I think the older core of reddit has always viewed itself as a bottom-up community, rather than a social media platform. Reddit won’t die for now, but this is a sobering wakeup call from that idea.
Reddit is no freehaven, it’s now just another company, and slowly everyone on it will get squeezed into the businessmold…
Hmmm. Maybe it’s intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about “free speech,” and whoever stays – out of ignorance or compliance – is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.
I’d certainly agree that this is at least Huffman’s internal thoughts about the whole thing at this point. Stabilize their large, more easily monetizable userbase, and get to the IPO asap. The only ones who “suffer” here are the users who give a shit, and the only remedy is to move on from reddit and create that content that matters, elsewhere.
I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.
Everything that I liked about reddit was the fact that it was NOT social media. Everything they’ve done in the last decade (avatars and all that), I’ve religiously ignored.
Reddit *still is * a bottom-up community, that’s why all their monetization efforts never worked and there’s so much backlash against the API changes. All of the content and value on the site is created by the users and mods. Reddit the company doesn’t own that, and redditors take offense at management’s attempts to take advantage of the users’ free efforts for their own gain.
What Huffman and Reddit should have done was think long term and set up a Wikipedia-like entity that could have ensured the health and growth of the site while only taking a modest cut. Instead they tried to pump up the value and cash out with an IPO, and when that likely fails, they’ll end up with nothing.
Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”
Honestly this sums it up pretty well
Additionally, it’s not even that good of a venue.
I was talking to my friend about this and asked if he could point out a single improvement that reddit has made in the last decade that hadn’t been about monetization, since I exclusively use old.reddit.com and third party apps, I certainly couldn’t. We couldn’t come up with anything…
There’s nothing. It’s been slowly getting more and more shitty for years. It’s just been happening so slowly that there wasn’t a breaking point where most of us left until now.
I’ve been casually looking for an alternative for years, because the content has gotten so low effort. There just hasn’t been any good alternatives. I tried Voat, but that got over run with racists and Trumpers almost from the jump.
Lemmy is the first thing I’ve found that seems half decent and it needs to triple ot quadruple it’s engaged user base to really have a shot. Too many posts with no comments or very few. What made reddit special was the comments and interactions. I have hope lemmy can get there, it just needs way more users to do so.
What made reddit special was the comments and interactions.
And in the past few months, I found several instances of karma farmers copying a good comment that was low in the thread and pasting it as a reply to one of the top comments to get visibility and upvotes. Idk if it was bots or people with no life, but I bet shit like that was happening much more than we realized, vastly padding engagement. Personally, I’d rather have a smaller and more authentic community here than disingenuous reposts, shitposts, botposts, trollposts, and general farming like what many subreddits became. I like that this platform seems to have much more thoughtful engagement between users who feel more like people than some cardboard cutout. I think we all can learn and grow as people by sincerely engaging in real discourse in the serious communities, and have interesting OC in less serious ones that are just about memes or storytelling or whatever.
I agree that interactions are special, and I agree that Lemmy needs more users, but I’m wary of bloating the userbase and packing garbage into here. I’d like to see a little growth, and give lurkers a reason to engage in an inviting community that isn’t hostile.
I agree. Lemmy is really promising but not quite at the critical mass yet. I’ve been trying to post more myself but we need consistentand sustained activity.
I bet reddit corporate is shitting bricks over chatgpt. They want to get their IPO and be able to sell their shares before AI upends online discussion. AI Bots are going to be a big deal, not in a good way.
It’s more that they just treat every artist with a lot of disrespect, but they know they’re the only big venue and there’s a basically endless supply of artists that wants to play there.
However, there’s smaller venues that will host these artists and treat them with respect. If it gets too bad, these small venues will grow and gain fame. Ultimately becoming a viable competitor to the original venue.
The comparison doesn’t hold exactly, because the nature of social media makes it so that the advantages of scale are exponential (the more users your platform has, the more attractive it becomes). However, federation breaks this. Which is why I believe this is the way to go. It’s probably not a coincidence that the reddit-style Lemmy has seemingly the most potential. The appeal of joining is not really dependent on famous accounts (e.g. twitter) or having friends that already joined (e.g. Facebook or Instagram). People move regardless, build communities and grow the platform.
I hate that the main issue reported is third party apps are dying. That’s a side effect, not the main issue.
The main issue is the access of the reddit’s data. We all built that. The volunteers who gave all of those hours to supervise that content is the real MVPs of reddit. Not the useless execs. The real founder of reddit has been gone for a while now (he was a true freedom fighter of access to knowledge).
The execs of reddit realize two main things. The first is the known idea that third party apps have the option to change how reddit looks to the user (including blocking ads). The other is that academic types and AI builders could use the content that we cultivated together in order to build datasets to train AI. The reddit execs know groups like these would be willing to pay extra for our data.
R.I.P. Aaron Swartz. It’s been 10 years and these are the issues you warned about and fought against.
I hope this whole ordeal, no matter how it goes down, ends up being a landmark for “social media as a monopoly”. I think there’s been a lot of talk about this in past years, with little real interest, because people are more interested in their next dopamine fix no matter how much they say they care about their data being sold. I hope this is the push we need to start considering these things for real. Most of us are uncomfortable with personal information being sold to 3rd parties, or knowing that users of these sites are technically the product being sold. It’s more weird and uncomfortable knowing the CEO and other execs are throwing a tantrum because user data and user submissions AREN’T being generated for them to sell to earn money to buy some yachts and golf courses.
Should social media be a public commodity, same way a community center or library is? Something paid for by taxes and regulated by government. I think it’s interesting in concept but odd to consider once you get into government censorship and surveillance aspects. Not a good idea either.
I guess I never thought about that. Technically, due to the first amendment of the US Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, press, right to assembly, etc.) the government has less authority to censor a public forum than any company has to censor their own private forum. Still, it would be an easy way to speak propaganda.
Government agencies already sell data (California bureau of vehicles, Florida in general). But I agree that the government would be much less incentivized to maximize profits like the way current social media platform are doing. This would keep the product focused on making conservations better (even the boring ones that don’t attract high volumes of people/viewership).
Also, I would think the content would belong to the public. Does this mean bad actors have access to identifying information as well?
I love how WIRED, being part of the commercialized, centralized internet itself, cannot bring themselves to mention actual Reddit alternatives like Lemmy or kbin, and end this write-up of Reddit’s folly with basically “uh so people might go back to tumblr, I dunno, maybe someone should like, give someone startup money for a like new Reddit and we can live the cycle of the good ol days again”. Yeah don’t worry guys, you’ll get us next time.
What a wet fart.
Yet another article that (knowingly or not) frames it as “people don’t want to pay for the API”:
Reddit charging for access to its API is also about more than just third-party clients, Bruckman says. A move like this has angered so many people on Reddit because it feels like a betrayal of the community’s trust.
No mention that several third-party app creators are fine with paying for API access, as long as they can build a business model around the pricing.
The more this drags on, the less people think this is about money, and more about controlling the platform.
A real business person finds a common ground, sets terms everyone can at least pay forward. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if I have $100 lemonade, if no one is able to buy it.
I really don’t understand why reddit doesn’t just charge end uses for API access. Heck chuck it in with premium or something. They can generate an API that you use in whatever client you wanted.
I’d happily pay Reddit for a key to then use in Apollo, but bizarrely this isn’t an option. It’s not like Reddit lacks the ability to charge end users, they already have premium after all.
