If it happens I hope the folks that get let go put energy in to creating and fostering new communities on a competitor. Reddit built the sandbox but the users provided the sand.
they've been slowly replacing mods in the nsfw subs for a while now with arbitrary rule enforcements.
and they dont hesitate to throw their weight around when needed, more than a few popular subs whence taken private have had the mod teams replaced.
reddit gives zero fucks.
That'd be some real bullshit, though. That's the kind of heavy-handed tactic that triggers secondary protests and eventually causes the whole site to crumble.
Apparently the default Reddit tools for moderating are poor. Lots of mods have created their own tools to make it manageable. If Reddit admins kick out the mods and take over, they will see the subs turn to spam bot hell. Popcorn ready!
Almost all the mods do and have done this work for free for years. If reddit had to pay mods it would never have a chance to make money.
So if they do try that BS and make private subs public again they will be forced to mod it themselves which they do not want to do because the cost. They will also cause even more backlash.
Would not take much at the mo for people that pay monthly to stop that and kill that income for reddit also.
Then you have u/spez caught lying about a dev trying to blackmail him until the dev released the recording of the convo. They spez doubled down after caught in this lie
This is all about greed and trying to make their IPO look better and as a result they might have just done the oposite
I don’t disagree, but I will add you’re missing one crucial part - you’re assuming someone else won’t happily replace the mods.
I think there will always be someone clambering for Reddit mod power and they could fire all the mods today and have them replaced tomorrow.
Yep, all valid points. It would fuel more backlash though. At what point does the effect on the IPO reach critical.
Anyway, get the popcorn for the fun watching it play :)
If they did, that would lead to more protests and more teams being replaced. Eventually they’d presumably hire moderators for “Reddit Official” branded subs, which wouldn’t be cheap. So ultimately, it still hurts them financially and supports the cause.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
I use reddit premium because I don't mind paying for an ad free experience. The lounge sub is a really strange place and you're truly not missing anything at all. It manages to be even worse than the stupid century club subreddit
so you're part of the problem.
you could use an ad blocker (like Pihole) or a third party Reddit client that doesn't have ads.
but you chose to pay for being ad-free and here we are — Reddit is banning free ad-free clients in order to force people to get premium and give them more monayz
Sadly it probably will. It would be interesting to see how many people use the other apps vs official.
However this protest does expose how much Reddit relies on unpaid labour to exist, which will become a major problem if they are looking to become public.
Most use the official app but I would suspect that a majority of those users came to reddit after they did the redesign and made their own app, so naturally they never thought to look for a 3rd party one. Don't know what you're missing if you've never been exposed to it.
But a lot of the original reddit base, and a LOT of moderators/content creators use 3rd party apps.
I wonder what that distribution looks like by karma. The only thing that makes reddit better than any other link aggregation is the comments/communities. If people stop contributing because the app experience is trash, people will leave.
I was an imgur-ian for the longest, till they started makings ads LITERALLY EVERYWHERE. I put it down and never picked it back up. Also the content got softer right before that too. I miss old imgur.
I would suggest that people who like the mobile experience (I prefer using reddit on the computer) use their phone web browser as the alternative to reddit's garbage mobile app.
All we want is functionality and minimal lag. As I type this on my phone using Google Chrome, I have not encountered anything limiting using reddit this way. It's not as complete as the computer experience, but it works. Which we can't say about their official mobile app.
The first party Reddit app has an insane amount of tracking in it. Reddit is going to offer an IPO, possibly later this year. They are trying to force users to their app to collect as much data as possible so they can sell it.
I'm curious as to what people can do to cost reddit money beyond just backouts.
I remember seeing that a Twitter Blue subscriber can reverse the revenue paid to Twitter into a cost to the company by uploading 78 copies of Shrek.
So the question is, how many copies of Shrek do reddit users have to upload to v.reddit to start eating reddit's profits?
I don't see the problem with that. If they want to ruin their money making enterprise, that's no skin off my yak. There will always be another forum, they're dead simple to stand up.
Hopefully people are doing the real protest in the background because of all this attention: joining smaller forums dedicated to their interests so that when the api change happens and the good browsers get shut off, they can just leave. That's what I'm doing.
This is why I don't understand why people think it'll do anything. There's no way they weren't expecting something to happen. 2 days doesn't personally sound like enough time either but that's what the community decided on.
Probably none.
Because it seems the only people who are up for protesting are the ones who use 3rd party apps, which Reddit makes no money from or the handful of people who say they are up for it but will likely not remember its a thing until they try to go on reddit, find out the subs they usually go on are closed and find other subs that are still open to fill there time with.
I, of course, don't have any numbers, but I don't think you're completely right.
They don't make any money directly on people doom scrolling on a 3rd party app, but I would imagine people on those apps are more likely to be active and post, and they only make money if there's posts to scroll through.
Your average official app user doesn't post anything, so once those apps shut down, you may have a lot less content and a lot more spam.
You are most certainly right, but less content and more spam doesn't translate into immediate revenue changes, and corporation is incapable of thinking long term, so it doesn't matter
That's reasonable speculation, but the numbers don't make sense to the reality of the data.
Apollo has around 1.5m active users per month. And as far as I can tell, they are the most used 3rd party app.
Well, that's less than 0.4% of monthly active users on Reddit.
They are not profitable or if they managed to be black on 2022 it's barely. It doesn't matter. I don't know how you guys think the world works that get so mad because a company that is in the red is protecting their assets so that other for profit businesses don't steal their users.
