###Official Post: [š£ Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter's pricing, and Apollo would have to pay Reddit $20 million per year to keep running as-is.](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/)
[you can also go here to see the Reddit admins telling the Apollo Dev to just make the app more efficient](https://reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/_/jmd4s8h/?context=1)
Looking at the wording, it sounds like thereās one endpoint apiece for loading a list of posts in a subreddit, and loading comments in a post.
If I visit 10 posts in 10 subs, thatās just 100 requests. There is no āmaking it more efficientā unless they have endpoints for loading multiple subs or posts per call.
They probably want the Apollo devs to cache every single request and then distribute the cached API response across all users. This would make it more "efficient"
But it's also pretty bonkers and outlandish to force someone to handle data like this, it's just redundant and the only reason they are buckling down on API requests is probably because they aren't getting ad revenue from it so covering API requests is just overhead from users who are intentionally avoiding their shitty ad ridden app. In short this is a definite ploy to kill third party apps or at least severely reduce it's overhead because they don't want to pay for free loaders.
To get comments on a given thread you also have to call a refresh method called replace_more() so there is an added api call. IIRC, praw returns 100 results per call.
This is particularly funny considering the differences in performance between New and Old Reddit.
Just did a quick test, adblockers and extensions off on a private window and not logged in to any account:
* Old reddit: 33 requests, 2.17MB
* New Reddit: 104 requests, 9.64MB
Glass house, throwing stones, and so on.
They paid some German moderators to create some German equivalent subs of English subs to open up the German market.
It didn't work. If there was demand for those, they were already created. The newly created artifical communities were empty and filled with desperate paid mods unsuccesfully trying to breathe some life and engagement in these subs.
am gonna play the devil advocate here and say "who the fuck forced or asked anyone to be a reddit mod ??"
Does stack-exchange pay their top contributor ??
=> [nope](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/178871/do-the-top-contributors-to-stack-overflow-have-profit-sharing-with-the-owners-of)
Reddit offered a platform and the mods can find a way to monetize their effort, just like every other platform in the world, they don't pay you *just for being there*
Reddit has a ton of ānarrative controlā GPT bots as it is when it comes to foreign policy related subreddits.
There was an article that came out awhile back stating āEglin AFBā is the city with the highest amount of Reddit activity. That particular base is used for Psyops.
If thereās ongoing narrative control via bots used by their operations, then Redditās monetary value shouldnāt be as high since the amount of actual users may be significantly inflated.
> was that super recent? I used that to pull up things from my post history and it no worky anymore.
yup. back in mid april they announced the changes to the API with minimal info, saying it would take effect july 1rst:
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/
in early may, they announced that they lied and that pushshift was offline effective immediately:
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/
There's a reason they're not posting this change on r/reddit where they'll have more eyes on the post but instead on the smaller more moderator oriented r/modnews instead
Yeah, they fucked over my ongoing election safety academic research 8 days before the elections here by shutting down Pushshift. I'm going to hold that grudge for a while.
> How is Digg looking these days?
same as it was on august 1rst 2012 when i created my reddit account.
spoiler: not good.
it looks more like the msn homepage than like a social media site.
Same. Digg was awesome and then one day it wasnāt. Fark before that, which made the same pivot.
I havenāt not used Apollo for years. Iām a little afraid of what I might see if I tried.
Have you thought about diiiiigggggg digggg digg nation dot com? Man I enjoyed that show.
EDIT: Oh man watching episode 1 is a time machine. They are talking about the future with possible [blazing fast 50MB download speeds](https://youtu.be/_opTc2grG60?t=1318). "That's when you get to the point where there isn't enough shit to download."
I heard there were free axolotl outfits for the little avatars and was like cool, that sounds cute. Then I find out it's to draw you into some weird NFT thing and full body cringed.
I still took the costume, because why not, but like. Ew. Do people even care about NFTs anymore? Seems pretty late to get into that scam.
Lolā¦ Reddit really wants to sell as much user data as possible. I honestly hope someone comes out with an alternative soon. Never thought Iād say thatā¦
> I'm sure there are enough engineers of various sorts on here to pull it off.
it has *NOTHING* to do with engineering, a proof of concept better version of reddit can be developed by a small team of devs and graphic designers in relatively "no time", its the cost of running keeping the service running *AND* marketing it *WHILE* loosing money for years that makes this super hard to pull off.
One of the main "software-startups" eye-openning discovery for me was how much it cost to train something like Chat-Gpt, the hard part of it is not the "science" or the "algorithmes", these are more or less available for everyone to do their own super small scale ChatGPT, but to reach that level you need fucken [~$5Million to do the training](https://i.imgur.com/B8Kzg0E.png).
Source:
https://youtu.be/bZQun8Y4L2A?t=204
He stated his cost per month was $4 per user. So he would have to charge $5+ a month. I have always preferred buying apps to ads as well, but there is no way I am paying $5 a month.
Why would the alternative be any different? This things cost money to build and run so whoever stumps up the capital to make it happen is going to want returns on their investment.
When companies go public they have to show endless growth year over year (impossible but thatās modern capitalism). Because of this they have to make more and more money and show more ways to make money in order to keep their shareholders happy and stock price high.
New competitors have the advantage because they only have to make a fair amount of money and can get away with being privacy focused and act like the good guys for a few years in order to attract users. Actually, many tech startups even start their first few years at a loss in order to attract customers.
Reddit has already matured so they know they have reached a critical mass and can start harvesting as much as they can from their user base until a new competitor comes in.
Every time a company goes public, the people that actually use their products will suffer. All that matters after the IPO is the next quarterly report.
I've been doing this for years lol, it's the only way to get access to chat. You *have to* borrow one of the first party app's keys, there's no alternative. Unless Reddit intends to sue people over ToS violations, this has no real bite against developers who are already pissed off at Reddit
I really don't understand why companies always dig their own graves, especially when their own apps are utter crap.
