Yes, Reddit is a big dataset and yes, Reddit deserves to make some money off that if other organisations are going to scrape that data, for AI or anything else.
That’s what they should be blocking and monetizing. Not those few users using 3rd party apps. Those folks (posters, mods) are amongst the ones creating that data set for Reddit, free of charge.
They are right about needing to make money to continue as a successful business. But they are doing it the wrong way and alienating their key assets.
Which is why I’m here :)
If they want organizations not to scrape their content, tough toenails; stopping them is impossible.
It’s especially impossible to stop Google and Microsoft from doing it, because they already have a search index full of said content.
Spez is alienating his loyal user base for nothing.
Yeah they could have left current large 3rd party apps alone and said any new API connections from AI companies and etc will be charged 20 million dollars a year…
Why does reddit deserve to make profit from content made by others? They are service provider - they are not entitled to the work of people who used their service.
Ok. I’m about to abandon an account that’s 17.5 years old. I despise what reddit is proposing.
But, honestly, how do you propose they turn (some) profit so it could last forever? Losing money isn’t a long-term recipe for success. I’ve got no problem with reddit seeking to profit. I’ve got a problem with their short notice and their refusal to let third party clients be part of the ecosystem they wish to create.
First I don’t see why reddit has to be a for profit organisation in the first place, since that’s kind of the rout of the problem. Users becoming a product that reddit is trying to sell to advertisers. At the same time if reddit would be respectful to users, creators and mods it would be a different story. But they are clearly not, they don’t respect the people who are making reddit work - but feel entitled to the fruits of their labor. That just irks me on a deeply personal level.
My main problem is not even with the API decision but with the way the CEO communicated with the community.
Same. Late to the conversation here, but in the same camp. About to delete a 13.5 year old account.
I’d be fine with Reddit making money, if they did it in an honest and predictable way. The way they’re going about it though is short sighted, deceitful, and completely unnecessary.
They could make money hand over fist if they just tweaked their approach a tad, kept the community happy, etc.
Bundle API usage in with Reddit Premium. Have it use upper limits of say 100k requests/month to the API. Anything over that and it’s on a per 10k/requests billing cycle sort of thing.
Push the cost to the consumer, so if AI wants to scrape all the data, they can pay for it just like everyone else.
It was never truly about them not making money though was it?
The whole thing would not have escalated, if they’d actually reacted to the problems raised, e.g. the astronomical API fees and the situation of mod tools and accessability tools.
Only when shit was already hitting the fan they responded to 3rd party devs, who tried to reach out to them for a month already.
Even if they’d postpone the changes and start listening to the raised problems now, they scorched a lot of earth and very well knew that would happen.
Isn’t it always about making more money? They don’t want 3rd party apps because they want more control because that allows them to optimize for more ad money. Now they can make even more money off their app by compromising the user experience, and users don’t have any other option to leave for a better client.
Genuinely don’t understand how reddit has failed to make money.
Reddit’s entire value is based upon the unpaid contributions of its users- they generate and moderate all the content on the site for free, and these are the things that bring people to the site.
How entitled must one be to think they can ignore all this and be fine?
Also how tf is reddit not able to break bank?
The functionality of their website was relatively simple - not underming the reddit devs here. The costs must’ve been minimal before the redesign and the dumb ass decision to host their own images and videos. Did they burn up all their money for the redesign and the shitty app?
They’re bloated. Thousands of employees. Tons of developers. Marketing people. And in the end? The real product is like you said, it’s the users and volunteer mods.
Those developers? Produced an absolutely terrible mobile app and mobile website.
The marketing people? They’re more focused on NYC time square ads than fixing sponsored posts on Reddit.
It’s an absolute shitshow but that’s what happens with these extremely bloated companies…
It’s amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.
And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can’t speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it’s not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don’t shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.
AlienBlue was reportedly good before Reddit bought it, so I’d say the official mobile app is intentionally bad.
They didn’t even really need need to make a better app to make more money. If the objective is getting the telemetry for ads by forcing the use of the official app, they could have the equivalent just via APIs and user-specific tokens. The backend would be key, and it would take advantage of an established app market. They could additionally monetize the API, if they approached it more reasonably. They could have the data and have developers pay a toll. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the animus they’re displaying here is self-defeating.