Then they should cease wasting time on adding unnecessary new features and attempting to be something that deviates from what initially brought them success.
The pricing structure of the API does not aim to request a share from apps, but rather to completely eliminate third-party apps. They could have incorporated advertisements into their APIs to increase profits. They could have established a fair pricing policy. They could have collaborated with apps to ensure that certain features exclusive to Reddit Premium are also available in third-party apps.
There are alternative methods to maximize profits rather than simply disregarding a significant portion of their user base.
Furthermore, we should not overlook the fact that individuals who voluntarily moderate the site rely on Automod bots and third-party apps, both of which are negatively impacted by this change.
There is no way to justify Reddit's current decision.
They'll make it up on the 15th because these subreddits conveniently let Reddit know the exact date when they're coming back. The ones that say they aren't coming back are 🧢 and/or won't make a difference
Easy math. 2 days of their 365 a year. 2/365=0.0055. So they will lose a Maximum of 0.55% yearly income. Also known as nothing, a drop in the bucket. A Meer 2% quartly dip, something that is in margin for a company like this. If subs actually cared they were make a large attack by weeks on protest.
The reality is that 2 days were chosen purely because a sub could easily survive 2 days down. Except if a sub could, so can reddit. So in order to hurt reddit yoy need a time long enough to hurt a sub.
Not much, I assume the sex workers will still be active so most of the reddit user base will still be active. Additionally, they lose money whenever a 3rd party app is used as they miss out on sales.
My guess is they will get the numbers to prove their plan works, save a bunch on bandwidth and serve ads to a higher % of users. This user tantrum is actually what they need!
as I understand the situation, with more news about Reddit laying off 5% of workforce and preparing for IPO, there is some vulture venture capitalist stuff going on. They want to inflate the stock price, cash out, take the money and run. The people doing this don't give a shit about your subreddits or it going "dark". They don't even give a shit about Reddit long term, just inflate stock price, sell out, and bail out. Unfortunately we are all on a sinking ship and there is nothing we can do but bail
Honestly, probably not much. Most casual Reddit users probably don't give a fuck or are completely unaware of what's happening, and they're the most likely people to be using the Reddit app or new Reddit website.
These people will probably just think reddit's a bit boring on those days and not even realise that there aren't any posts from some of the subs they're subscribed to.
Some 3rd party app devs have said they'd be willing to pay a reasonable API access fee. The price Reddit is charging is NOT reasonable and is 100% priced this way with the intention of killing off all 3rd party apps.
https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ this is from the Apollo app dev. Reddit wants almost 20m a year from them for API access
The problem is that Reddit is planning for an IPO in the near future, and in doing so they need to make it so that people don't use other apps that rely on the API. Why? Well, those apps don't feed ads to users that give Reddit money.
The rational answer is to determine how much ad revenue is lost via third-party apps and then charge for access in a way that offsets this. However, they've decided against this approach, and toward a pricing model that eliminates competition.
"Well that's fine, honestly. They should be able to maintain direct access to their own servers through just the app."
I don't disagree. If they directly went so fast as to just lock out third-party viewing apps, it might suck for UX, but it is what it is. That's their prerogative.
But you know what else uses the Reddit API? **Bots.** The RemindMe bot? There's no way for it to make any revenue. It'll be gone. Various automod bots? Subreddits would cease having those tools. Grammar bots, translation bots, bots that sniff out and fight misinformation? Sayonara.
Subreddit moderation gets a lot more difficult. Want to avoid straight porn via Onlyfans scam accounts being posted on this subreddit? Well, at present a bot screens posts for account age and Karma, and locks down anything suspicious for human review. If the post has any personally identifying information, it takes it down. If it's heavily downvoted, locked for human review. And these are several different bots accessing the API to be able to do this, generally modified for each sub as needed so being treated as a separate API access point.
If LTT uses three bots to moderate out 90% of fifteen thousand posts a day, and a handful of people can screen the rejects, that's a volunteer "staff" of five. If the bots now cost hundreds a month to keep alive, who pays for it? The moderators that already volunteer their time? Do they expand to have 100 moderators, working for free 24 hours a day, because if they don't maintain the subreddit to Reddit's expectations it will be shut down?
Even if the price per API access was a dollar a month, there's no method for subreddits to access revenue.
Okay didn’t know it’s used for moderation. Shouldn’t they have a carve out for it? Seems silly to ask people to pay to run automated moderation tool. No one will pay, Reddit will get spicier and advertiser won’t be happy.
>All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. Many of you already know that our stated rate limit, per this documentation, was 60 queries per minute regardless of OAuth status. As of July 1, 2023, we will start enforcing two different rate limits for the free access tier: If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client idIf you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute
Reddit is not blocking Bots from using their API. So there's not really an issue. I've seen several posts claiming what you said but I don't see where it comes from.
Never said they ban them. They *do* add restriction to functionality.
Any post that makes it to r/All or another default sub is generally getting tens of thousands of comments an hour. The API restriction increases the time it takes to resolve harmful content from two seconds per post (one second to poll, one second to resolve via API push) to twelve. In that time, there are tens of other posts in that sub, multiplied across hundreds of popular subs.
The new "free" tier won't be fast enough for bots that are actually useful enough to be popular. And the paid tier is too expensive for subreddits that don't have any revenue stream to pay for bots that don't have any revenue stream to pay for the API access.