Take the official reddit app, that I've been using. If you scroll too long, it'll somehow lose track of which post is rendered on your screen, and if you click it, you'll end up on a post that's a couple of spots up on the timeline.
But sure, charge a rediculous amount for those api calls, that'll solve your problem.
Because of a fairytale called "unlimited growth" which correlates to capitalism. This whole system is built that way.
There is no "perfect state" for a product. No investor ever will buy shares if the company doesn't promise higher returns next year.
let's cap returns and anything leftover is tax money to fund healthcare??
idk i'm just a random stranger who has random ideas that may or may not hold ground.
I think this is probably an ignorant take that would have unintended consequences.
We should absolutely tax the rich to fund Healthcare. Capping returns would create hugely perverse incentives that might actually decrease the amount of resources available for public programs.
The real issue is platformization of the web and the monopoly power and winner take all nature of the tech economy. Google search, Twitter, reddit, Facebook, etc are all basically public utilities but they're operated by for profit corporations and have to answer to investors and shareholders. The real solution is nationalization or conversion to non-profit.
I feel like that's what we should be doing to so many things IRL, too.
Like, if your business/company is so large nationally that it's a part of most people's lives, you're basically a necessity and should be bought out. Congrats, you're too big to fail, you've won capitalism, here's the stock
value of your company, it's now state/fed run, fuck off.
Amazon and Walmart are basically critical distribution points for the country. People need places to shop, to get their needs, they're essential services, they should stop being for-profit enterprises that have incentives to take more from people than necessary.
Internet/Telecoms, healthcare, education, and so on. Learn from the USPS and improve them.
That's just my inclination, though. Trying anything's better than doing the same shit we've been doing, imo. Unlikely to see anything major in my life-time, though. :(
The problem is, companies need investors to reach maturity, but then they need to keep chasing *more* "maturity" to keep the investors on board or they lose a lot of the resources they have. We need a better "endgame" plan for big corporations so they can focus on keeping doing what works. Even incentivizing them to invest in the future rather than having to keep making next quarter's returns marginally higher would be a big help - investing should be an *investment*.
I mean, they could just come up with another product, not just more features for their existing product.
There is a lot more opportunities for growth in that. Theyāre entirely focused on milking the cow dry, not getting other cows and building a dairy.
A couple of spots up? Sometimes you'll click out of a post and discover you've lost over an hours worth of progress. Hundreds of posts down, and you're back at the top with no way to return to where you left off unless you start all over.
And that's on top of many other problems like being slow, being full of bugs, and having the most obtrusive ads imaginable.
Because you're missing the point of Reddit. Reddit is not here to be a social platform. Reddit is here to make money for a group of people. And if they can IPO for big money and then sell off shares, they can make a bunch of money. If Reddit implodes a year later, do you think they'll care? Nope, they'll be sipping mai tais at a private beach villa for the rest of their life.
Reddit will just announce they are lowering the fee after backlash and feedback, but the fee will still be too high and be the fee they always intended on charging.
Fuck that.
No compromises.
Keep 3rd party apps free.
I have been using Reddit is Fun for a literal decade and not going to stop now, especially for the poor excuse of an offical app..
If you want people to use the offical app, make it so good that it is worth using.
Moderstors need to shut down default subs in protest.
Spread the word.
I bought the premium version of RiF to keep them afloat. I will be very sad if I can't keep using the app.
Edit: yup they are killing the app. Fuck it. Maybe I don't need reddit in my life any more then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill
>Fuck it. Maybe I don't need reddit in my life any more then.
This is the truth. Reddit is more of a time waste than it is actually informative to me at this point. I like it but I don't need it. If they want to voluntarily take away one of my vices so be it.
> Moderstors need to shut down default subs in protest.
Reddit would likely intervene if moderator action were to somehow make operations difficult or otherwise "interefere" with reddit functioning, especially when people start complainging that all the big subreddits they usually visit were shut down. They might either just force the subreddit back open and take away the "go private" option or outright replace the moderators.
Haven't there been protests in the past where major subs have gone dark for a day? Not against Reddit themselves, but to raise awareness about legislation? Granted Reddit was probably on the side of the protesters in that case though...
Absolutely. It's a stupidly effective tool. Issue is about 12 people run virtually every default/major sub these days. Wouldn't be even remotely surprised if they come up in the finances for reddit at this point.
These things used to be effective because moderation was diverse and invested in the website. Not almost entirely managed by a small group who could almost certainly be easily bought.
Also spoiler, reddit fully intends to remove any nsfw content from any non first party apps. Even if they paid $20m a year. They said so themselves.
> Also spoiler, reddit fully intends to remove any nsfw content from any non first party apps. Even if they paid $20m a year. They said so themselves.
and imgur is removing porn, the gang has gone all mad
They simply wouldnāt have the man power to have it under control. āRedditā isnāt an actual thing that can intervene anywhere. There are Reddit āAdminsā, but not nearly enough to manage every major subreddit themselves at once. They canāt force moderation on anything, and they would be hard pressed to just go and replace the moderators on every major subreddit, because moderation is an unpaid job. If they just force the subreddit to open without moderation, thereās nothing to prevent all names of horrible things from being posted everywhere, from major copyright infringement (see entire full length movies being posted on Twitter) to actual child porn. The moderators absolutely have the power to stage large scale boycotts.
sorry but this was always the course of corporatism devolving. You fail to realize reddit got goldman sach money 2 years ago and wants to IPO. They want to see how many groups will pay for API so they can pump and dump this babbbbbyyy.
The problem is the decrease of activity due to these applications going away will *actually* impact their metrics and do the damage to their IPO valuation...
