'll probably also receive considerable hate for even contemplating the decision. Of course they just didn't give a second thought and just went with it.
I stopped using reddit after spez's AmA. If all of this would have been handled in a more mature and open way, I would probably have moved to the reddit app, complained about it for a while, but kept usind reddit. But after what happened in the last weeks, reddit is no longer something I want to be associated with.
For lack of a better description, I simply don't 'like' reddit anymore. It's like a friend who treated you like shit.. Sure, you could still go to a party together and have fun, but it's just not quite the same anymore.
It's not so much about what they did, most people understand reddit has to make money at some point. It's the how that is driving people away imho. At least it is for me.
considering they'll probably also receive considerable hate for even contemplating the decision.
Honestly, when Christian first brought up “maybe subscriptions for Apollo to offset API costs,” I was fine with that. I get that we were receiving a service for free that cost the company money, and I was fine with paying a reasonable amount for that. I just don’t get why they had to make the costs so unreasonable that even subscription based wouldn’t cut it.
I mean after the whole "spez shadow-edited someone else's comment to put words in their mouth" thing, what you're describing sounds a bit too ethical for reddit as a company.
This is not true in most cases.
It's not about being profitable, it's about always making more and more and more and more - the so-called growth.
Let's take the case of reddit inc. Their revenue grew from just $25 million in 2016 to over $500 million in 2022. If they can't make a profit with that, I don't know what to say (I'd say the leadership buys a new ferrari every month, probably). According to this thread, reddit operating costs were around $35k dollars back in 2011. Even if you were to multiply that by a factor of 10, it's still just a couple million dollars per year. Multiply it by 100, and still They. Are. Fucking. Profitable. As. Fuck.
No, the problem is not profitability and paying the bills. Fuck no. The problem is them wanting more than what is remotely reasonable, and of u/spez being a greedy fucking pig and wanting not simply a big, but instead a spectacular cashout in their coming IPO. Well, fuck the greedy little pig boy and fuck reddit.
For some reason Reddit has 2000 employees. That's a huge expense. If I were in charge of Reddit, I think the first thing I'd be doing is conducting those "Exactly what would you say you do here" interviews and figuring out why something that should be a relatively simple and mature forum website needs so many people working on it.
Social media companies are especially doing this whiplash switch from aiming for growing the userbase to making money. And for them, there is another factor that makes it even more important to use money for growth when it is available -- network effect. Basically, for certain services, the role of the service is to facilitate communication between their users. While it's not quite true that all users are equally-likely to communicate with each other -- an elderly user who only speaks Italian and a schoolboy in Kansas who only speaks English might not have a lot of desire to communicate -- in general, users of the service get their value from the service by communicating with each other and each additional user is one more person with whom a user can communicate. This means that it's much more-desirable to use a service with a large userbase than one with a small one, because you can communicate with others. The value of the service as a whole, if everyone were equally likely to communicate with everyone else, rises roughly as the square of the number of users. That's because the value to each user is proportional to the number of users that they can talk to, and that is true for every user -- multiply one by the other, and the value of the service as a whole is proportional to the square of the userbase size.
Social media work by connecting members of their userbase. So for them, they have a huge incentive to use money for growth whenever they can get a hold of it as far as they can.
The services that are especially likely to respond to capital being cheaply available are companies that have a business model that does this, even moreso than a typical dot-com. And sure enough -- Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube derive their value from connecting members of their userbase, rely on network effect as well as economies of scale. And just as they dive really deeply into spending cheap money to grow when they could, when money ceases to be really cheaply available, so they will have further to swim out when it ceases to be.
My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.
This is basic economics. Increased interest rates mean companies will pay more for every dollar they borrow. This includes venture capital. Cheap borrowing is one of the reasons real estate values skyrocketed over the course of the past generation. Cheap money increased demand, and inflated costs. Do this long enough (maybe an economic collapse or recession between), and the house you bought in 1980 for $50k is now worth $400k.
Every company utilizes borrowing a lot more than you might think. From infrastructure, to payroll, borrowing money plays part in most activities of a company. It's pretty complex.
This is the second time I've seen something on kbin trying to dress the reddit migration to the Fediverse up as some hugely patriotic thing.
We don't need that, we don't benefit from it. This is how you create demagogues. Don't infuse nationalism into the Fediverse. That is super problematic and I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening when you see how much more European the Fediverse is than reddit was.