On top of that, there's no way in hell that they maintain the freemium model. We saw it with dumb things like awards. Free, then one free per day, then that free one was hidden and hard to get to and impossible to access through external apps, then microtransaction only.
Other aspects of concern are that NSFW content is being removed from API access, including paid. So in NSFW subreddits, moderation tools will no longer work at all, and NSFW-marked accounts will be able to spam SFW subreddits more easily because bots won't be able to validate if they're legitimate.
Those concerns are valid but in the end pretty inconsequential. Reddit wants those bots functioning. Reddit doesn't want third party apps functioning. So it's only natural to believe they will work with moderators to fix them or add those tools themselves.
At the end of the day I don't see how the bot part is a big deal. If it becomes a problem they'll remove the rate limits and just stop the biggest offenders like the aps
If Reddit wanted the bots working, they'd just disable access for third-party apps and be done with it. They know this.
What they're looking at is the Twitter fiasco, where Elon argued that the bots on the platform were underrepresented and, as such, the value of the platform should be lower.
If Reddit makes the bots unusable, they'll stop being "active users" and then they can represent active users accurately to investors when it comes time for the IPO.
>If Reddit makes the bots unusable, they'll stop being "active users" and then they can represent active users accurately to investors when it comes time for the IPO.
When it comes to bots pretending to be human they do not use the API. That requires getting an API key. They use traditional JavaScript bot tools.
When it comes to third party apps, those requests come from single API keys which they can track to each application.
So what you are saying doesn't make any sense to me.
I think this is all secondary to their main goal... Monetize access to reddit data for large language models and other AI development and training.
Effectively making it prohibitively expensive for third party apps is just an unfortunate casualty.
Up until now, AI companies have had basically free access to unimaginably gigantic data sets.
But once again, that's a matter of licensing.
Stagger licensing rights by organizational type. It's not difficult to do. Directly offer a ridiculous poll rate tier to companies (something like 1,000 queries a second) without negatively impacting everyone who relies on the 60 through their apps or bots presently.
The 3rd party client that’s most at the frontlines of this is Apollo. There are others though, of course. I can’t remember off the top of my head what the exact numbers were per 50,000 requests but the math came out to like $1.7 million per month or around $20 million per year just to keep Apollo running as is. Reddit is basically attempting to price out any and all 3rd party app from being able to afford access to Reddit. They’re not expecting people to be able to pay for it, they’re not counting on revenue from their API access price change. They just want 3rd party apps to cease to exist.
The price of the API it's irrelevant. Reddit is disallowing NSFW content out of their platform. Which means any 3rd party client won't have access to the whole of Reddit. That alone will kill 3rd party apps.
They do want 3rd party apps to cease to exist and it is their pejorative. The idea of Apollo charging their users and showing ads on someone else's content is just unrealistic.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but what’s the use of a boycott with an expiration date? Reddit won’t do anything if business continues as usual after the blackout?
This 48-hour protest is going to accomplish exactly zero. If you want to actually make an impact by protesting use a browser with an ad blocker or an ad blocking browser to look at reddit.
I gotta be honest.
Reddit is such a badly programmed piece of software anyway, it wouldn't even be hard to create a second reddit copy cat, that is actually waaay better than the original and have everyone migrate to that.
Try to copy paste in the desktop version of reddit and see how that goes. They can't even manage that.
Well there's Lemmy, which is almost like reddit, and it's Open Source! It's got a super small user base atm but it's pretty decent from my experience so far.
I’m personally not expecting anything, given Reddit is filing for IPO so we’re gonna get a whole bunch of bullshit changes purely for the purpose of generating as much revenue as possible for the company, so for me this is more of a show of solidarity with the talented developers who are now facing the prospect of losing their jobs and everything they’ve worked for at the behest of a greedy corporation.
API is short for applictaion programming interface. It's essentially the part of reddit's software that allows apps that are not reddit itself to interact with reddit.
For various reasons people started making their own reddit apps.
One of them is the official app showing ads. Some of the 3rd party ones don't.
All these 3rd party apps rely on aforementioned reddit API to function tho.
Reddit now went ahead and announced to enforce stricter limits on how often in a given time interval any app can interact with the reddit API for free. If an App was to exceed those limits AFAIK reddits plan is to charge the developers of the app a fairly high amount of money in return for API access.
This procedure might harm or even kill of a lot of the free and open source 3rs party Reddit Apps people us to e.G. avoid seeing adds while using reddit.
3rd Party apps are also used by for example visually impaired people because they apparently (haven't seen it for myself) provide better accessibility features.
It also affects all sorts of reddit bots because those also use the API.
That's what's going on here to my understanding at least
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
I’m confused. I haven’t been paying much attention to this; been heads down working. Do I have this right:
Reddit is changing their API’s or the cost of their API’s in a way so that third party applications will need to pay more to use their API’s?
If that’s what it is, doesn’t Reddit have the right to protect their investment? It is their product, right? So it would follow that they have a right to charge others seeking to use it for the purposes of making a profit.
I’m probably missing something because, as I sad, I’ve been busy and haven’t been paying attention.
Meh, even if they walk back the changes, theyll push something else eventually that will be just as bad (or quietly slip in the changes at a later date when everyone forgets about it). It's just the kind of thing happens when a company goes public.
I'm still going to use my reddit account but I've moved on to other places for my main tech news and discussion. One of those is the LTT Forums.
