What will you do if reddit undoes API changes?

Interested in getting a feel for what people may be likely to do IF reddit reverses their decision regarding API access, or reduces access fees to a reasonable level and 3rd party apps remain sustainable.

While I know the chances of this are extreeeemely slim, until 1st July there is an ever so slight chance this could still happen.

From my perspective, the community harm is done, and those who have left prior to July 1 have left due to principles, not because their app stopped working. As such, I'd be inclined to think most of those migrators would stay here in the fediverse.

But would we see a mass exodus back to reddit if the changes were undone? It's easy to say no, but if it went back to operations as relatively normal, it may be easy to justify going back for some users.

I'd like to think I wouldn't go back. I've deleted content and account from reddit. I'll be happy here so long as there is enough userbase for some discussion.

thedatabug,

Its not like this was the first shitty thing that Reddit have done. Its a platform that has been getting progressively worse for years. I will definitely stay here.

Afkargh,
Afkargh avatar

Honestly, the damage is done. I don’t think I’ll ever feel good about going back to Reddit

CoderKat,
CoderKat avatar

I wanted to migrate in some past controversies, but there never felt like a feasible alternative. And what alternatives existed were usually overrun by the absolute worst kinds of people. The fact that there's a half decent alternative this time makes this time different.

That said, I probably will still check reddit for cases where there simply isn't a Fediverse equivalent (hopefully largely just yet). But I'll minimize my usage and try to avoid giving them advertising money.

1bluepixel,
1bluepixel avatar

I try and take a pragmatic stance.

My desire to find an alternative to Reddit stems in part from a practical aspect. I TRIED using the official app, but it's as bad as Facebook these days and bombards me with ads. The user experience is terrible.

So if the API changes were reversed, that means I'd probably still use Sync to check some super-specialized subs or to look up answers from time to time.

But on the other hand, the damage's been done. I will not use Reddit where there's a viable alternative, and Kbin is not only a viable alternative but actually better for conversation and general discussions. It's a project I'm excited about instead of just using it by pinching my nose.

So I think a large part of the damage is already done. If Spez 100% reversed his decision, it'd still be too late. It's like a boyfriend/girlfriend being supremely shitty to you, then realizing their mistakes and apologizing sincerely... Although you might accept their apology, something about the relationship is already broken.

So I think whatever happens, Reddit has reached the Facebook stage for me. I'm still using Facebook for a few things like staying in touch with some friends or joining events, but the days where I'd go there to find interesting content are long gone.

mrayan,

11 year redditor here and this sums up almost exactly how I feel. There are 2-3 small niche communities that I may go back to if reddit reverses their API changes or at the very least commit to a reasonable rollout period like Christian Selig had proposed. But for my main content aggregation? I'm now fully onboard with this federated model, whether it be kbin, lemmy, or some mix of the two/some other great open source solution.

CoderKat,
CoderKat avatar

Plus honestly it's hard to imagine a sincere apology from Spez at this point. The time for that was near the start of this. Maybe when the blackout started.

At this point, it'd be hard to believe any apology to be sincere as opposed to something scripted.

Endorkend,
Endorkend avatar

Same here.

I've had it with Reddit.

They go all hamfisted in this situation, but when they should do something, they don't.

Besides that, I've been annoyed with the centralization of everything for decades. I grew up in a time BBS and newsgroups ruled the day, before the Internet.

Switching to the Internet then and finding that HALELUJAH, I can access whatever I want without having to rely on the BBS I pay for to pull in the content (same with usenet).

And then in the past 2 decades, motherfuckers started centralizing everything into one place again anyway.

And all this while I've been in IT for just as long and saw the possibility for federated systems being here, with the thing holding it back being the interest into interconnecting selfhosted systems was FAR FAR outweighed by everyone wanting to rule the internet.

So I'm glad we're now at a point most people are seeing what a mistake it was, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Reddits.

Now lets move to federated systems where you can have some actual control on the content you consume and won't be forced to have a load of stuff shoved down your throat for every nibble of content you actually want to consume.

athos77,

For me, it's not just that they screwed up the API changes, it's that they've repeatedly kept doubling down since then.

It's also ... I keep thinking back to Ellen Pao. They brought her in knowing that they wanted her to get rid of FPH and Victoria, knowing that at least the FPH thing was going to make her a target of the misogynistic GamerGate haters and bringing in a woman anyway, and they deliberately and repeatedly refused to give her any public support. It was completely reprehensible, and they cheerfully scapegoated her and kicked her to the curb when it was done.