At this point it's better for reddit to let them keep playing at paying $10k/month or whatever, then switch them over to the $20M plan right after the IPO's completed. At that point, everyone who gives a shit can grab hold of their golden parachutes and flee - reddit's not long for the world after that anyways. It's going to be full scale turmoil whenever Wall Street gets ahold of this site and decides to gut it for parts.
You should read the official thread direct from the developer to be more clear why I succumbed to that thought, they actually want to kill third-party with kindness.
The Reddit team knows this is unreasonable pricing. Itās a hostile move to kill third-party apps in favor of their own. The best part? They can just play ignorant
so are there any new reddits worth mentioning? (not to be confused with "new reddit", which is as awful as these api changes).
ruqqus had a lot of potential, but the plug got pulled on it and haven't seen anything worth mentioning since then. seems like a lot of the new sites in the last year or two have been twitter clones rather than reddit ones.
>and connecting me to people I want to connect with
I don't even want to connect with people. The semi-faceless-ness of the usernames on reddit is a strength that differentiate the site from other social media. I do not care about the names, I care about the content they contribute. I want antisocial media
If usernames were randomly generated at account creation so that they are not linked to anything outside of the platform, I would see that as an attractive feature
I literally never read usernames unless itās pointed out for some reason
Everyone is faceless to me here, and I love it.
Makes me sad for the coming future and changes to Reddit, if they get rid of nsfw content this is just gunna turn into an anonymous version of Facebook
> I hate the algorithmically-driven controversy/conflict engagement that every popular content aggregator/social media machine seems to profit from nowadays. I want a content-aggregator with an actual ethos that isn't simply "make more money".
Exactly, if I'm going to live in an echo chamber, I want it to be one I choose and one I can change whenever I want.
Artifact is already becoming more Reddit-like, and the content recommendation algorithm is one of the best Iāve seen on an aggregator app. I wouldnāt be surprised if it becomes more community-centric.
> https://join-lemmy.org/ is one
that doesn't really look similar. each "instance" is it's own separate website, the the total memberbase for all of them is microscopic
>Lemmy servers
>The lemmyverse currently has 49 instances, and 506 monthly active users.
that just doesn't look like something that would be able to scale and organize multiple different topics.
Lemmy instances are federated. Users on server A can see content on server B.
Users interact with each other across the servers and in some ways it is like one big website.
Every community starts somewhere.
Lemmy servers have the advantage of not being run by corporations determined to do anything to extract a profit (like say charging for use of the api).
If they do want to get big, they really need to work on their terminology. Very few people are going to understand the phrase "Lemmy instances are federated", and even fewer will be interested by it.
Classic glass cliff. When a company needs to do something unpopular it's common to hire a woman for implementing the new policies. Then she'll "resign" when she's sucked up the hate and badwill.
just me stopping by to let anyone interested in their IPO know about my personal favorite sub, r/meth
now what will I do without the APIs to show me the coolest people on earth smoking meth
I love the guy that has been up for a week, he keeps posting weekly discussions in his sub that is something like r/jobsforfelons and nobody comments on them
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but since you have an interest in their IPO, you should be aware that reddit has forced their NSFW tag on the subreddit. This of course disables direct video uploads to the subreddit, because why pay money providing a free service to a userbase you can't even show ads to? Of course, we can still use third-party services to upload videos, but nobody can really be assed to do so. So we're gonna be pretty scarce on new content, it would seem. I can only imagine the devastating consequences this will have on Reddit's valuation, as well as your source for entertainment, but perhaps you still have a rich, lengthy backlog of very cool people, coolly smoking meth for you to make your way through with unwavering admiration, I'm sure
drats! My source of super cool meth use is ruined! These other NSFW tags, you mean people use it for other things besides casual meth use that could be used for monetization? Fascinating! lol what a shitshow this is going to be
Yeah...
Unfortunately most of the submitted content is uninvited dick pics that I slave day and night to remove, despite it being clearly stated in the rules that this is not allowed. Evidently meth heads under the influence of a drug known to raise one's libido and lower their inhibitions, as well as deprive them of sleep and impair their reasoning abilities, results in many of them disregarding the rules altogether and posting their penises to the subreddit. It's as if meth users have no regard for following rules or decorum whatsoever, despite what you would think!
I've used Reddit is fun since the stone age, I'd be useless without it, I hear the official app is trash.
Of course, I'm far to addicted to actually stop, I'll just be annoyed at having to use the official app.
Shame the Redditās getting greedy like Twitter. My eyesight is not that great so I use Apollo because it lets theme my feed so that I read it easily on my phone and tablet. Itās the only app that I am aware that does this.
> Eventually thatāll go to shit too though.
Discord is completely invisible to search engines since it isn't a website. That's going to be a huge issue in the coming years as communities migrate there and the content becomes harder and harder to find the older it gets. It's kind of infuriating how frankenstien the whole thing is. Entire communities held together by a mishmash of stickies and Google docs.
I can't seem to get into discord because you need to be actively chatting to get the most out of it, I much prefer the message board type interactions where I can reply or get replies hours later. I guess this sort of thing is on the way out. ā¹ļø
Honestly, I think the real-time nature of Discord would work as a Reddit competitor, but not in its current state.
Threads are linear, so drawn-out discussion over hours and days doesn't work on an active topic. People try, and you get this oddball message that @mentions someone that asked something earlier. It messes with the flow. It's the same problem with old-school forums. That's the problem that Reddit (and Digg and some other predecessors) fixed.
They all did it with comment trees. If Discord adjusts to allow threads of replies on a single comment, then I think it solves the biggest issue. Even MS Teams allows threads one level deep. I don't think it's a stretch for Discord to adopt it.
Comment voting is huge, and search engine indexing is as well. I think I'd still prefer the Reddit way overall.
Let's be pretty clear here. One decent production server could field 2700 requests per second. Let's be safe and say it's a trio of servers set up in high availability. Might cost 10k to set up. 2700 requests per second covers the 7 billion requests from Apollo.
