This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.
Most bots actually would continue working, the free API allows for 100 requests a minute which for most is enough, and they have been manually adding exemptions for moderation bots that need more. The question is if the creators are willing to continue supporting them, for free, in the future. Plenty understandably do not.
Also currently being a moderator (of any subreddit) allows you to bypass both the the rate limit and NSFW sub ban - which itself seems to be a manual list of mostly porn subs, as most of the subs that are nsfw as a protest still work so it isn't a blanket ban.
@JohnEdwa The bots should not even hit the limit, otherwise its a hint for any anti-bot detection. Just create lot of small bots staying low on threshold to be detected. Together with an AI, then the missing bot detection utility and some missing moderators, Reddit should become a bigger pile than it is already.
I wonder when buying these 3rd party apps as acquisitions, if Reddit brought along their dev(s) in the process. It sounds like they didn't, which would be so shortsighted. Because what it seems is that once Reddit had these programs in their possession, they didn't know what to do with them, or how to integrate them into their own source code...at least with Spell this seems to be the case. I have no idea about Alien Blue, which I had used at one point prior to using Reddit's own mobile app. All they had to do with Alien Blue is rebrand...why didn't they?
How do you employ nearly 2,000 people. an army of unpaid moderators, and not come up with proper tools to navigate your own program, or find profitability off its user data? I think that Huffman has had no plan, leads a top-heavy organization, has been coasting along the company putting out day-to-day fires, and now he's scrambling to quickly find something profitable to show his investors.
There are a lot of things that don't make sense at the core of Reddit, because Google, Chat AI, and ad revenue are the places to make a profit...not API usage from 3rd party apps. I watched a really great video of the history of D&D last night on Nebula, and wow talk about lessons that Reddit could learn about 3rd party contributors.
(I'm going to link the video, but you need a subscription to Nebula and/or Curiosity Stream to view it). TL;DW summary: D&D works best as a business when it collaborates with 3rd party contributors and its fans.
And the beautiful irony is that in their mission to secure an increased IPO valuation they merely reduced it substantially. Gonna need some more popcorn as we watch them burn it to the ground
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted.
I’ve noticed this too. Almost all of the subs I regularly go to have been filled by obvious “seed”-content posting by brand new and never before seen in the sub accounts, with upvotes equaling some of the highest voted (for the sub). It actually pushed me to migrate to Lemmy more.
I’m really fascinated at how in the lead up to this they consistently alienated moderators and users so into reddit that they looked up 3PAs. Like they really went ham on the users that make their site work and go all shocked pikachu when people leave/disengage/protest. That’s a level of social incompetence I can’t conceptualise when the stakes are this high.
Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn't think bestof communities were lame.
As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.
I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.
Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo's carapace?
Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.
So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn't arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn't have to think about reddit's corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.
This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn't have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I'm on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I've since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian's mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.
You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?
I got banned from r/soapmaking because I didn’t agree that buying soap that someone else made, melting it, adding perfume and glitter, and pouring it into moulds was soap making and not arts and crafts. I raise the pigs, render the lard, and make actual soap. I was called arrogant.
I was banned from r/republican for pointing out that the headline of an article that said that the DOJ had found evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia was incorrect and based on a letter written by a Trumpist political hack, Jeffery Clark, not the DOJ and that it in fact contradicted the DOJ, the Republican AG, the Republican Governor of Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia, and Republican election officials in Georgia. I was called a troll.
I was banned from r/canada for wondering out loud if the neo-fascist premiere of Alberta who made unethical phone calls to Justice officials about a hateful street pastor charged with repeatedly breaking covid rules then having a secret recording of a phone call with the accused released wherein she fawned over him and promised that she was doing everything she could to help him would pay him conjugal visits in prison once he had been sentenced.
I was banned from r/freedomconvoy2022 when I pointed out that they had exercised their Section 6 rights to travel freely across provincial borders while exercising their Section 7 right to be unvaccinated to exercise their Section 2 rights to assemble in downtown Ottawa to hold their giant racist, western separatist, Nazi, fascis, white nationalist, sovereign citizen, anti-science, resident harassing, air pouring, business closing, hourly wage employee unemploying, street shitting tantrum.
The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to "poison" fediverse spaces ... is losing the whole plot.
OP's straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It's a nine-hour-old account, and they're already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.
I don't know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I'd suggest that if they left Reddit for "toxicity" only to immediately find it here too ... maybe they're carrying it around with them?
I'm 99% sure OP has made multiple accounts to try to sell their 'ex-Redditors are evil" schtick. I saw a post this morning from someone with a similar name pretty much saying the same thing.
Yeah I'm sure you've got it from my stalker, who has defenders that say he wasn't...stalking? Huh, funny how people have such a deranged difference in what means what to them.
Painting Reddit as a monolith in general is a problem, too. “Reddit is toxic?” Some subs, sure. But certainly not the ones I subscribed to. Some of them might have had bad actors here and there. But they were usually dealt with by the mods.
In the end, the only toxicity that drove me away from Reddit was the toxicity from the CEO.
Do you just love living a life, where you think you know everything and place people in some little organizer that you define people as, personally? Because you're doing exactly the same thing as you're claiming as to what I'm doing, just to make yourself look better and righteous.
