“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”

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[–] 172 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (9 children)

If it wasn't hurting them they wouldn't be doing damage control.

It's working, keep it up.

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  • [–] 52 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    It's seriously hilarious that the "damage control" has been more damaging than the blackout itself

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  • [–] 36 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Ironically, if Reddit has been up front and said they were killing third party apps, and kept their mouths shut they would have faired better. For a stupid play like this, speaking only makes it worse. This is going to be taught in business school on how to kill a business.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    They could have even gotten third party apps to pay for API access. They just needed to set a fair rate and a workable timeline for the change.

    Instead, they said "we're charging $20 million starting next month. Good luck trying to stay afloat with those sudden costs!"

    Reddit could have increased their profits and kept users/moderators happy, but they chose Burn It All Down instead.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Definitely I would have gone back if not for the complete and total disrespect spez has shown towards the community

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Honestly I think every time spez says something stupid it convinces another wave of Redditors to check out Lemmy

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    [–] 65 points 3 years ago

    funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is

    If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.

    The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it's EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

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  • [–] 55 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Mir offers another business metaphor for the tension on Reddit: “If you have a really good music venue, but you break relations with every notable artist, you’re not going to be a very successful venue. You need to really prioritize the needs of the folks providing the value on your platform.”

    Brilliant. Reddit looks out at a crowd of people at a packed show and says "ok we could lose 5%". But those are the ones who return another night as musicians. And you cant run a music venue long term with open mic 7 nights per week.

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  • [–] 42 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).

    The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    He's so egotistical about it. Insults mods as "landed gentry" and users' concerns as "noise" - but those are literally the people that have created this "valuable dataset" he's coveting so greedily.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    That's why I nuked all my posts and edited every one of my comments to point to kbin / lemmy before deleting my account. They may revert my changes, but I at least wanted to try to prevent them from benefiting from me in any way.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    Except that it already has been. They've already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.

    They didn't pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It's no great loss.

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  • [–] 42 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Corrected headline: The Reddit API Cash Grab is Breaking Reddit

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    [–] 34 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I hope Redditors don't cave and cease protesting, clearly it's working if Reddit has to force subs to reopen.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I haven't been on since the 10th and I was on it near constantly before that. If reddit sync isn't going to be around 10 days from now then I have no plans to use the site anything like I used to. I literally have no desire to learn their crappy app and lose the curated experience I had set up for myself. The only redditing I plan for the future is googling for specific questions in niche communities.

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    [–] 32 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    I want it to hurt them. I want it to fail. But I fear they're doing this now because they've run the numbers and are pretty sure the vocal minority that will leave permanently won't be noticed in a month.

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  • [–] [S] 47 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Look, I am happy as long as there are enough people on lemmy and kbin to have a fun website here. I can go and visit reddit now and then to see what kind of stuff they're upvoting, that's not a problem. But I want the potentially better alternatives to grow.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    Well, two things about that. In their interviews, Huffman says this decision making is based on Elon Musk at Twitter. I think this implies that Huffman is not basing this on numbers but on ideology and an example set by Musk. It's simply "If I'm a rich tech bro and a richer tech bro does x, I can become a richer tech bro by copying them!"

    Secondly, they can crunch the numbers, it doesn't mean they are right, or that they are not subject to change in unexpected ways. Digg V4 was also a calculated decision, but they greviously miscalculated.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I doubt anyone on the Reddit payroll tells spez the unvarnished truth right now. Musk's employees infamously curate their interactions with him. I read somewhere about one (I want to say working in info-sec for Tesla) who kept an extra monitor with a Matrix style scroll of bullshit because it matched Musk's perception of what a busy person in that field should have up.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    To be fair, there was a viable and easy to use alternative (Reddit). And the community was largely tech savvy.

    Today there are more computer users, so the average tech literacy is higher, but the tech literacy of the average computer user is lower. People want slick, easy to use, centralised solutions.

    I'm not too concerned about this thought. I think realistically the fediverse could achieve a critical mass to keep it going, but won't be too large that it becomes just a bunch of noise (like Reddit).

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    There are fewer computer users, when you look at it by proportion of the population, since most people who aren't into PC gaming, programming, video editing and similar have switched to just using phones and tablets.

    That said, there are still plenty enough people to keep the fediverse going, and frankly I don't think it needs to be nearly as unintuitive to the average user as it is. That's a design problem.

    Granted, I've thought the same of Linux for ages. It could be as intuitive and user friendly as windows... Except the people who create it are largely nerds who cater to themselves and fellow nerds, and who even take pride in using a relatively inaccessible system, which results in both the absence of basic features (like no color blind mode! In 2023! C'mon) and forums that are mean and condescending to anyone who asks a question (not everyone is like this, of course - there are people who genuinely try to help others get into Linux - but there are enough other people doing the opposite that it's very unpleasant to deal with as a newbie.)

    All of which is to say, whether the fediverse can become mainstream or not depends on whether it can overcome its own nerd culture and prioritize ease of use. I hope it will, but Linux hasn't yet, even after all these years (although it is a little better, arguably, at least). We'll see I guess.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Regular users don't care about the mod drama. The real backlash will start on July 1st when all the apps stop working.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    I think that is true that most people will not leave reddit. I’m in a subreddit called redditalternatives, and lately not many people are posting in it anymore. It definitely feels like a niche thing, but I think it’s okay. Reddit won’t last forever, and in the meantime, we can be seeing if fediverse is the way forward. This isn’t the first time reddit screwed up and it won’t be the last.

    They’re also I think trying to become like tiktok and give lots of forever scrollable content, but I think tiktok/youtube shorts already fill that niche

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    [–] 22 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    “Any plan that involves endless and continuous growth is bound to run into scale issues, which is where I think Reddit and Twitter are running into problems,” Mir says. “You can’t inflate the balloon forever. It will pop at some point.”

    I'm looking at you too, Netflix.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    Reddit’s plans—driven by an urge to make the company more profitable as it inches toward going public

    Correction: Reddit's plan is driven by an urge to make the company profitable.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Glad it is doing something.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    It boggles my mind that I read this sentence near the end of the article:

    "Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want."

    This isn't a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. "fill their needs.... with advertising."

    Nobody has "advertising needs." It shows how fucked-up the internet has become when a journalist writes something like this unironically, without even attempting to explain themselves. They just assume everyone believes they have advertising needs. Unreal.

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