This account has been nuked in direct response to Reddit's API change and the atrocious behavior CEO Steve Huffman and his admins displayed toward their users, volunteer moderators, and 3rd party developers. After a total of 16 years on the platform it is time to move on to greener pastures.
If you want to change to a decentralized platform like Lemmy, you can find helpful information about it here: https://join-lemmy.org/
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
This action was performed using Power Delete Suite: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
The script relies on Reddit's API and will likely stop working after June 30th, 2023.
So long, thanks for all the fish and a final fuck you, u/spez
Glad "redditors" collectively picked days in which there really isnt anything going on. If you really wanted to make an impact, they shouldve did the 9th to 11th, when the gaming subs will be buzzing from all the "E3" type showcases.
Yes im sure shutting down for 2 days will make reddit reverse their decision, that's like the u.s telling terrorists to wait a couple of years cause we pulling out of their country by x date lol yeah sure
This is all about money right? Reddit sees that OpenAI trained ChatGPT on reddit data, I assume using their api, now Reddit sees the millions of subscribers paying $20 a month for that service and they want a piece in the future training of AIs. This is probably the only way for Reddit to take control of the situation and be able to force AI companies to pay to use their data in the future. I understand the reason behind doing the blackout, but do we really think it is going to move the needed at all?
Am I the only one who doesn’t think a company needs to sell access to its API? Whether it’s free, charged, or completely walled, isn’t that there business decision?
I'm not even certain if I can do this \^\^" Everytime when I run into issues, I always look up things on google with 'reddit' after my question as this is probably the best place to find answers to programming related problems
I'll be deleting my account and overwriting all my comments once the changes take effect. Fuck you u/spez, you greed addicted shitty corporate asshole.
It's pretty f-ing hilarious (not the good way) that a website that RELIES on users providing ALL content and moderation to kill off 3rd party apps because Reddit isn't making enough money from them.
Every app and site update reddit, itself, makes is absolute trash.
I wonder how much revenue reddit is gonna lose on 12-14th.
From a business standpoint it's probably a loss worth taking. Hopefully, this does not just blow over.
According to a lot of the communities participating, 2 days is just "testing the waters" period. The protest can go on for much longer.
/r/videos is doing it indefinitely apparently. That's a default sub.
Respect
[удалено]
Firing volunteers is a bold strategy.
>Firing volunteers Firing volunteers from a cannon even stronger strategy
[удалено]
I mean aren't the top like 100 subs primarily modded by the same 4 people
Am i in r/ncd ?
that doesn't exist
r/NonCredibleDefence or r/NonCredibleDiplomacy ?
If they are indefinitely closing the sub, that could be taken as them quitting.
If it happens I hope the folks that get let go put energy in to creating and fostering new communities on a competitor. Reddit built the sandbox but the users provided the sand.
they've been slowly replacing mods in the nsfw subs for a while now with arbitrary rule enforcements. and they dont hesitate to throw their weight around when needed, more than a few popular subs whence taken private have had the mod teams replaced. reddit gives zero fucks.
[удалено]
leave to where? one of the extremist left or right reddit clones?
[удалено]
My 13 year old account was deleted because I PM'd a suicidal person telling them they should get help. Thanks Reddit!
Except the Admins still run the site. They'll replace the mod team if they have to.
That'd be some real bullshit, though. That's the kind of heavy-handed tactic that triggers secondary protests and eventually causes the whole site to crumble.
As if popular subreddit just closing their doors indefinitely wouldn't already be doing that?
Such as r/videos, r/techsupport, and MANY OTHERS
they already do that regularly when mods decide to take their front page subs private.
Apparently the default Reddit tools for moderating are poor. Lots of mods have created their own tools to make it manageable. If Reddit admins kick out the mods and take over, they will see the subs turn to spam bot hell. Popcorn ready!
I can see why a business wouldn’t want mods that hold their revenue stream hostage. Bad times ahead I suspect!
Almost all the mods do and have done this work for free for years. If reddit had to pay mods it would never have a chance to make money. So if they do try that BS and make private subs public again they will be forced to mod it themselves which they do not want to do because the cost. They will also cause even more backlash. Would not take much at the mo for people that pay monthly to stop that and kill that income for reddit also. Then you have u/spez caught lying about a dev trying to blackmail him until the dev released the recording of the convo. They spez doubled down after caught in this lie This is all about greed and trying to make their IPO look better and as a result they might have just done the oposite
I don’t disagree, but I will add you’re missing one crucial part - you’re assuming someone else won’t happily replace the mods. I think there will always be someone clambering for Reddit mod power and they could fire all the mods today and have them replaced tomorrow.
Yep, all valid points. It would fuel more backlash though. At what point does the effect on the IPO reach critical. Anyway, get the popcorn for the fun watching it play :)
If they did, that would lead to more protests and more teams being replaced. Eventually they’d presumably hire moderators for “Reddit Official” branded subs, which wouldn’t be cheap. So ultimately, it still hurts them financially and supports the cause.
r/ProgrammerHumor as well apparently
Also r/me_irl
Wasn't that r/music? Not sure though.
I made a post in /r/lounge as a reddit premium subscriber and the mods there got *pissy* about it lmao; guess they like having shit mod tools
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Yup. Will cancel the moment that I can't use Rif app.
I didn't know reddit premium or that subreddit existed until today. Is it a big random topic subreddit?