As bad as that was, I also see elements of the same thing happening here, where this is a highly unpopular change, and there's no one else from reddit speaking up to support spez. I think they're going to have him force through the changes and then kick him to the curb like they did Ellen. They're not going to reverse any of the changes - it's what they want, after all, but they're going to let spez take all the heat and go on their merry way completely unphased.

To be completely honest, I think spez deserves this: his job as CEO is to have vision, manage public relations, and handle crises, and he's miserably failed at all of those. He misunderstood reddit's most valuable assets (it's commentary and the large group of people contributing and moderating the site for free), and he literally paid the API fees for some very profitable and potentially profitable companies to suck every piece of data from reddit; then he publicly targeted small publishers who enhance reddit instead of presenting them as collateral damage of the AI wars (I suspect to avoid bringing attention to his incredible lack of vision in letting everyone freely harvest data for their own lucrative products). And he's clearly failing in the PR and managing crises front as well. But I truly believe that everyone at reddit is perfectly happy to let spez do this thing that they want done, and then they'll throw him away when it's done in an attempt to appease the users.

Anyway, your question is "what will I do if reddit undoes the API changes". Given my beliefs, I simply don't see how I could possibly trust reddit management ever again. And trust is a really big thing with me; I don't think I could ever go back.

Unless you're reddit management, here to gauge user temperament, in which case I will totally return if the API changes are undone, yes, of course I will, just trust me!

PrunesMakeYouPoop,

Well said. The Pao kerfuffle is why I left reddit.

The_Cameron,
The_Cameron avatar

That situation was 100% out of the Glass Cliff playbook, just cowardly.

islandmonkeee,
islandmonkeee avatar

Yeah, not a healthy working team there exactly.

ulu_mulu,
@ulu_mulu@lemmy.world avatar

I'll stay here, I don't tolerate being treated like sh*it as they did, it's totally unacceptable. Even if they apologized, they shown their true colors, we know they would be lying.

I came here a couple of weeks ago and since then I did my best to be involved in lemmy communities so as to not miss reddit, and you know what? It worked :)

I'm not deleting my account because I want my data first (sent a GDPR request), but I don't really care anymore about what they do, nor I care about reddit as a platform, engagement here is much higher quality.

Still following news because it's entertaining, I love how the community got creative with the protest.

Beardedsausag3,
Beardedsausag3 avatar

With my extremely limited, northern England born n bred vocabulary - fucken could not have said it any better. +1

auhu,
auhu avatar

I am willing to die for "fucken" to replace "fucking" in the dictionary

ironic_elk,

Wish granted. You have 24 hours.

hydra,

Thank you monkey's paw

LoafyLemon,
LoafyLemon avatar

Fucken great!

polygon,
polygon avatar

At this point it's not even about the API changes anymore. Spez would need to be replaced to even consider it. He's shown what he thinks of the community, he's made a tour of all the tech news sites outright lying and misrepresenting how users feel, he's killed several small businesses for app developers, and is currently authorizing the removal of entire teams of mods (and locking their accounts).

All of the problems with Reddit start at the top. No band-aids are going to fix that problem. Spez is the disease, and Reddit is the rot that follows. Twitter can never recover under Elon, and Reddit will continue to decline under Spez.

I'm out. If any Lemmy/kbin admin pulls some shit like Elon or Spez, you just move to another instance. I'm done with the Silicon Valley style "burn it down for the payday" mind set because VC firms have the CEO by the balls.

jacktherippah,

Meh. I'm staying here. Reddit has been getting worse. The future should be federated, not centralized, so hopefully that stuff Reddit just did has very little chance of happening again.

MrOrange,
MrOrange avatar

Agree 100%. Also, the API changes were the start but what's transpired since has shown everyone what a truly awful bunch u/spez et al are... Lying, manipulative human shit stains.

LostCause,

Laugh at the fools who believe they won‘t just make the same changes in increments instead. Oh a reasonable level? Let me introduce inflation to you. Now pay more and make us content we can sell serf. That‘s the entire purpose of your existence in the eyes of a corporation.

Lippy,
Lippy avatar

Nothing will change my decision now. The trust is permanently broken and the damage is irreversible.