That's the kind of mentality I see all around Reddit as also. Nobody is accountable for their own behavior, it's always the other person's fault and it's always the other person who is the toxic one. Somehow. Someway. Despite condemning evidence to the contrary for all to see, how it's all of the people pegging rocks at them. It's exactly how it is in school, with bullying, only it's amplified online. Does it make you feel superior? Does it make you feel better? What is the precise reason do you feel, that you have to behave this way?
I'm pretty confident it is some insecurity within you that you shroud so well, but I can see the cracks already just by your reply alone. May I advise that maybe you should take some time outdoors, instead of like, making up characters out of baseless assumptions to satisfy your pseudo intelligence?
I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that ... you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.
You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you're that desperate to feel like you've snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.
You're the problem with your own experience.
This response is hugely excessive for the "provocation" and yet I'm sure you'll storm off imagining that I'm the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you've done that to everyone who wasn't fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.
Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with "toxic" people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.
It's not hard to miss that you've just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it's easy to wonder if maybe you're projecting a little here.
Kbin is federated with Lemmy though, so it is sort of indirectly included…ish. I can see and interact with communities on kbin instances from Lemmy, like this one
It's federated with Lemmy, yea, but it has a completely different layout with different features. I can straight up browse and interact with Mastodon from /kbin thanks to its microblog support, but you obviously wouldn't say /kbin is included in Mastodon. I think that the same goes for Lemmy.
Also, /kbin doesn't get a mention but beehaw (a Lemmy instance) does?
Right - that's the weird part, if beehaw is being mentioned, then kbin should have as well, alongside Lemmy. Maybe someone will write to the author and complain about the imprecision:-). In the meantime, at least this gives us a glance at how people far away from the situation see it - those of us on kbin are on "Lemmy", or something. :-P
It is strange that they mention beehaw which is now largely defederated but not kbin which isnt. I suspect whoever wrote that article is less knowledgeable than I am on the subject, which is to say they know nothing at all about it - I’ve only been using Lemmy less than a month
Articles that mention kbin though are extremely few and far between. I think I've only seen it twice actually - I just posted one of them separately, and there the author does mention it while explaining basically that Lemmy is better.
Kbin is like this best non-Lemmy fediverse instance that you've never heard of, for the average person:-).
There are server issues where like if more than a minute (iirc) goes by from you loading up a page - while you read the whole thing, plus comments too - then you try to reply, it will not go through. Or if you reply to one person and then try to reply to another, same thing. Most often, refreshing the page seems to solve it for me. So like you can write in an external editor, refresh the page, THEN submit the reply. Kbin/Lemmy lacks "polish", that is for sure - it is undeniable that Reddit's UX is better, even if everything else about that company can go to hell.
Or if you are using an app, that would be a whole other matter that I do not know about, but I hope this suggestion helped!:-)
Thanks! Yeah I am using Liftoff on android. I’ll be able to reply to anyone else in the same moment, but if they have a kbin name it just fails instantly. Idk it’s weird it worked for you tho. Oh well. Things will smooth out over time.
Edit: oh, I wonder if there actually might a thing about the person who originally submitted a thread, vs. others who did not? That bug might treat the OP differently.
Big brain move time. Is there a way to get only high-quality content providers while keeping out low-effort stuff? Ofc that would knock me out too - who would ever want to be a member of a club that would actually accept us? :-P
The only thing those people are signalling, in my opinion, is that it doesn't take much to bait people into engaging with reddit to give them traffic, can't wait for an article about how metrics are going up so investors have nothing to worry about.
Investors aren’t idiots. Advertising is a major draw for investors if the subscription model isn’t great. A site that serves millions of views of fuckspez isn’t attractive to advertisers.
You might of had a point of investors being able to look the other way during tech bro funding time, but a lot of the free cash has dried up. Reddit has to convince Betty Crocker that their platform is a great place for cake recipes. If everything goes “ ¼ sick of butter, 2 eggs, 1 pound of fuckspez.” They’re going to have a really hard time driving that point.
This is why it seems all the social media platforms are flying apart at the seams here. Pretty much all of them were flying high on the free to low interest cash. Now that a lot of them have to justify things for every penny and nickel they want, they’re realizing they didn’t have a great model to begin with and are hoping users will snap in place with the new “paradigm”.
But that’s the thing. Employees snap because their check relies on it. A lot of users don’t snap the same for the reason that lot of them just use social media as an outlet. Which for the users that are using these platforms for a source of income/word of mouth, they’re just watching this conflagration in tears.
I have the sinking feeling that they don’t care if anything is sustainable. They just want the IPO to happen with the highest inflated numbers then run away as soon as possible, leaving the whole thing burning behind them. It’s not about marking Reddit successful again, it’s about getting rich fast.
I deleted a 10+ year old account a couple of years ago. The accounts I deleted when the ruckus started were those I'd been using since then.
That 10 year old account a couple years ago bugged me awhile because I had the conceit that anyone at all on Reddit recognized my name or cared what I had to say. Eventually I got over that.
As a result, I felt almost no sting from wiping and deleting the younger ones. Maybe 5 minutes of feeling a little weird about it until I realized I'd given up exactly nothing.
I do feel like I recognize people here more probably because of the avatars. I see you around a lot, and I recognize Nepenthe, catch 42, and otomechan based on their avatars.
Funnily enough I always think you're Ernest for half a second before I realize I've done it again.
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