Actually sounds like a pretty standard case of feature creep, the bane of all large scale software. A vicious cycle of trying to do too much, failing, and then needing more people to maintain all of the crappy code. All the while they can’t make any actual forward progress on things that do matter.
Not sure why they had to blow up like that. At its core Reddit should have been relatively simple to create and maintain.
Can’t forget about https://nft.reddit.com/, the real moneymaker. Nothing says value-adding like nfts, the dumbfucks.
Ah but it’s exclusive you see. Your avatar can be a glowy, animated Snoo, whereas everyone else just has free peasant avatars.
For the low price of 105 ETH $(227,389.05). Makes about as much sense as the really high priced ships in Star Citizen.
I don’t get it, if 3PA is only 1% of the traffic, why even bother murdering them?
It’s possible that this is not about collecting money for third party apps, but instead about forcing people to use Reddit’s apps (both mobile and web), which are designed for data extraction and tracking.
My best guess is they want to fight against adblockers next and can’t have people easily switch to a 3PA and avoid ads this way.
Ads already exist in Reddit’s system as a different subtype of the same entity that a post or a comment is. They could just… Present adds in the API call returns. And they could have someone doing regular checks to ensure that the app developers aren’t filtering out ads. This is so fucking stupid lol
That wouldn’t give Reddit access to your phone’s APIs.
Android permissions required by Reddit 2023.23.0:
- android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE
- android.permission.INTERNET
- android.permission.READ_MEDIA_IMAGES
- android.permission.READ_MEDIA_VIDEO
- android.permission.READ_MEDIA_AUDIO
- android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
- android.permission.FOREGROUND_SERVICE
- android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE
- com.google.android.gms.permission.AD_ID
- android.permission.POST_NOTIFICATIONS
- android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
- android.permission.READ_SYNC_SETTINGS
- android.permission.WRITE_SYNC_SETTINGS
- android.permission.WAKE_LOCK
- android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION
- com.android.launcher.permission.INSTALL_SHORTCUT
- android.permission.VIBRATE
- android.permission.PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS
- android.permission.USE_BIOMETRIC
- android.permission.USE_FINGERPRINT
- android.permission.RECORD_AUDIO
- android.permission.CAMERA
- android.permission.FLASHLIGHT
- android.permission.MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS
- com.google.android.c2dm.permission.RECEIVE
- com.google.android.finsky.permission.BIND_GET_INSTALL_REFERRER_SERVICE
- android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED
- com.reddit.frontpage.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION
- com.android.vending.BILLING
- android.permission.BLUETOOTH
- android.permission.BLUETOOTH_CONNECT
- com.sec.android.provider.badge.permission.READ
- com.sec.android.provider.badge.permission.WRITE
- com.htc.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
- com.htc.launcher.permission.UPDATE_SHORTCUT
- com.sonyericsson.home.permission.BROADCAST_BADGE
- com.sonymobile.home.permission.PROVIDER_INSERT_BADGE
- com.anddoes.launcher.permission.UPDATE_COUNT
- com.majeur.launcher.permission.UPDATE_BADGE
- com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.CHANGE_BADGE
- com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
- com.huawei.android.launcher.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
- android.permission.READ_APP_BADGE
- com.oppo.launcher.permission.READ_SETTINGS
- com.oppo.launcher.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
- me.everything.badger.permission.BADGE_COUNT_READ
- me.everything.badger.permission.BADGE_COUNT_WRITE
from Umberto Eco’s list of 14 common features of fascism:
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
It’s no surprise spez worships elon musk
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
Wow. Clearly Reddit now believes that they own all of the conversations that people have had on the site. That explains why they’ve also been restoring comments that people have deleted when leaving the site. That has major implications for data security, privacy, and even safety in some situations.
This episode has revealed Reddit’s true colors, and they’re not pretty.
When something is free, you are the product. Reddit has been a human farm for ages, using effectively “slave” (free) labor to maintain the herd. That massive data trove is now being sold for profit. That’s why it’s so important that Huffman preserve Reddit and is kicking recalcitrant mods (something I predicted would happen).
I admit, I unsubscribed to Reddit and logged off the day of the AMA, after giving Huffman a piece of my mind about his “double dipping.” I was fine paying him for no ads. I would have been fine paying Apollo a small subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Reddit AND Apollo for the use of Reddit, when Apollo was basically going to be forced to collect the money I was already paying Reddit (using the APIs as a blinder).