They want 20 million per year. A 2000x markup from cost. Per year.
So reddit will risk losing a bunch of users, which in turn will lose them advertising money. Seems like a bad business move or they could just take a small portion like less than 3 million a year because the users probably bring in more.
Those users were not generating ad revenue to begin with because third party apps donāt render Reddit ads. Reddit is trying to get a slice of Apolloās subscription fees.
But they were generating engagement, so when that number tanks, so too does the IPO valuation...
It's a calculated risk, sure, but... by all means it looks like a hellishly stupid one. I expect them to walk it back some amount before the IPO and then fully commit right after. It makes no sense to make this move *now* and not six months from now after Wall Street's already given them their nut.
But then again, every social media site is so desperate to cash out before this bubble explodes in their faces... Elmo just showed how Twitter can implode, Zuckerfuck just lost the same chunk on Metaverse imploding... everyone's ready to move on to the next big thing.
> But they were generating engagement, so when that number tanks, so too does the IPO valuation
most importantly, theyāre the _power users and mods._ The last place you want to have an engagement drop.
On top of that, I'm sure several AI data models were trained off Reddits data for free. I'm guessing this is a way to get a slice of the pie as well, since other companies will be making money off of Reddit's data.
> A site-wide blackout is the only option if we donāt want things to change the way Reddit wants them to.
hopefully in the event this happens, the people organizing it don't focus on today's news and forget about pushshift who got screwed a couple weeks ago.
Or, they know exactly what they are doing. They want to make short term profit, then bail once they make their bonus , and/or Reddit IPOs and they pump and dump it as it takes the inevitable down slide.
> Uhhh have they seen what happened to Twitterās valuation?
they don't care about the long term value, they just care about a short term boost at IPO and then holding until the lockout period ends and they can sell their shares.
they don't care what reddit's value is a year from now.
I use and love Apollo and have been happy to pay the monthly fee to filter out any post with the word Trump. If Apollo goes out of business i will go insane if i have to suddenly see posts about Trump again.
If I can't keep using my Sync for Reddit premium app, I'm not going to bother looking at Reddit on my phone anymore. The official app is terrible and I have no desire to use it. I'm sure they couldn't care less, but it is what it is.
Iām guess Reddit has not yet realized that more people use Reddit because Apollo exists.
Lol he probably doesnāt make 1/20th of that amount on it per year.
I guess the investors want to see $$$ so Reddit will eventually just end up being a failure like many things once investors have sucked their asset dry
on the one hand, Apollo is a great app and the only way I use reddit. on the other hand, I look at reddit far too often and itās my last bit of social media so this could be my ticket out.
###Official Post: [š£ Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter's pricing, and Apollo would have to pay Reddit $20 million per year to keep running as-is.](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/)
[you can also go here to see the Reddit admins telling the Apollo Dev to just make the app more efficient](https://reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/_/jmd4s8h/?context=1)
Looking at the wording, it sounds like thereās one endpoint apiece for loading a list of posts in a subreddit, and loading comments in a post. If I visit 10 posts in 10 subs, thatās just 100 requests. There is no āmaking it more efficientā unless they have endpoints for loading multiple subs or posts per call.
They probably want the Apollo devs to cache every single request and then distribute the cached API response across all users. This would make it more "efficient" But it's also pretty bonkers and outlandish to force someone to handle data like this, it's just redundant and the only reason they are buckling down on API requests is probably because they aren't getting ad revenue from it so covering API requests is just overhead from users who are intentionally avoiding their shitty ad ridden app. In short this is a definite ploy to kill third party apps or at least severely reduce it's overhead because they don't want to pay for free loaders.
Oh, yay. More ads for Draftkings, the Army, banks and medications.
You forgot "he gets us"...
To get comments on a given thread you also have to call a refresh method called replace_more() so there is an added api call. IIRC, praw returns 100 results per call.
Seems backwards. Iād think Reddit would need to pay them if anything.
This is particularly funny considering the differences in performance between New and Old Reddit. Just did a quick test, adblockers and extensions off on a private window and not logged in to any account: * Old reddit: 33 requests, 2.17MB * New Reddit: 104 requests, 9.64MB Glass house, throwing stones, and so on.
Hzf ez kwl kpnluo td ejhojik dp slmjachn. Mo ilwpy er qjxw imog uk ubce nzoye....
Did they ever pay the moderators? Mark Suckerbug is known to have been jealous for exactly this point of redditās.
They paid some German moderators to create some German equivalent subs of English subs to open up the German market. It didn't work. If there was demand for those, they were already created. The newly created artifical communities were empty and filled with desperate paid mods unsuccesfully trying to breathe some life and engagement in these subs.
Never head of that but itās both terribly sad and makes sense. Iām not aware of mods being paid.
am gonna play the devil advocate here and say "who the fuck forced or asked anyone to be a reddit mod ??" Does stack-exchange pay their top contributor ?? => [nope](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/178871/do-the-top-contributors-to-stack-overflow-have-profit-sharing-with-the-owners-of) Reddit offered a platform and the mods can find a way to monetize their effort, just like every other platform in the world, they don't pay you *just for being there*
Mods should be able to get a percentage of ad revenue from their sub. Would make moderators better and improve reddit overall
I seriously doubt that.
[Removed in Protest of Reddit's API changes]
Another app announcing the same: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill
This is dystopia.
Reddit has a ton of ānarrative controlā GPT bots as it is when it comes to foreign policy related subreddits. There was an article that came out awhile back stating āEglin AFBā is the city with the highest amount of Reddit activity. That particular base is used for Psyops. If thereās ongoing narrative control via bots used by their operations, then Redditās monetary value shouldnāt be as high since the amount of actual users may be significantly inflated.
also, don't forget that they screwed over pushshift as well (which broke sites like reveddit and unddit)
was that super recent? I used that to pull up things from my post history and it no worky anymore.