They've shown that they won't hesitate to kick out mods at a whim even when it goes against the community's wishes. Even if the API changes are walked back, Spez resigns and the company apologises, that's no longer enough to undo what they've destroyed. Reddit is done.

I was originally going to simply delete my Reddit account on the 30th. After seeing the farce unravel, I'm also going to nuke all content I've created on that platform at the same time. Scorched earth seems to be the only answer now and it's the least I can do after the continued disrespect they've shown to their users, mods and especially the third party app devs. They're nothing without the communities and the content that they've produced.

tikitaki,
tikitaki avatar

in case anyone wants to know how to do this

Yall, remember to mass edit your post history at least a couple of times before deleting your account. It will take a while (it took various hours to nuke 8k+ comments from my history) and time is getting shorter as we probably won't have access to automated tools once July comes.

Remember that Reddit complies with GDPR by anonimising your comments, not deleting them. If you want to nuke your post history, you have to do it now that you have the chance.

PowerDeleteSuite, Redact.dev, shreddit should all do edit+delete.

I personally used this fork, is slower but gets 100% of your comments and you can deselect the delete check to do more rounds of editing to reduce the risk of rollbacks (I've been doing a round every few days for a while):

https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite

Veraxus, (edited )
Veraxus avatar

I do not recommend Redact. Reddit cuts it off after rewriting fewer than 20 comments. If I have to manually edit thousands of comments, I will; but I'd rather automate it.

Shreddit doesn't seem to do mass edits, just deletions. Edits are safer than deletions (which Reddit seems to be restoring) and send a stronger message.

I'm looking into Power Delete Suite now.

EDIT: Ok, so Power Delete Suite gets blocked by Reddit's rate-limiting. Thankfully, it's Open Source, so I copied the code into ViolentMonkey and wrapped the pd.children.edit internals in a setTimeout() with a 2000ms delay, and that has been running successfully for hours (I also added a handler to alert me if I got any rate-limit messages in the response text, just-in-case).

tikitaki,
tikitaki avatar

let me know about your research. i'm looking to do this in the next couple of days. i found that comment on reddit. i've worked with the reddit api before and presumably i could make my own script to do it.. but there are probably complications i'm not aware of that these tools have had to deal with

Buelldozer,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.world avatar

PDS has worked quite well for me in the past. I've been in the habit of nuking all my Reddit comments every 2-3 years just to clean up unintended data leakage.

minnieo,
minnieo avatar

be careful, they are restoring deleted posts and comments. rewrite your comments to nonsense or a protest message with redact or power suite delete

rememberence,

I don't want to go back. I miss my subreddit - hell let's be honest, I miss /Reddit/ - but... Seeing how spez has acted and treated... /everyone/...

Like... We used the site, we provided the content, and the conversations, and the knowledge, the info, the jokes, the memes... That was all us. And it's like... I dunno he wants to eat his cake and have it to. He wants us there both for the content we provide as well as to monetize us and in a way I get it but it's like... ... When reddit was just the background... "the background" you didn't really think about it so much, you know? But it's like when Elon took over Twitter suddenly it's not just "Twitter" in the background it's now "Elon musks Twitter" and it's front and center and sleezy and scuzzy and you just want to not be a part of it anymore.

That feels like reddit now. Like how spez has been acting just makes it all feel dirty and horrible.

And I /miss/ reddit, I miss my subreddits. I miss googling any random idea and aphending reddit to the end of it and not even thinking about if it would show up on there because you just knew it would. Like it wasn't even a question... And I /miss/ that. So much. ... But it's like... /tainted/ now. I hate seeing reddit results from Google searches now.

And learning about how federation works reminds me of reading shadow run back in the day and how the matrix worked there with little nodes of info all talking to each other. In a way, then, the fediverse, to /me/, feels like the future...

So I'm willing to stay here and wait for it to grow and comment a little more than I ever did on reddit. Because I don't want to go back. And I don't think we should.

CheshireSnake, (edited )
@CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Bring your subs here. I'm sure you'll find new subscribers in lemmy/kbin. We're still growing so it might not be immediate, but I'm confident that as the fediverse matures and it gets simpler for people more will come. :)

I'm staying. The community has been nothing short of amazing. I don't get stressed when commenting or discussing things with people unlike reddit where a lot of interactions (not all, of course) are directly or indirectly motivated by karma.

