The blackout is starting to have a financial impact on Reddit, but we must stay dark!

If the performance weakness continues for a week or two, the agency would start recommending decreasing spend with Reddit or directing it to other platforms.

After the blackout, we will be closely monitoring user behavior on Reddit and guide clients when we can unpause,” said Freddy Dabaghi, managing director at Stagwell-backed Crispin Porter Bogusky, which has asked clients to stop campaigns, depending on their client goals.

Lawliss,

I love how these articles always frame the strike as "These needy people are mad because Reddit is now charging for something that was free before." Motherfucker, we're mad because the price was unreasonable and they were unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Third party app developers even agreed that charging for API usage was a reasonable thing but they expected the cost to be reasonable, as well.

totallynotsocsa,

On NPR they did interview the Apollo dev at least.

OofShoot,
@OofShoot@beehaw.org avatar

They still got the frame completely wrong, unless there's a different radio segment I didn't hear. The one I heard was mostly from an expert I had never heard from before who made it seem like "the developers" were mad because they had to pay. They included a single throwaway line from Chris. (I think that's the Apollo dev's name.) No mention they the pricing was clearly intended to be unreasonable.

totallynotsocsa,

There was a segment today, and one yesterday where they actually put Christian on air for a bit longer and he explained things a little better. The one today was definitely obnoxious. But whatever. There's a lot of nuance in why the API decision is annoying and some of it really does boil down to old users feeling betrayed or having diverging preference. I definitely feel betrayed, and have a preference not to be tracked on my semi-anonymous internet forum.

But to someone who hasn't spent a decade+ on Reddit, the argument makes sense I think. The API does represent an opportunity cost. Whether that opportunity cost is grounded in reality, or MBA brain rot is probably outside the scope for All Things Considered

QHC,
QHC avatar

I am mad because the leadership of Reddit thinks they own the content generated by their users. It's a complete breach of trust and respect for users. That is not the kind of company I want to support or use their products. It's very similar to why a lot of people have left platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The API changes are just the inciting incident to build momentum for something better. This would not have happened if it wasn't preceeded by years of similar lies and complete disregard for the users (including mods, disabled users and developers, who Reddit does not give any shits about at all).

xTechDeath,

It's bullshit fr. I also haven't seen one major news article report on that god awful AMA where Spez tried to lie about what Christian said and then claim he was blackmailed but was met with audio recordings of himself that proved he was lying

kofe,

I know it's not "major" in the sense of traditional news outlets, but Philip DeFranco is covering it at least

dojan,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

I'm mad because of the slander.

The reason the price is unreasonable is because they're butthurt that OpenAI and other companies have used the API to pull a LOT of text for machine learning datasets. They are sad that they didn't get a slice of that cake.

aragon,

Reddit's soul was slowly drained off life. It's better here than going back to Zombieland. That's said, I will grab some popcorn and watch this slow train wreck called future of Reddit.

tekchic,

Agreed. 12 year account, I refuse to go back or even give them a click. I'll find my way in the fediverse just fine. It'll grow with care and users.

darkstar,

Speaking of popcorn, I'm literally going to go make some right now!

Jessica,
@Jessica@lemmy.world avatar

A new blackout tracker just dropped on the Discord: https://darktotal.com/

briongloid,
@briongloid@aussie.zone avatar

This one is much nicer.

naneek,

I’ve also been liking https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

Jessica,
@Jessica@lemmy.world avatar

Oh that's a great one as well! The graph bottom right tracking individual subs over time is super helpful

mmmcheesums,

That’s very useful. I scrolled through the out of blackout list and was disappointed to find quite a few of my most-visited subreddits were public again

SpezCanLigmaBalls,
@SpezCanLigmaBalls@lemmy.world avatar

It almost makes me more upset that the subreddits are going public and makes me resist going back even more. It’s obviously having some sort of impact from that article about advertisers. Like, do mods really need to have their subreddit public that much? Go touch some god damn grass It’s irritating

Kyoyeou,
@Kyoyeou@lemmy.world avatar

Confused looking at r/gtafk jumping every hour from public to restricted to private to public to....

SpaceNoodle,

Mod fight, probably.

potterman28wxcv,

I love how this contrasts with the CEO statement that many subreddits would go back to normal after the 2 days

darkstar,

Thank you for sharing!

ps, which discord is this?

