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Reddit communities with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Digg was a site that was a lot like reddit, it was incredibly popular until they did a site redesign that many users hated and they were unable to roll back, engagement went way down, users looked for alternatives, and reddit got most of the refugees. I haven't been back on digg for many years.
I thought reddit learned its lesson from digg given they kept legacy old.reddit.com running even after their own redesign, but they failed to remember that 3rd party interfaces to their API is almost the same thing; users like interfacing with their social media using the UI/UX design they chose and grew accustomed to. If they take that away, it risks alienating users and driving them to alternatives.
If reddit was smart they'd make it so that people with reddit gold can keep using API access instead of locking them out entirely.
But that would be contrary to Reddit's actual goals, which is to monetize their user's data as much as possible. They can't do that if third party apps are providing a better experience, so they are trying to force everyone to use only the website and apps that are directly controlled by Reddit. So they can track our behavior and sell more ads.
I read somewhere that a lot of the API pricing has to do with people training LLM's on reddit comments for free; reddit wants to get paid for it. I guess they'll just have to scrape instead. /shrug
There's still a lot of tracking that can be done via api calls but you're right that they lose ad revenue and UI/click info.
That is the claim from Reddit, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny because LLMs are not using the API to get content from sites like Reddit. They are scraping data from the entire Internet, much like Google does.
Even if it was using the API, however, it's still a bullshit excuse because Reddit would be fully within their rights to enforce existing rate limits or other TOS violations. Nobody would have been complaining if Reddit revealed that the Apollo app or OpenAI were abusing the rules that were already in place and everyone agreed to. Actually, nobody would even be complaining if the pricing and timeline for the changes was anything close to reasonable!
What reddit doesn't seem to get that for many people old.reddit (or a 3rd party app) is reddit for them. If they take that away they're forcing them to learn a new UI or to get a new app. It's naive to think that everyone is just going to switch to the official ones. Might aswell find an alternative to reddit and learn to use that.
It's not just about learning the new interfaces...I've used the new site design and have heard the official app is just as bad about shoving ads down our throats. Baconreader made ads at least fairly unobtrusive, but with all the drama I've decided: fuck it. I appreciate Lemmy and other decentralized options for being user-funded rather than reliant on corporations