Gold originally was fine imo. Then it got out of control with so many different medals, some free, some cheap, etc. They made it so confusing and basically every post on the front page had some sort of award. They made it confusing and cluttered… At least they realized it was dumb.
I remember at one point, Talklittle mentioned the addition of rewards, and how he was against them, which was convenient since Reddit didn't give third party apps access to them in the first place. I know at one point I was able to buy gold in RiF, but that was gone the moment that Reddit introduced all the other bullshit rewards.
I did, actually. My instance has a saved copy of the post, I replied to it there, it forwarded the information to Kbin.
OPs point is dumb. Lemmy and Kbin are separate platforms that happen to be interoperable because of the backend protocol they’ve decided to use (which Kbin added relatively recently in the grand scheme). The Fediverse is made up of many of these platforms that are doing the same thing. There is nothing wrong with referring to the platform one is using.
Well said. If you want to mean all the things connected to ActivityPub, you say Fediverse. If it’s restricted to lemmy, use lemmy. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. OP saying it borders on ignorance may have to think about it.
I use lemmy. I don’t really care for nor use other Fediverse services like Mastodon.
Wouldn't every viewed copy anywhere then be a saved copy of the original post? Does that distinction even mean anything when it's still posting specifically to the original instance?
If I reply in a Lemmy.world thread, I'm still posting on Lemmy.world even if I'm viewing from Kbin.social.
As a comparative example to old and dying social media, it would be like finding a link to a celebrity's Twitter comment on Reddit and you saying you saw the person saying that on Reddit, which would be extremely misleading to anyone listening, thinking that the celebrity had posted it on Reddit.
It’s not posting comments specifically to the original instance. If the instances defederate I can continue to post comments, and people on my instance can see and interact with them.
Once somebody subscribes to a community (or magazine if you’re on the rifle site), ActivityPub acts like dynamic, synchronizing RSS. Everybody interacts with local data, an instance isn’t simply acting as a proxy when interacting with a different instance.
No, you're posting on kbin.social. You're never ever doing anything directly on a remote site. You view on k-so, you vote on k-so, you post on k-soc, and you comment on k-soc. Your actions are then, at some later point (which may be microseconds, or it may be hours, depending on traffic levels on both k-soc and the remote website), relayed to the remote website so the two copies of the community can be synchronised.
The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.
Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but... Not by anywhere close to the same degree.
Alright, we're sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.
First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it's going to cost $x.
Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.
Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.
And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.
By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.
There. That's really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.
You'd probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don't get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.
Again... This shouldn't be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!
Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)
Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients... But I for one would have been... Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn't suck.
Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.
They're not redundant functions. They're... Mixed up on kbin right now, because things were originally built with the up button boosting content, but that's incongruent with how Lemmy does it, so it was changed.
But boosting isn't really about sorting at all. It's about republishing content, so that it can be sent out to instances that have started following a group after the content was originally posted.
Perhaps more importantly why would one retweet a comment? Rather than a post?
The way content propagation works here is that someone using Website A follows a remote content source (either a user, or a group -- aka a "community" or a "magazine"), and the remote hosting website (let's call it Website B) sends all subsequent content from that source to Website A, where the requesting user can then view it. If someone from Website A was already following that content source, then they get to see all of the content that Website A had already received, and benefit from earlier users efforts. But if that person was the first from Website A to subscribe to that content source, then they only get future content.
It's very similar to a, well, a magazine subscription in that way. NatGeo isn't sending you their 150 years worth of back catalogue when you subscribe in 2023 (not that you should bother subscribing to NatGeo in 2023).
The 'boost' button republishes content, though. Posts, comments, whatever. Hitting 'boost' on a comment republishes it, and once republished the group actor (the little bot-like construct that functionally is the group) sees it as new content, and pushes it out to everyone following it. This means it will reach websites that started subscribing to the group after the comment was originally posted.
Boosting is how older content (where older basically means "from anytime before literally right now") spreads through the fediverse.
So this is one of those things like git, where you can't explain how it works on the surface to a normal person because it barely even makes sense if you don't know about the underlying plumbing. :\
Not awesome, but I guess that's what you get when you graft a reddit-like experience onto a fediverse that was more or less invented for microblogging.
