Lmao, so much for him telling everyone it was just a noise, it’ll be done in 2 days, it doesn’t affect us :D
THIS is actually the best piece of news from that article: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html
Arguing that moderators aren’t doing their job is such a complete mischaracterization when mods literally let their subreddits vote on the blackout.
All my homies hate u/spez
He’s said that very few people use 3rd party apps, but at the same time, he says “And the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,” So are 3rd party apps very unpopular, or are they taking away a really significant number of users? He’s essentially saying- nobody uses Apollo, but Reddit is dying without Apollo’s users.
The thing he doesn’t comprehend is that third party apps were reddit’s value creation engine.
But if you think everything in life is a zero sum game you are delusional.
How many people would have happily spent some of the free credits Google play store awards on paying an annual £5 to be able to continue using RIF to cover API costs?
The thing he really talks about caring about is preventing LLMs from getting his data and using it to provide answers that reduce traffic to Reddit. Except LLMs weren’t purely trained on Reddit, and the high majority of the internet where the training data did come from doesn’t have a convenient API… so that makes it a little harder, I guess, but it really has no effect.
Then other times, he complains about the advertising revenue, but contradicts himself and says actually the 3rd party app userbase is 3% of all users and inconsequential but people just want to bandwagon the poor multi-hundred million dollar company. Yet it’s such a big opportunity cost that can’t be ignored and there’s just no better way.
While it is certainly sad the direction that reddit is going, there is just a little bit of joy in watching the public meltdown after all the user hostile decisions they’ve made over the past few years.
There is not one single new feature added to reddit since before the redesign that has actually added value to the platform for a user.
The redesign made things worse and only worse:
- Login walls for random communities
- Actively user hostile mobile website that doesn’t respect “use desktop site” and tries to funnel people into the app
- Redesign and mobile app are bloated wastes of resources that do less than old.reddit but using several megabytes of Javascript, unusable with anything less than a stable 4G connection
- Full of whitespace and rounded buttons that waste screen space, they expect everyone to have 1440p monitors to have a decent UI density
Visually, I actually quite like the look of the redesign (on desktop at least; mobile’s a whole other story). But it’s so bloated that on my old laptop I could get maybe 10-15 minutes of browsing time before it used up all my ram and dragged my whole computer to a crawl. And it has a whole mess of bugs that make it almost unusable - it feels like someone’s CS project rather than the front end of one of the largest sites on the web.
That last bit is the rub - if they’d made improvements with the main app or new interface, maybe I wouldn’t want to use RIF… But they chose uber enshitification instead.
Of all the features added since I joined in 2018, only two I found truly useful, especially with the death of other sites. Gallery uploads and polls. That’s it.
Everything else? Useless cruft or stuff that died out where that time and resources could’ve been used to fix new reddit and the app.
In a blog post published by Reddit, the company links to its Moderator Code of Conduct while saying “Dissent, debate, and discussions are foundational parts of Reddit” and it respects the right to protests. However, the rules state that the company can remove moderators if they are uncooperative.
We respect your right to protest, but we also respect our right to not let you protest lolll