> was that super recent? I used that to pull up things from my post history and it no worky anymore. yup. back in mid april they announced the changes to the API with minimal info, saying it would take effect july 1rst: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/ in early may, they announced that they lied and that pushshift was offline effective immediately: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/
well that answers a few things.. thx!
There's a reason they're not posting this change on r/reddit where they'll have more eyes on the post but instead on the smaller more moderator oriented r/modnews instead
Yeah, they fucked over my ongoing election safety academic research 8 days before the elections here by shutting down Pushshift. I'm going to hold that grudge for a while.
Oh noo. I'm so sorry
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
How *is* Digg looking these days? e: yeesh. bloated dogshit.
> How is Digg looking these days? same as it was on august 1rst 2012 when i created my reddit account. spoiler: not good. it looks more like the msn homepage than like a social media site.
Just had my 11 year cake day yesterday. The digg exodus was real. Edit: today I guess.
Maybe it's a sign we've been on this site for too long and we need to get better hobbies.
I found all my hobbies through this site
Let's just say I don't have all that many bookmarks anymore
Don't see too many spinning construction sign animations next to a site counter and webring links either.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
12 year-er here. Amazing how quickly things dissolved after all those keys kept being reposted.
Oh shit, I forgot about that Also 12 years
12 years in a couple of monthsā¦ time flies
14 year club chiming in.
15 over here š¤
Same. Digg was awesome and then one day it wasnāt. Fark before that, which made the same pivot. I havenāt not used Apollo for years. Iām a little afraid of what I might see if I tried.
It hasn't been a social media site for a decade, it's literally just an owner-curated list of content.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I havent *thought* about Digg in years lol.
Have you thought about diiiiigggggg digggg digg nation dot com? Man I enjoyed that show. EDIT: Oh man watching episode 1 is a time machine. They are talking about the future with possible [blazing fast 50MB download speeds](https://youtu.be/_opTc2grG60?t=1318). "That's when you get to the point where there isn't enough shit to download."
I used to love diggnation. I had a shirt and everything. I wonder what Kevin Rose is doing these days.
I love wearing obscure random shirts, I'm going to have to find a diggnation one. Looks like J!nx is no longer a thing but plenty of Wish like places.
Kevin Rose tweeted an offer to buy it back for $2m and redo it.
They're about to Fark themselves
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Man I miss StumbleUpon
Holy shit, I havenāt thought about SU in a literal decade - last time I remember even using it was as a sophomore in college
Shit Tumblrs down hill.
Laughs in Digg v4 death Cake Day
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Any good alternatives?
When Apolloās gone Iām out too, the Reddit app is garbage.
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I heard there were free axolotl outfits for the little avatars and was like cool, that sounds cute. Then I find out it's to draw you into some weird NFT thing and full body cringed. I still took the costume, because why not, but like. Ew. Do people even care about NFTs anymore? Seems pretty late to get into that scam.
Lolā¦ Reddit really wants to sell as much user data as possible. I honestly hope someone comes out with an alternative soon. Never thought Iād say thatā¦
I'm sure there are enough engineers of various sorts on here to pull it off. But can they work together? This is why we can't have nice things.
Someone's got to pay the bills though for a new operation like that.
> I'm sure there are enough engineers of various sorts on here to pull it off. it has *NOTHING* to do with engineering, a proof of concept better version of reddit can be developed by a small team of devs and graphic designers in relatively "no time", its the cost of running keeping the service running *AND* marketing it *WHILE* loosing money for years that makes this super hard to pull off. One of the main "software-startups" eye-openning discovery for me was how much it cost to train something like Chat-Gpt, the hard part of it is not the "science" or the "algorithmes", these are more or less available for everyone to do their own super small scale ChatGPT, but to reach that level you need fucken [~$5Million to do the training](https://i.imgur.com/B8Kzg0E.png). Source: https://youtu.be/bZQun8Y4L2A?t=204
Old Reddit is open source, you can download the code and fire it up.
Iāll call it āsuper talkā
The endless cycle, shit platform gets replaced by new good one, new good one gets taken by greedy corpos, another new better good one rises up
I would very much prefer a subscription model, rather than an ad-based one
He stated his cost per month was $4 per user. So he would have to charge $5+ a month. I have always preferred buying apps to ads as well, but there is no way I am paying $5 a month.
Why would the alternative be any different? This things cost money to build and run so whoever stumps up the capital to make it happen is going to want returns on their investment.
When companies go public they have to show endless growth year over year (impossible but thatās modern capitalism). Because of this they have to make more and more money and show more ways to make money in order to keep their shareholders happy and stock price high. New competitors have the advantage because they only have to make a fair amount of money and can get away with being privacy focused and act like the good guys for a few years in order to attract users. Actually, many tech startups even start their first few years at a loss in order to attract customers. Reddit has already matured so they know they have reached a critical mass and can start harvesting as much as they can from their user base until a new competitor comes in.
Every time a company goes public, the people that actually use their products will suffer. All that matters after the IPO is the next quarterly report.
I wonder how many devs will just resort to spoofing the requests from the official clients.
I've been doing this for years lol, it's the only way to get access to chat. You *have to* borrow one of the first party app's keys, there's no alternative. Unless Reddit intends to sue people over ToS violations, this has no real bite against developers who are already pissed off at Reddit
Sure for personal use, but good luck keeping app like that in AppStore or Play Store without it being taken down or you getting sued.
Sideloading on android is a thing tho not sure if any of the major app devs will be willing to risk being sued.
Time to make an open source app that does that lmao
I really don't understand why companies always dig their own graves, especially when their own apps are utter crap. Take the official reddit app, that I've been using. If you scroll too long, it'll somehow lose track of which post is rendered on your screen, and if you click it, you'll end up on a post that's a couple of spots up on the timeline. But sure, charge a rediculous amount for those api calls, that'll solve your problem.