Yea, i'm working on my own Fedi software and i'm struggling with the point of boosting in the link aggregator context. It's an odd overlap with Reddit-style reposting to appropriate subs, but based on the user.
It makes sense in the Twitter UX, but i struggle to find it's place in the Reddit UX.
I think boosts have potential to be used for crossposts, and the current implementation are just crossposts to your profile. Though they're likely here right now just because Kbin is a mix between thread and microblog software
Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.
When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.
With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.
Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they've seen.
but relevant users cant see it, its never fetched for them to see it. Sure users on the home instance can see it, but they're on the home instance, it's already fetched for them. Ive run into this problem on here, where there is a lot of content on other instances that isnt visible from kbin. I have the option of visiting the home instance to see it, but it takes me completely off of kbin, I cant boost it from that page.
Someone just needs to follow. The community owner either needs to seed the community to big instances using accounts on them, or people who find the community via other instances need to subscribe and know that fresh content will come. Then they can boost older content from the hosting site.
Things take some conscious effort here. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"Then they can boost older content from the hosting site." No that's the problem. Like you yourself said back catalogues arent fetched. They can't see the older content to be able to boost it, they'll only see new content.
If my instance follows a community at time t = T, and your instance starts following it at time t = T+10, I can boost content posted between T and T+9 so that you can see it.
Meanwhile, if people on the hosting instance boost things posted from times earlier than T, we both get to see them. Then, once they're visible to us, we can continue to boost them for new instances to see.
If boosting is meant to be a solution to the back catalogue problem, then it's a horrible way to do it. You'd have to go through and boost every single post from before the hosting instance was followed, and then it'd only show up the user page of the guy who went to all of that effort? (or, realistically, bot).
If what I'm saying is accurate (and I'm still not sure because this is admittedly a bit too complicated for me) then it doesn't sound very useful since individual profiles aren't nearly as important in a forum context when compared to something like twitter, and especially when you can just upvote something and have that show on your profile. Unless I'm mistaken and anything you've upvoted doesn't propagate to another automatically instance while boosts do... but I don't think that's a big enough distinction to have two different buttons? You could just have an upvote also do that.
I see it as similar to the "save" function on Reddit, except it's public. I've started using it on things that I think I might like to read again later (and so by extension anyone who's "like me" would probably want to read it too).
i disagree, it's a great functionality that people should learn.. and here's the simple point.. you can BOOST a comment you disagree with, so that your argument AGAINST the comment will get more visibility.. reddit is dysfunctional, and this mechanism can help fix one of the problems reddit cannot get rid of.. this mechanism can help discussion, and fight against things like brigading..
think about it a minute.. someone makes a really TERRIBLE point that you can dismantle easily.. tear it down, and BOOST the hell out of it.. reddit cannot accommodate that.. keeping those two functions separate is critical..
this will help keep every thread from becoming a popularity contest that is entirely predictable, once people figure it out
edit to add: i've only been using this platform for a few days.. but i promise you, it works the way it's supposed to.. try it out..
NCD was one of my absolute favorite subbreddits, and one of the few communities I was truly sad to leave behind. It looks like it may be destroyed anyway. Hopefully this means more users from the NCD community will move to federated communities like the one I'm familiar with on sh.itjust.works.
I’m not sure how jerboa works, but if you go to the actual sh.itjust.works website, you can do it. Go to the communities search bar and paste kbin.social/m/NonCredibleDefense. The magazine should show up there.
On Kbin I find that sorting by top, and then limiting top to the last 3 hours does a better job of showing stuff I'm subbed to. It's not perfect, but better.
So the incentive to make the best spambots won’t just be some project for influence, but an actual financial reward? Truly, reddit will be at the forefront of innovation.
Musk did the same stupid thing just now, rewarding accounts with many retweets/views with money (of course Fascists), making sure bots will bot the shit out of other bots to make a dime, of course Musk-lover Spez follows suit.
I agree, but I try to be pragmatic. Everyone is looking for the twitter killer that will destroy it in a blaze of glory, but I am fine with it slowly bleeding users and value as Threads and Mastodon (and Bluesky?) get better and gains more users.
But is Meta/Facebook gaining any better? Remember, this was the company that gladly shared information with Cambridge Analytica to affect the 2016 US elections. And they’re collecting an absolutely monstrous amount of data from each Thread user.
RedditMigration
Top
This magazine is not receiving updates.