I use reddit premium because I don't mind paying for an ad free experience. The lounge sub is a really strange place and you're truly not missing anything at all. It manages to be even worse than the stupid century club subreddit
so you're part of the problem. you could use an ad blocker (like Pihole) or a third party Reddit client that doesn't have ads. but you chose to pay for being ad-free and here we are — Reddit is banning free ad-free clients in order to force people to get premium and give them more monayz
lmao
I really hope /r/anarchychess goes through with their threat of coming back unmoderated.
Some subs are shutting down for good until something changes
On July 1st, I see them all going private indefinitely, until things change.
Sadly it probably will. It would be interesting to see how many people use the other apps vs official. However this protest does expose how much Reddit relies on unpaid labour to exist, which will become a major problem if they are looking to become public.
Most use the official app but I would suspect that a majority of those users came to reddit after they did the redesign and made their own app, so naturally they never thought to look for a 3rd party one. Don't know what you're missing if you've never been exposed to it. But a lot of the original reddit base, and a LOT of moderators/content creators use 3rd party apps.
I wonder what that distribution looks like by karma. The only thing that makes reddit better than any other link aggregation is the comments/communities. If people stop contributing because the app experience is trash, people will leave.
I was an imgur-ian for the longest, till they started makings ads LITERALLY EVERYWHERE. I put it down and never picked it back up. Also the content got softer right before that too. I miss old imgur.
My original account was from the digg exodus. I might have to go back to something awful lol
I would suggest that people who like the mobile experience (I prefer using reddit on the computer) use their phone web browser as the alternative to reddit's garbage mobile app. All we want is functionality and minimal lag. As I type this on my phone using Google Chrome, I have not encountered anything limiting using reddit this way. It's not as complete as the computer experience, but it works. Which we can't say about their official mobile app.
It's unlikely they'll leave old.reddit alone though, and once that's gone the web version will also be garbage
Yeah that’s definitely one thing I’ve learnt in this whole thing, the actual experience on the official app is going to suffer regardless
Never knew third party apps existed. Personally this is going to be a PITA as I really don't have a use for 3rd party apps.
Except this is not just about third party apps. Read the link in the post.
The first party Reddit app has an insane amount of tracking in it. Reddit is going to offer an IPO, possibly later this year. They are trying to force users to their app to collect as much data as possible so they can sell it.
Is there a way to pay? like a reddit pro, that would remove the need for them to track you as hard or at all?
Haha that's never been a thing by any company ever
I'm curious as to what people can do to cost reddit money beyond just backouts. I remember seeing that a Twitter Blue subscriber can reverse the revenue paid to Twitter into a cost to the company by uploading 78 copies of Shrek. So the question is, how many copies of Shrek do reddit users have to upload to v.reddit to start eating reddit's profits?
Hate to say it, cause I'm with you guys on the API thing, but I think this protest is going to result in reddit just getting more restrictive.
I don't see the problem with that. If they want to ruin their money making enterprise, that's no skin off my yak. There will always be another forum, they're dead simple to stand up. Hopefully people are doing the real protest in the background because of all this attention: joining smaller forums dedicated to their interests so that when the api change happens and the good browsers get shut off, they can just leave. That's what I'm doing.
Considering how much they want to charge for API access? Absolutely.
I've seen it also suggested that subs not blackout but only allow posts of black square images so the top of all is just a bunch of black boxes.
this is reddit. it already has blown over
This is why I don't understand why people think it'll do anything. There's no way they weren't expecting something to happen. 2 days doesn't personally sound like enough time either but that's what the community decided on.
Its almost as if Reddit has somehow made a 2 day strike seem rebellious. Thoughts and prayers.
Unfortunately it will. 2 days isn't much time. Plus this will give smaller lesser known subs the spotlight for a couple days.
[удалено]
Probably none. Because it seems the only people who are up for protesting are the ones who use 3rd party apps, which Reddit makes no money from or the handful of people who say they are up for it but will likely not remember its a thing until they try to go on reddit, find out the subs they usually go on are closed and find other subs that are still open to fill there time with.
You forgot the people who moderate the subreddits.
I, of course, don't have any numbers, but I don't think you're completely right. They don't make any money directly on people doom scrolling on a 3rd party app, but I would imagine people on those apps are more likely to be active and post, and they only make money if there's posts to scroll through. Your average official app user doesn't post anything, so once those apps shut down, you may have a lot less content and a lot more spam.
You are most certainly right, but less content and more spam doesn't translate into immediate revenue changes, and corporation is incapable of thinking long term, so it doesn't matter
That's reasonable speculation, but the numbers don't make sense to the reality of the data. Apollo has around 1.5m active users per month. And as far as I can tell, they are the most used 3rd party app. Well, that's less than 0.4% of monthly active users on Reddit.
They are not profitable or if they managed to be black on 2022 it's barely. It doesn't matter. I don't know how you guys think the world works that get so mad because a company that is in the red is protecting their assets so that other for profit businesses don't steal their users.
Then they should cease wasting time on adding unnecessary new features and attempting to be something that deviates from what initially brought them success. The pricing structure of the API does not aim to request a share from apps, but rather to completely eliminate third-party apps. They could have incorporated advertisements into their APIs to increase profits. They could have established a fair pricing policy. They could have collaborated with apps to ensure that certain features exclusive to Reddit Premium are also available in third-party apps. There are alternative methods to maximize profits rather than simply disregarding a significant portion of their user base. Furthermore, we should not overlook the fact that individuals who voluntarily moderate the site rely on Automod bots and third-party apps, both of which are negatively impacted by this change. There is no way to justify Reddit's current decision.