I am fine leaving behind a ghost account. And while I get the idea of taking your data with you, frankly, I am not a thought leader in any space, and most of my comment history are stray tidbits across multiple subreddits. Certainly nothing of any value. The only value I have is being someone who could have eyes on to ads, or interact with an ad, and that can’t happen if I’m not there. And I fully believe that there is more harm to cause by being inactive than in not being there at all. Huffman may have 400 million accounts, but how many of those are actively engaged? What if the number of inactive accounts keep growing?
Let u/spez be CEO of a graveyard of rapidly aging data and ghosted accounts. For those who have contributed, I think the best solution at this time is to get your knowledge archived in a searchable format and then just pick up elsewhere. Yeah, there will be work to re-grow the community, but I have found that folks do migrate to where the activity is. As subreddits go quiet, folks will look for where the action is. It’s what happened with MySpace and Livejournal, LiveJournal and Facebook and Facebook and Twitter. Reddit is no different. Nor is Twitter. People just forget and get complacent. Personally, I like to shake things up anyway. It’s time for change.
I keep my account and deleted every single comment or post I’ve made. If you have ever follow any thread, seeing a [deleted] comment is infuriating even if it turns out to be insignificant info. I want to maximize my departure’s effect and that’s exactly what I wanted.
I have been having to rerun my deletion scripts daily. They are actively restoring comments. Even after writing gibberish and deleting. They are now holding more than 1 backup.
That’s not a bad point. I still get the occasional reply notification from comments many years old, from people who were looking for a conversation on a topic and engaged with what I said a decade ago.
I suppose it would be somewhat impactful if those comments were just empty voids, perhaps even moreso if they were all replaced by a message saying something like “I left reddit because of X, look for me on the feddiverse to continue this conversation.”
Imagine if phone companies started selling our conversations without giving us a cent for the content.
Oh, my sweet, summer child. Maybe not phone calls (yet?), but they sell lots of other data they maintain about you. Location data, specifically, is a hot seller.
Don’t a lot of calls get recorded now anyway? (I’m just asking, I don’t actually know)
Not without consent of at least one party to the call, no. Unlike most forms of invasive spying, that one is illegal in many jurisdictions.
What I find interesting is this could be avoided by granting exceptions to the existing app devs and being done with it.
I get the api costs money and theres folks like pushshift aggregating data and using it for their own profit. I’m sure plenty of companies are using data for adverts and more. And there’s an argument there Reddit deserves a cut. Especially if they are using the api to train bots or ai to have conversations for their own inventions.
But just the ass backwards way they handled devs of existing 3p apps that constitute value add to their data sets is just…mesmerizing.
And if these users ARENT a majority of the usage or costs, why bother cutting them off and not just granting exceptions to avoid the PR issues.
I think you misunderstood spez. He wanted no 3rd party app at all. RIF was paying Reddit for using their brand name and spez terminated the contract. It’s all about control.
It would be much easier to just inject ads into data returned by the API. Apps will automatically display these ads and developers will understand that if they filter these ads, their access to Reddit will be either limited or completely cut out.
Wait really? Source? I always thought it was unauthorised name use that went quietly unacknowledged for a long time, until they decided otherwise.
“Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.””
I had to google Landed Gentry, it still don’t make sense; “The landed gentry, or the gentry, is a largely historical British social class of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate.” That’s a weird way to describe an unpaid moderator. Either way, there’s no reddit to return to if they’re going scorched earth on the moderators anyways. This is home now.
I saw somewhere that the analogy was supposed to be “whoever got there first owned the land.” The idea I guess is that the landed gentry settled down on the land (subreddits) first, and now the subreddit is a dictatorship because the users could never vote on who their “landlords” are.
Yes, that analogy is also terrible, and it also goes to show that spez has no idea why people hate landlords.
Edit: everyone that’s replied to me has provided more reasons why it’s a stupid analogy, and that makes me happy :)
But that analogy would make Spez the king who rules over all the lands of Reddit-tania, doling favors out to people who support him and punishment out to those who oppose him no matter what the people of Reddit-tania want.
Wait, maybe the analogy has some merit to it after all.
It only makes sense if Huffman considers himself King; the moderators are a threat to his land!
And the commenters and posters are the crops being farmed? (Some would be weeds, I guess.)