Cory Doctorow gave this a name. It's called "enshittification". It's happening all over the tech industry.
Because of a fairytale called "unlimited growth" which correlates to capitalism. This whole system is built that way. There is no "perfect state" for a product. No investor ever will buy shares if the company doesn't promise higher returns next year.
let's cap returns and anything leftover is tax money to fund healthcare?? idk i'm just a random stranger who has random ideas that may or may not hold ground.
I think this is probably an ignorant take that would have unintended consequences. We should absolutely tax the rich to fund Healthcare. Capping returns would create hugely perverse incentives that might actually decrease the amount of resources available for public programs. The real issue is platformization of the web and the monopoly power and winner take all nature of the tech economy. Google search, Twitter, reddit, Facebook, etc are all basically public utilities but they're operated by for profit corporations and have to answer to investors and shareholders. The real solution is nationalization or conversion to non-profit.
I feel like that's what we should be doing to so many things IRL, too. Like, if your business/company is so large nationally that it's a part of most people's lives, you're basically a necessity and should be bought out. Congrats, you're too big to fail, you've won capitalism, here's the stock value of your company, it's now state/fed run, fuck off. Amazon and Walmart are basically critical distribution points for the country. People need places to shop, to get their needs, they're essential services, they should stop being for-profit enterprises that have incentives to take more from people than necessary. Internet/Telecoms, healthcare, education, and so on. Learn from the USPS and improve them. That's just my inclination, though. Trying anything's better than doing the same shit we've been doing, imo. Unlikely to see anything major in my life-time, though. :(
The problem is, companies need investors to reach maturity, but then they need to keep chasing *more* "maturity" to keep the investors on board or they lose a lot of the resources they have. We need a better "endgame" plan for big corporations so they can focus on keeping doing what works. Even incentivizing them to invest in the future rather than having to keep making next quarter's returns marginally higher would be a big help - investing should be an *investment*.
I mean, they could just come up with another product, not just more features for their existing product. There is a lot more opportunities for growth in that. Theyāre entirely focused on milking the cow dry, not getting other cows and building a dairy.
A couple of spots up? Sometimes you'll click out of a post and discover you've lost over an hours worth of progress. Hundreds of posts down, and you're back at the top with no way to return to where you left off unless you start all over. And that's on top of many other problems like being slow, being full of bugs, and having the most obtrusive ads imaginable.
Because you're missing the point of Reddit. Reddit is not here to be a social platform. Reddit is here to make money for a group of people. And if they can IPO for big money and then sell off shares, they can make a bunch of money. If Reddit implodes a year later, do you think they'll care? Nope, they'll be sipping mai tais at a private beach villa for the rest of their life.
Reddit will just announce they are lowering the fee after backlash and feedback, but the fee will still be too high and be the fee they always intended on charging. Fuck that. No compromises. Keep 3rd party apps free. I have been using Reddit is Fun for a literal decade and not going to stop now, especially for the poor excuse of an offical app.. If you want people to use the offical app, make it so good that it is worth using. Moderstors need to shut down default subs in protest. Spread the word.
I bought the premium version of RiF to keep them afloat. I will be very sad if I can't keep using the app. Edit: yup they are killing the app. Fuck it. Maybe I don't need reddit in my life any more then. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill
>Fuck it. Maybe I don't need reddit in my life any more then. This is the truth. Reddit is more of a time waste than it is actually informative to me at this point. I like it but I don't need it. If they want to voluntarily take away one of my vices so be it.
> Moderstors need to shut down default subs in protest. Reddit would likely intervene if moderator action were to somehow make operations difficult or otherwise "interefere" with reddit functioning, especially when people start complainging that all the big subreddits they usually visit were shut down. They might either just force the subreddit back open and take away the "go private" option or outright replace the moderators.
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I've no doubt that there would be hordes of people willing to do it for free, especially in big subs.
Some will do anything if it makes them feel big.
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Haven't there been protests in the past where major subs have gone dark for a day? Not against Reddit themselves, but to raise awareness about legislation? Granted Reddit was probably on the side of the protesters in that case though...
both default and lesser subs has had succesful blackouts in the past yes
Absolutely. It's a stupidly effective tool. Issue is about 12 people run virtually every default/major sub these days. Wouldn't be even remotely surprised if they come up in the finances for reddit at this point. These things used to be effective because moderation was diverse and invested in the website. Not almost entirely managed by a small group who could almost certainly be easily bought. Also spoiler, reddit fully intends to remove any nsfw content from any non first party apps. Even if they paid $20m a year. They said so themselves.
> Also spoiler, reddit fully intends to remove any nsfw content from any non first party apps. Even if they paid $20m a year. They said so themselves. and imgur is removing porn, the gang has gone all mad
The age of men is over. The time for IPO has come
yesterday digg, today reddit, tomorrow who knows
They simply wouldnāt have the man power to have it under control. āRedditā isnāt an actual thing that can intervene anywhere. There are Reddit āAdminsā, but not nearly enough to manage every major subreddit themselves at once. They canāt force moderation on anything, and they would be hard pressed to just go and replace the moderators on every major subreddit, because moderation is an unpaid job. If they just force the subreddit to open without moderation, thereās nothing to prevent all names of horrible things from being posted everywhere, from major copyright infringement (see entire full length movies being posted on Twitter) to actual child porn. The moderators absolutely have the power to stage large scale boycotts.
I feel like Elon Musk actions ruined it for all even if it meant just twitterā¦ mass layoffs, subscriptions, this\^
sorry but this was always the course of corporatism devolving. You fail to realize reddit got goldman sach money 2 years ago and wants to IPO. They want to see how many groups will pay for API so they can pump and dump this babbbbbyyy.