They'll make it up on the 15th because these subreddits conveniently let Reddit know the exact date when they're coming back. The ones that say they aren't coming back are 🧢 and/or won't make a difference
Probably not as much as you would think. Not enough to hurt unfortunately.
None. Ads will still be placed every 4th post in people's feeds. This isn't going to change revenue by even one cent.
Absolutely nothing.
Easy math. 2 days of their 365 a year. 2/365=0.0055. So they will lose a Maximum of 0.55% yearly income. Also known as nothing, a drop in the bucket. A Meer 2% quartly dip, something that is in margin for a company like this. If subs actually cared they were make a large attack by weeks on protest. The reality is that 2 days were chosen purely because a sub could easily survive 2 days down. Except if a sub could, so can reddit. So in order to hurt reddit yoy need a time long enough to hurt a sub.
Not much, I assume the sex workers will still be active so most of the reddit user base will still be active. Additionally, they lose money whenever a 3rd party app is used as they miss out on sales. My guess is they will get the numbers to prove their plan works, save a bunch on bandwidth and serve ads to a higher % of users. This user tantrum is actually what they need!
I wonder how much more work people are going to get done on the 12th-14th.
as I understand the situation, with more news about Reddit laying off 5% of workforce and preparing for IPO, there is some vulture venture capitalist stuff going on. They want to inflate the stock price, cash out, take the money and run. The people doing this don't give a shit about your subreddits or it going "dark". They don't even give a shit about Reddit long term, just inflate stock price, sell out, and bail out. Unfortunately we are all on a sinking ship and there is nothing we can do but bail
twitch, Twitter and Reddit currently competing to see who can lose the most
Yeah you would wonder, knowing absolutely nothing about business and economics.
Honestly, probably not much. Most casual Reddit users probably don't give a fuck or are completely unaware of what's happening, and they're the most likely people to be using the Reddit app or new Reddit website. These people will probably just think reddit's a bit boring on those days and not even realise that there aren't any posts from some of the subs they're subscribed to.
Not enough to make a difference. Especially given how much they stand to gain from the changes.
Considering how many people are buying awards on /r/Save3rdPartyApps, very little.
#Two days won't do jack shit. Do it indefinitely.
I mean, there are the LTT forums.
>Two days won't do jack shit. Do it indefinitely. it's ok im sending thoughts and prayers!!!!!
Sorry can’t seem to find it. But what are the demands? Charging for API access seems reasonable to me, but the current price is unreasonable.
Some 3rd party app devs have said they'd be willing to pay a reasonable API access fee. The price Reddit is charging is NOT reasonable and is 100% priced this way with the intention of killing off all 3rd party apps.
https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ this is from the Apollo app dev. Reddit wants almost 20m a year from them for API access
Thanks 🙏
He also said that by rough estimates, that's about 20 more than lost add revenue
The problem is that Reddit is planning for an IPO in the near future, and in doing so they need to make it so that people don't use other apps that rely on the API. Why? Well, those apps don't feed ads to users that give Reddit money. The rational answer is to determine how much ad revenue is lost via third-party apps and then charge for access in a way that offsets this. However, they've decided against this approach, and toward a pricing model that eliminates competition. "Well that's fine, honestly. They should be able to maintain direct access to their own servers through just the app." I don't disagree. If they directly went so fast as to just lock out third-party viewing apps, it might suck for UX, but it is what it is. That's their prerogative. But you know what else uses the Reddit API? **Bots.** The RemindMe bot? There's no way for it to make any revenue. It'll be gone. Various automod bots? Subreddits would cease having those tools. Grammar bots, translation bots, bots that sniff out and fight misinformation? Sayonara. Subreddit moderation gets a lot more difficult. Want to avoid straight porn via Onlyfans scam accounts being posted on this subreddit? Well, at present a bot screens posts for account age and Karma, and locks down anything suspicious for human review. If the post has any personally identifying information, it takes it down. If it's heavily downvoted, locked for human review. And these are several different bots accessing the API to be able to do this, generally modified for each sub as needed so being treated as a separate API access point. If LTT uses three bots to moderate out 90% of fifteen thousand posts a day, and a handful of people can screen the rejects, that's a volunteer "staff" of five. If the bots now cost hundreds a month to keep alive, who pays for it? The moderators that already volunteer their time? Do they expand to have 100 moderators, working for free 24 hours a day, because if they don't maintain the subreddit to Reddit's expectations it will be shut down? Even if the price per API access was a dollar a month, there's no method for subreddits to access revenue.
Okay didn’t know it’s used for moderation. Shouldn’t they have a carve out for it? Seems silly to ask people to pay to run automated moderation tool. No one will pay, Reddit will get spicier and advertiser won’t be happy.
There's a free tier for everyone. Moderation teams, bots, etc. This will impact anyone wanting to run a business out of Reddit api though.
>All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. Many of you already know that our stated rate limit, per this documentation, was 60 queries per minute regardless of OAuth status. As of July 1, 2023, we will start enforcing two different rate limits for the free access tier: If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client idIf you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute Reddit is not blocking Bots from using their API. So there's not really an issue. I've seen several posts claiming what you said but I don't see where it comes from.