Hell,I'd never have commented this if I were on reddit for fear of someone coming along and debating what I've said. Lol.

TimeSquirrel,
TimeSquirrel avatar

That's something I noticed on Reddit too. Half of everyone's existence there seems to be just for going fishing for possible arguments to get into.

CheshireSnake,
@CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Yeah. Most of my comments ended with arguing with someone so I started commenting less and less. Ended up a lurker. It's very different here.

Nougat,

I'll fight you if it makes you feel nostalgic.

wizardbeard,

https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc

CIWS-30,

Agree. I'm not even sure if they're sincere half the time. Sometimes it honestly seems like they're just trying to start a fight and don't believe what they're actually "saying". On Kbin and Lemmy, it's a different experience. People engage positively or neutrally, and actually have civil discussions. It's unusual to say the least, but still very welcome.

n1ckn4m3,
n1ckn4m3 avatar

In a world where Steve Huffman has called reddit's data "his data to sell", it has become abundantly clear that he has absolutely no respect for the fact that it is his users and moderators that create the community -- all that he and the admins do is create a system whereby the community can create and curate content. Without users, he has a big expensive and empty server.

It's not "his data", it's the community's data. The fact that he's acting like he owns all of it pretty much sums up why I overwrote and deleted all of my content on reddit, and it is precisely why I will never provide free content for that website ever again.

smokinjoe,
smokinjoe avatar

I'll probably go back from time to time to:

  1. Demonstrate that them reversing course wasn't for naught
  2. Steal content to post here to help foster communities/magazines until the next idiotic decision that drives users away

Ultimately, this is my new home. But I'm not against swiping content to furnish it with.

bdonvr,

Lmao even if it weren't just no out of principle, after spez's comments about how Twitter under Elon is a model for Reddit to look to - why would I waste an ounce of energy on such a platform?

mack123,

The damage is done and the reddit project has failed. Reddit wil die the slow death of the abandoned, slowly losing relvance over time.

I think many reddit users have been curious about the fedverae, but nor ready to move. Or ready to put in the effort to learn. This certainly describes me. Reddit's actions were the push I needed.

So now we build something new and exciting. Reddit will just become the place we talk about in the greybeard threads a few years from now. That site we used to know.

NevermindNoMind,

This describes me as well, curious about the fedaverse, but not so much that I'd actually go through the trouble to look into it, especially with the, in retrospect completely inaccurate, comments on reddit dismissing mastadon/lemmy/kbin as "too complicated." The blackout got me to break my reddit habbit and create a lemmy account. Now I'm trying out Kbin.

What I think is really important is that Kbin/Lemmy are fun and exciting new projects. I didn't just find a Reddit replacement, I found something new with a vision and that people are invested in and are actively building from the ground up, and I feel a desire to contribute what I can. For the first time in a long time I am excited about new thing on the internet. I didn't realize how much the corporate consolidation of social media had turned it into a drag. I used to be active on Reddit in various communities, but in the last few years had turned into a lurker, mindlessly scrolling repetitive content to kill time. But being part of the Kbin/Lemmy communities is actually fun. Maybe its just me, but I think that might be a big part of Reddit's eventual downfall. If Reddit and Kbin/Lemmer were simply equivalents, I could imagine eventually going back to Reddit. But their not, here real people are talking and building communities, on Reddit corporations are trying to make money off bot farmed content and the illusion of open communities. I just can't imagine myself going back to the latter.

somniumx,

At this point, I'd be more likely to use facebook or geocities. Or start talking with strangers on a train. Sure, I miss some of my niche communities that didn't make the jump to kbinlemmy - but not enough to go back on my principles.
If a Google search spins out Reddit as a source for a solution, fine. Not making my life harder than I need to. But hanging out, generating data and content? Nope. Done.

Latecoere,
@Latecoere@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

When this whole thing kicked off I was kinda pissed off at reddit but I assumed things could be resolved amicably and we'd go back to normal pretty soon. I certainly wasn't considering leaving reddit or joining the alternatives. But since then the actions and comments of Spez and the rest of the Reddit higher ups have disgusted me enough to leave their platform. Dunno if I'll go back but it's looking doubtful. I just don't trust them anymore.

DestroyerOfWorlds,

Trust is gone, fuck reddit.com

print it on a t-shirt

Zednix,
@Zednix@lemmy.ca avatar

Fuck Spez, that mongrel needs to be shit canned.

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