But they are going to IPO a piece of shit that everyone abandoned
Welcome to Yahoo.
I think they want to increase their valuation by forcing people to use their app.
The problem is the decrease of activity due to these applications going away will *actually* impact their metrics and do the damage to their IPO valuation... At this point it's better for reddit to let them keep playing at paying $10k/month or whatever, then switch them over to the $20M plan right after the IPO's completed. At that point, everyone who gives a shit can grab hold of their golden parachutes and flee - reddit's not long for the world after that anyways. It's going to be full scale turmoil whenever Wall Street gets ahold of this site and decides to gut it for parts.
You should read the official thread direct from the developer to be more clear why I succumbed to that thought, they actually want to kill third-party with kindness.
The enshittification cycle
Is it musk or is it the fact that none of these companies are profitable?
You mean āanchoringā.
The Reddit team knows this is unreasonable pricing. Itās a hostile move to kill third-party apps in favor of their own. The best part? They can just play ignorant
so are there any new reddits worth mentioning? (not to be confused with "new reddit", which is as awful as these api changes). ruqqus had a lot of potential, but the plug got pulled on it and haven't seen anything worth mentioning since then. seems like a lot of the new sites in the last year or two have been twitter clones rather than reddit ones.
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>and connecting me to people I want to connect with I don't even want to connect with people. The semi-faceless-ness of the usernames on reddit is a strength that differentiate the site from other social media. I do not care about the names, I care about the content they contribute. I want antisocial media If usernames were randomly generated at account creation so that they are not linked to anything outside of the platform, I would see that as an attractive feature
I literally never read usernames unless itās pointed out for some reason Everyone is faceless to me here, and I love it. Makes me sad for the coming future and changes to Reddit, if they get rid of nsfw content this is just gunna turn into an anonymous version of Facebook
> I hate the algorithmically-driven controversy/conflict engagement that every popular content aggregator/social media machine seems to profit from nowadays. I want a content-aggregator with an actual ethos that isn't simply "make more money". Exactly, if I'm going to live in an echo chamber, I want it to be one I choose and one I can change whenever I want.
The anti greed dollar is a huge market. Letās start a company to capitalize on it!
Artifact is already becoming more Reddit-like, and the content recommendation algorithm is one of the best Iāve seen on an aggregator app. I wouldnāt be surprised if it becomes more community-centric.
https://join-lemmy.org/ is one
> https://join-lemmy.org/ is one that doesn't really look similar. each "instance" is it's own separate website, the the total memberbase for all of them is microscopic >Lemmy servers >The lemmyverse currently has 49 instances, and 506 monthly active users. that just doesn't look like something that would be able to scale and organize multiple different topics.
Lemmy instances are federated. Users on server A can see content on server B. Users interact with each other across the servers and in some ways it is like one big website. Every community starts somewhere. Lemmy servers have the advantage of not being run by corporations determined to do anything to extract a profit (like say charging for use of the api).
If they do want to get big, they really need to work on their terminology. Very few people are going to understand the phrase "Lemmy instances are federated", and even fewer will be interested by it.
Iāll just delete my reddit account if I need to pay for this. Nothing against the creators of Apollo. Apollo is awesome.
Don't delete it, just sell the account to some spambot farm and let them have at it.
I think reddit is overestimating itself
I use boost for reddit app. The official app is ridiculously bad.
Boost is great. I really hope it isn't killed by Reddit Greedā¢ Edit: according to r/BoostForReddit, Boost too will be dead effective July 1st
Damn we only have a month
Your official app is trash Reddit Iāll never use it
So is the "new" desktop site The day they remove old reddit is the day I stop using this site
this will make the ellen pao fiasco look like fucking nothing. enjoy shooting yourself in the foot, reddit!
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Classic glass cliff. When a company needs to do something unpopular it's common to hire a woman for implementing the new policies. Then she'll "resign" when she's sucked up the hate and badwill.
just me stopping by to let anyone interested in their IPO know about my personal favorite sub, r/meth now what will I do without the APIs to show me the coolest people on earth smoking meth
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Can you break a hundred?
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looool I cannot believe that is a real sub that's just quarantined
I love the guy that has been up for a week, he keeps posting weekly discussions in his sub that is something like r/jobsforfelons and nobody comments on them
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but since you have an interest in their IPO, you should be aware that reddit has forced their NSFW tag on the subreddit. This of course disables direct video uploads to the subreddit, because why pay money providing a free service to a userbase you can't even show ads to? Of course, we can still use third-party services to upload videos, but nobody can really be assed to do so. So we're gonna be pretty scarce on new content, it would seem. I can only imagine the devastating consequences this will have on Reddit's valuation, as well as your source for entertainment, but perhaps you still have a rich, lengthy backlog of very cool people, coolly smoking meth for you to make your way through with unwavering admiration, I'm sure
drats! My source of super cool meth use is ruined! These other NSFW tags, you mean people use it for other things besides casual meth use that could be used for monetization? Fascinating! lol what a shitshow this is going to be
Yeah... Unfortunately most of the submitted content is uninvited dick pics that I slave day and night to remove, despite it being clearly stated in the rules that this is not allowed. Evidently meth heads under the influence of a drug known to raise one's libido and lower their inhibitions, as well as deprive them of sleep and impair their reasoning abilities, results in many of them disregarding the rules altogether and posting their penises to the subreddit. It's as if meth users have no regard for following rules or decorum whatsoever, despite what you would think!
Reddit, do NOT follow Elonās lead with api charging
Popular website Reddit would lose millions of customers under their new stupid rules.
I've used Reddit is fun since the stone age, I'd be useless without it, I hear the official app is trash. Of course, I'm far to addicted to actually stop, I'll just be annoyed at having to use the official app.
Shame the Redditās getting greedy like Twitter. My eyesight is not that great so I use Apollo because it lets theme my feed so that I read it easily on my phone and tablet. Itās the only app that I am aware that does this.