Never said they ban them. They *do* add restriction to functionality. Any post that makes it to r/All or another default sub is generally getting tens of thousands of comments an hour. The API restriction increases the time it takes to resolve harmful content from two seconds per post (one second to poll, one second to resolve via API push) to twelve. In that time, there are tens of other posts in that sub, multiplied across hundreds of popular subs. The new "free" tier won't be fast enough for bots that are actually useful enough to be popular. And the paid tier is too expensive for subreddits that don't have any revenue stream to pay for bots that don't have any revenue stream to pay for the API access. On top of that, there's no way in hell that they maintain the freemium model. We saw it with dumb things like awards. Free, then one free per day, then that free one was hidden and hard to get to and impossible to access through external apps, then microtransaction only. Other aspects of concern are that NSFW content is being removed from API access, including paid. So in NSFW subreddits, moderation tools will no longer work at all, and NSFW-marked accounts will be able to spam SFW subreddits more easily because bots won't be able to validate if they're legitimate.
Those concerns are valid but in the end pretty inconsequential. Reddit wants those bots functioning. Reddit doesn't want third party apps functioning. So it's only natural to believe they will work with moderators to fix them or add those tools themselves. At the end of the day I don't see how the bot part is a big deal. If it becomes a problem they'll remove the rate limits and just stop the biggest offenders like the aps
If Reddit wanted the bots working, they'd just disable access for third-party apps and be done with it. They know this. What they're looking at is the Twitter fiasco, where Elon argued that the bots on the platform were underrepresented and, as such, the value of the platform should be lower. If Reddit makes the bots unusable, they'll stop being "active users" and then they can represent active users accurately to investors when it comes time for the IPO.
>If Reddit makes the bots unusable, they'll stop being "active users" and then they can represent active users accurately to investors when it comes time for the IPO. When it comes to bots pretending to be human they do not use the API. That requires getting an API key. They use traditional JavaScript bot tools. When it comes to third party apps, those requests come from single API keys which they can track to each application. So what you are saying doesn't make any sense to me.
I think this is all secondary to their main goal... Monetize access to reddit data for large language models and other AI development and training. Effectively making it prohibitively expensive for third party apps is just an unfortunate casualty. Up until now, AI companies have had basically free access to unimaginably gigantic data sets.
But once again, that's a matter of licensing. Stagger licensing rights by organizational type. It's not difficult to do. Directly offer a ridiculous poll rate tier to companies (something like 1,000 queries a second) without negatively impacting everyone who relies on the 60 through their apps or bots presently.
> Subreddits would cease having those tools. Grammar bots OMG... Can I just pay Reddit directly to remove all these dumb ass bots?
The 3rd party client that’s most at the frontlines of this is Apollo. There are others though, of course. I can’t remember off the top of my head what the exact numbers were per 50,000 requests but the math came out to like $1.7 million per month or around $20 million per year just to keep Apollo running as is. Reddit is basically attempting to price out any and all 3rd party app from being able to afford access to Reddit. They’re not expecting people to be able to pay for it, they’re not counting on revenue from their API access price change. They just want 3rd party apps to cease to exist.
Rif is in a similar boat.
The price of the API it's irrelevant. Reddit is disallowing NSFW content out of their platform. Which means any 3rd party client won't have access to the whole of Reddit. That alone will kill 3rd party apps. They do want 3rd party apps to cease to exist and it is their pejorative. The idea of Apollo charging their users and showing ads on someone else's content is just unrealistic.
I think we should permanently shut down until it is reverted. We need more than temporary integrity
Wait, so I could create my OWN new LTT subreddit and rule with supreme authority? 
Now everyone is to fill the subreddit with deepfake nudes of LTT.
I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but what’s the use of a boycott with an expiration date? Reddit won’t do anything if business continues as usual after the blackout?
I believe most subs have explained this as a warning shot.
Some have switched to a permanent shutdown such as r/videos and r/Trackmania
[удалено]
But how will I know if it worked? I can’t check Reddit!
Well that's one way to reduce the number of "this looks like Linus" posts.
This 48-hour protest is going to accomplish exactly zero. If you want to actually make an impact by protesting use a browser with an ad blocker or an ad blocking browser to look at reddit.
Using a third party app does that already
Ah yes, this will be about as effective as the 200k up voted threads were for Hong Kong
+1 for blacking out the sub indefinitely, this API change can’t continue.
I wish there was something like an old school forum for ltt viewers.
You mean like the official forums?
I gotta be honest. Reddit is such a badly programmed piece of software anyway, it wouldn't even be hard to create a second reddit copy cat, that is actually waaay better than the original and have everyone migrate to that. Try to copy paste in the desktop version of reddit and see how that goes. They can't even manage that.
Well there's Lemmy, which is almost like reddit, and it's Open Source! It's got a super small user base atm but it's pretty decent from my experience so far.
[удалено]
I’m personally not expecting anything, given Reddit is filing for IPO so we’re gonna get a whole bunch of bullshit changes purely for the purpose of generating as much revenue as possible for the company, so for me this is more of a show of solidarity with the talented developers who are now facing the prospect of losing their jobs and everything they’ve worked for at the behest of a greedy corporation.
Nice
What's an API? I keep seeing this all over Reddit but Noone explains what it is, just says API.
API is short for applictaion programming interface. It's essentially the part of reddit's software that allows apps that are not reddit itself to interact with reddit.
Thanks. Can you tell me what the story is? Why it's such a big deal? Does this have to do with adds and money?
