2 points

But yeah keep going back to their site and watch their ads, that’ll show them for sure.

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2 points

I use old.reddit on computer with ublock origin, I don’t even know Reddit has ads, been visiting for 10+ years, never saw single ad, same on mobile where I use Boost + Adaway or Kiwi browser + uBlock origin, I will see how the 3rd party situation works out

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2 points

I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there’s some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven’t been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that’s frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.

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3 points
*

Probably, but if you monetize “my data” (by tracking everything I do + the content I put on your site) you won’t get any ad revenue from me (I used old.reddit + ublock origin too).

If you don’t and you give me a service that’s valuable to me then I’m willing to pay (I pay for protonmail for example).

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4 points

Or, you could do what I do - use [https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit) with an ad blocker. That hurts them on two levels -

  1. They have to pay for you to use the site and,
  2. Their ads are blocked.
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0 points

it also hurts them on a spiritual level since they want to kill off old reddit.

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8 points

You want to swap the order of the text and the link there in Markdown. This:

[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)

Yields this:

[https://old.reddit.com](Old Reddit)

Whereas this:

[Old Reddit](https://old.reddit.com])

Yields this:

Old Reddit

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3 points

Spez is already talking about monetizing users account histories. Just blocking the ads isn’t going to stop them.

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1 point

Have a citation for that? Because that sounds like a great link for an inevitable edited response to all my comment history

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7 points
*

I mean, I get that Reddit isn’t making money. And that during the growth phase of a dot-com, it’s okay to burn money in the name of growing the userbase, but that he has to transition to making money at some point. Investors gave him money, hundreds of millions, if I recall correctly, in the expectation that he can generate a return. He’s getting near the point where he has to do that. And the return they’re going to expect is going to be in the neighborhood of what other dot-coms can generate from their investment.

Like, the people yelling at him for being “greedy” in that he’s aiming to make Reddit generate a return at all aren’t realistic. That is something that always was going to have to happen, from the day that Reddit started. If you look at the issues that the moderators are taking up with him, they’re trying to come up with a way that Reddit makes money and their concerns are also met.

The problem is that some of the moves he’s making to try to make a return have really negative impacts, and a number of people want something that has less of a negative impact.

If the Fediverse can support similar functionality based purely on cash donations, or based on some other model (e.g. Usenet runs on software developed by the community, but generally one has to pay a commercial Usenet provider for service to cover the costs), or a “users donate resources” like BitTorrent and provide a better experience, then that’s great. But the Fediverse is also going to have to figure out how to handle the costs of hardware and software development and all that, if it wants to be a competitive alternative. There are some hard questions that may come up down the line for the Fediverse too. The long term for something the scale of Reddit cannot be Earnest paying all of the money out of his personal pocketbook to Cloudflare to handle ramping up kbin’s capacity or something like that from the main Lemmy instance operators.

Right now, I haven’t seen any ads on the Fediverse, and I haven’t yet donated money to Earnest (though he apparently does have a “buy me a coffee” tip jar and people have sent him small gifts). Which means that right now, I’m relying on the gift of resources from Earnest and some Lemmy instance operators to me. Maybe they can afford that for a small number of users. But end of the day, if many more users show up, they are going to have to find someone else to help bear the costs on an ongoing basis.

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1 point

Thing is he can still shill that to advertisers/investors as hey, once we kill off old.reddit we will get x% of new eyes on your ads!

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1 point

And don’t post anything - contribute nothing.

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0 points

Could also keep using 3rd party apps, apparently all those API calls are costing them millions.

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0 points

Only the accessibility focused apps will be allowed by Reddit to continue free of cost. The other 3rd party apps will shutdown at the end of this month since their API costs will be too much for them to bear.

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7 points

My god… he is such… a fucking… idiot. Holy shit… I’m just surprised he’s lasted this long as “CEO”. I work in tech and I’ve seen interns and entry level engineers exercise better decision making. I guess being strongman is more important to him than saving his company and/or protecting his image as a sensible leader.

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13 points

The Verge interview is Here

The tl;dr is it’s the AMA part 2: electric douchealoo

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16 points

These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free.

I just can’t believe that a CEO of a company who doesn’t pay their moderators would actually say something so tone deaf.

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5 points

And blatantly false.

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1 point

He managed to paint Reddit as the victim in this, double down on their decision, and then paint the moderators and App developers as the ones hurting users.

Insanity.

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2 points

Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up

LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.

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2 points

Also no sane company would pay that ridiculous price for training a LLM on memes

Why paying exorbitant api prices when you can scrape for free? Like all those image models clearly trained on scraped watermarked stock images

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2 points

LMFAO that ship has fucking sailed. They already used Reddit data through 2021 and got everything they needed for free. Huffman is locking the barn after the horses are already out, and setting it on fire. What a fucking dumbass.

Plus they can just scrape the data without using the API. It’s a red herring, just a lie to cover up his desire to kill third party apps.

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8 points

Folks have made millions.

It sucks to be you, Reddit.

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12 points

It’s hilarious how people have literally paid app developers for a better way to experience reddit and he’s mad about that. Like sorry you’re a talentless hack. The only reason reddit is as popular as it is was down to the stars aligning back in the digg days. That’s about it, first mover advantage with your only other competitor shooting themselves in the foot.

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7 points

I used most 3rd-party apps for Android and the official one is simply the worst.

Lemmy clients are already better than Reddit’s official apps.

You’re right about the first mover advantage: there was a small time window in which Reddit was the town square of the Internet, but it turned to shit when the brass decided to milk users like data money cows.

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2 points

R.I.P. Reddit.

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