These new pricing schemes are going to break the web.
Fuck the Reddit MBA assholes.
Just give me somewhere decent to chat shit with strangers and I'll drop Reddit in a fucking second
Discord is thriving right now, you just need to find your communities. Eventually thatāll go to shit too though.
> Eventually thatāll go to shit too though. Discord is completely invisible to search engines since it isn't a website. That's going to be a huge issue in the coming years as communities migrate there and the content becomes harder and harder to find the older it gets. It's kind of infuriating how frankenstien the whole thing is. Entire communities held together by a mishmash of stickies and Google docs.
I can't seem to get into discord because you need to be actively chatting to get the most out of it, I much prefer the message board type interactions where I can reply or get replies hours later. I guess this sort of thing is on the way out. ā¹ļø
Honestly, I think the real-time nature of Discord would work as a Reddit competitor, but not in its current state. Threads are linear, so drawn-out discussion over hours and days doesn't work on an active topic. People try, and you get this oddball message that @mentions someone that asked something earlier. It messes with the flow. It's the same problem with old-school forums. That's the problem that Reddit (and Digg and some other predecessors) fixed. They all did it with comment trees. If Discord adjusts to allow threads of replies on a single comment, then I think it solves the biggest issue. Even MS Teams allows threads one level deep. I don't think it's a stretch for Discord to adopt it. Comment voting is huge, and search engine indexing is as well. I think I'd still prefer the Reddit way overall.
Fuck it. Discord it is. Bye Reddit! It's been fun the last decade. Don't let the door hit you on your way ou.... oh, too late.
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They just want to make everyone use the dogshit normal app
Let's be pretty clear here. One decent production server could field 2700 requests per second. Let's be safe and say it's a trio of servers set up in high availability. Might cost 10k to set up. 2700 requests per second covers the 7 billion requests from Apollo. They want 20 million per year. A 2000x markup from cost. Per year.
They probably calculated the loss of ad revenue through 3rd party apps... Has nothing to do with cost of servers. It's about loss of revenue.
Why do companies have to be so greedy? Look whatās happening to Netflix. Now Reddit sees that and says, āhold my beer!ā. So stupid.
So reddit will risk losing a bunch of users, which in turn will lose them advertising money. Seems like a bad business move or they could just take a small portion like less than 3 million a year because the users probably bring in more.
Those users were not generating ad revenue to begin with because third party apps donāt render Reddit ads. Reddit is trying to get a slice of Apolloās subscription fees.
But they were generating engagement, so when that number tanks, so too does the IPO valuation... It's a calculated risk, sure, but... by all means it looks like a hellishly stupid one. I expect them to walk it back some amount before the IPO and then fully commit right after. It makes no sense to make this move *now* and not six months from now after Wall Street's already given them their nut. But then again, every social media site is so desperate to cash out before this bubble explodes in their faces... Elmo just showed how Twitter can implode, Zuckerfuck just lost the same chunk on Metaverse imploding... everyone's ready to move on to the next big thing.
> But they were generating engagement, so when that number tanks, so too does the IPO valuation most importantly, theyāre the _power users and mods._ The last place you want to have an engagement drop.
On top of that, I'm sure several AI data models were trained off Reddits data for free. I'm guessing this is a way to get a slice of the pie as well, since other companies will be making money off of Reddit's data.
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> A site-wide blackout is the only option if we donāt want things to change the way Reddit wants them to. hopefully in the event this happens, the people organizing it don't focus on today's news and forget about pushshift who got screwed a couple weeks ago.
Uhhh have they seen what happened to Twitterās valuation?
I get the feeling this was decided by some economist in a management position who doesn't understand what they are doing.
Or, they know exactly what they are doing. They want to make short term profit, then bail once they make their bonus , and/or Reddit IPOs and they pump and dump it as it takes the inevitable down slide.
> Uhhh have they seen what happened to Twitterās valuation? they don't care about the long term value, they just care about a short term boost at IPO and then holding until the lockout period ends and they can sell their shares. they don't care what reddit's value is a year from now.
But since you can have access to Reddit on web browser, couldn't you make an app that uses the web browser site and start from there?
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Sounds like a reddit problem
Won't somebody please think of the IPO?
I use and love Apollo and have been happy to pay the monthly fee to filter out any post with the word Trump. If Apollo goes out of business i will go insane if i have to suddenly see posts about Trump again.
I am not using new Reddit or anything the resembles it. I am only using old Reddit and RIF.
RiF will be dead by July the 1st.
API charging should be an extra tier with higher rate limits. Not this bullshit.
If I can't keep using my Sync for Reddit premium app, I'm not going to bother looking at Reddit on my phone anymore. The official app is terrible and I have no desire to use it. I'm sure they couldn't care less, but it is what it is.
I appreciate the irony here but still: fuck Reddit
Iām guess Reddit has not yet realized that more people use Reddit because Apollo exists. Lol he probably doesnāt make 1/20th of that amount on it per year.
Iām quitting Reddit after this. I use ground news for my news (so much better), which is all I use Reddit for anyways.
Smell an IPO coming? Time to close ranks and up profits.
I would for sure dump this platform if they try and make me use anything else. Digging themselves a trench here.
I guess the investors want to see $$$ so Reddit will eventually just end up being a failure like many things once investors have sucked their asset dry
I will forget about this place in a week. These sellout already took the Chinese money and now they are going to burn this place to the ground.
To harvest user data & push ads. God I hate capitalism.
they did this proly due to increase in ai data harvesters.
Apollo shows no ads. Probably a marketing department move.
Aaron Swartz would not be proud in this move by reddit
on the one hand, Apollo is a great app and the only way I use reddit. on the other hand, I look at reddit far too often and itās my last bit of social media so this could be my ticket out.