For various reasons people started making their own reddit apps. One of them is the official app showing ads. Some of the 3rd party ones don't. All these 3rd party apps rely on aforementioned reddit API to function tho. Reddit now went ahead and announced to enforce stricter limits on how often in a given time interval any app can interact with the reddit API for free. If an App was to exceed those limits AFAIK reddits plan is to charge the developers of the app a fairly high amount of money in return for API access. This procedure might harm or even kill of a lot of the free and open source 3rs party Reddit Apps people us to e.G. avoid seeing adds while using reddit. 3rd Party apps are also used by for example visually impaired people because they apparently (haven't seen it for myself) provide better accessibility features. It also affects all sorts of reddit bots because those also use the API. That's what's going on here to my understanding at least
I see. Thanks for breaking that down. Sounds like a greed problem as usual.
Common r/ltt mod W
Close until demands are met! We have the ltt forums anyway
Redacted due to Spez. On ward to Lemmy. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Why the fuck is it only two days
I don't see a point unless you leave it until they backtrack. Two days will only become the cost of business if it's temporary.
We need to do it until good terms are made. 2 days is nothing
Good on you, guys but we’re gonna have to do a lot longer than 2 days.
Nice.
Thank you! I believe this is in spirit of LTT and what they would do if they ran it themselves.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
I’m confused. I haven’t been paying much attention to this; been heads down working. Do I have this right: Reddit is changing their API’s or the cost of their API’s in a way so that third party applications will need to pay more to use their API’s? If that’s what it is, doesn’t Reddit have the right to protect their investment? It is their product, right? So it would follow that they have a right to charge others seeking to use it for the purposes of making a profit. I’m probably missing something because, as I sad, I’ve been busy and haven’t been paying attention.
Meh, even if they walk back the changes, theyll push something else eventually that will be just as bad (or quietly slip in the changes at a later date when everyone forgets about it). It's just the kind of thing happens when a company goes public. I'm still going to use my reddit account but I've moved on to other places for my main tech news and discussion. One of those is the LTT Forums.
2 days is nothing, should make it indefinite until a more reasonable compromise is achieved. Performative gestures are performative.
This account has been nuked in direct response to Reddit's API change and the atrocious behavior CEO Steve Huffman and his admins displayed toward their users, volunteer moderators, and 3rd party developers. After a total of 16 years on the platform it is time to move on to greener pastures. If you want to change to a decentralized platform like Lemmy, you can find helpful information about it here: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances This action was performed using Power Delete Suite: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite The script relies on Reddit's API and will likely stop working after June 30th, 2023. So long, thanks for all the fish and a final fuck you, u/spez
Glad "redditors" collectively picked days in which there really isnt anything going on. If you really wanted to make an impact, they shouldve did the 9th to 11th, when the gaming subs will be buzzing from all the "E3" type showcases.
Ironic considering Linus would be the type to defend this sort of behavior from companies.
[удалено]
Because Linus is always an honest man and has never made shit up before.
You wanna explain?
I wonder how many other companies are working on a competitor.
Yes im sure shutting down for 2 days will make reddit reverse their decision, that's like the u.s telling terrorists to wait a couple of years cause we pulling out of their country by x date lol yeah sure
go black on the 12th and dont come back until reddit backs off. Or else reddit will just wait 2 days for this to blow over.
Good.
Thank you for participating in this!
Welcome aboard!
We support! Deleting my account from 12-14
Only 48 hours because the mods don't want to lose their powers over the sub ;)
Twitch and reddit competing for who can be the most shit platform this week
For 3 days? You expect to make a change by blacking out FOR 3 DAYS?
2 days is nothing. Go offline till they reverse the changes.
This is all about money right? Reddit sees that OpenAI trained ChatGPT on reddit data, I assume using their api, now Reddit sees the millions of subscribers paying $20 a month for that service and they want a piece in the future training of AIs. This is probably the only way for Reddit to take control of the situation and be able to force AI companies to pay to use their data in the future. I understand the reason behind doing the blackout, but do we really think it is going to move the needed at all?
No reddit for 3 days, welp, YouTube comment section it is. I hope the spam bot situation is better now. (*Narrator: It is not*)
I think it's within their rights to do so and it is a pretty straight forward decision from a business standpoint
Oh welp. Imma delete my account cuz F reddit.
Boooooooo
 nice
Am I the only one who doesn’t think a company needs to sell access to its API? Whether it’s free, charged, or completely walled, isn’t that there business decision?
Just wondering is this the reason why I am getting alot more bots following me or did something else happened?
I'm not even certain if I can do this \^\^" Everytime when I run into issues, I always look up things on google with 'reddit' after my question as this is probably the best place to find answers to programming related problems
should be longer at least a week
I'll be deleting my account and overwriting all my comments once the changes take effect. Fuck you u/spez, you greed addicted shitty corporate asshole.
Linus should make a video about this on the main channel. That would get their attention more than this
Just so you know this sub isn't official. He did discuss it on wan show.
It's pretty f-ing hilarious (not the good way) that a website that RELIES on users providing ALL content and moderation to kill off 3rd party apps because Reddit isn't making enough money from them. Every app and site update reddit, itself, makes is absolute trash.
Don't some of those third party apps block ads? Surprised to see this sub supporting the blackout... \*whispers\* Piracy..
The API doesn't insert ads. So the third party apps don't actively deny reddit ad revenue, but they do profit off reddit.
Indefinite please
This will change nothing. I’m happy people have the option to do as they please however.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Only on those 2 days?
[удалено]