Jessica,
@Jessica@lemmy.world avatar

https://discord.gg/reddark

crowsby,
crowsby avatar

[Advertisers] didn’t want to become the subject of users’ opinions about Reddit’s decisions.

—Anonymous media buyer

I mean, that's the cheat code right there. Reddit's decision-making has traditionally been swayed more by advertiser sentiment than something mushy and ephemeral like boring old doing the right thing or taking community interests into consideration.

If the protests could find a meaningful way to put pressure on the advertisers, we'd be reading a mea culpa from Steve Huffman within the day.

QHC,
QHC avatar

Reddit's decision-making has traditionally been swayed more by advertiser sentiment than something mushy and ephemeral like boring old doing the right thing or taking community interests into consideration.

I don't know how long you were on Reddit before this, but there's some recency bias here. Reddit and Huffman in particular used to be all on the "free speech" and "community first" kind of ideals. Then they realized they could make a ton of money by literally selling out to the pressure of advertisers.

The decline was many years in the making. This is exactly why it's not just about a single incident. It's a lack of trust that deteriorated and was finally embraced fully by that disastrous AMA.

menemen,

Protests and boycots can work. Just look at how Wizards of the Coast made a 180° turn with their changes regarding the Open Gaming License.

sunspider,

Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.

Oughtakyk,

Nice, I won't go back to reddit after Apollo shut down

davi,

I just moved to Lemmy after staying on Reddit for almost 8 years! Hopefully more people will migrate too :)

Social media should never be centralized and for-profit

HerrLewakaas,

Moved today. A big part of what I enjoy on reddit is reading comments and with how active communities are over here, I just might be here to stay!

Rolldach,

me too. also really nice to just read normal commentsand not just upvote farming comments.

Sans_outside, (edited )

Once Reddit restricts it API usage and Stock goes public it will slowly just become another Digg clone.

GilbertGarfield,

I officially left reddit. Totally done with it. I remember when the Digg exodus happened. No one thought things would turn out the way it did for Digg. There will always be users on reddit, and who knows, maybe they will use AI to aggregate content to fill the void for those who have left. It's all about the targeted ads in the end; they don't care who submits content, they care about the views.

Schaedelbach,

Holy Moly! Only 9000 of about 100000 Subs reportedly participate in the protest! Not even 10 percent! Ugh!

Dadbot,

65% of the top 1000 subreddits. . Pretty impressive (and impactful hopefully).

skillissuer,

yall are going around on the internet without ad blocker in current year?

Black616Angel,

In this adconomy?

EsotericEmbryo,

Right? It's like sleeping with strangers without a condom on. Even the FBI recommends an adblocker now.

animist,

Also using my VPN's DNS to block adware on phone and desktop as well as Pi-hole at home for guests who don't use a VPN

daniskarma,

I've used an adblock for more than a decade now. At work, due to security reasons, the way we connect to internet is quite restricted and I don't have an adblock. Internet experience is terrible with that, like unusable. Most websites you barely can find what you are looking for, and the annoyance is constant. It's like a nightmare every time I have to use it that way.

Nogami,

I never gave them money, but I gave them free content. That is now done and gone. As soon as Apollo's API is deleted, I'm editing all of my old comments and posts to remove any content and let readers know what. Some of it was very helpful stuff to help others troubleshoot PC and server issues.

donnnnnb,

Does internet archive preserve these? I agree it's attracting clicks for reddit and should be removed, but a lot of really good information is about to be lost if people do this en masse.

Nogami,

I think that's the point though. I'd rather have all of my posts be edited to vanish instead of contributing them for free to an evil corporation.

donnnnnb, (edited )

Yeah but reddit shouldn't be getting clicks or revenue from the internet archive since it's just a snapshot. I hate to see knowledge destroyed, whatever the reason. I just hope there was an effort to preserve it.

I can't help but feel reddit is in a "heads I win, tails you lose" position right now with its users. They don't really need us. The formula for user engagement has been perfected by all the other social medias that came before it and in a short time I think reddit will be the same. Without an archive it seems like this is inflicting disproportionate harm on the community.

Wiping your account would reduce their clicks from searches, but as someone who uses a lot of open source software, this is a huge loss for all the tech help posts. If I could just search the archive for it though, that'd be great.

jcb2016_,

@Nogami @Jessica You realize that id you delete your account that has all that content the comments and post will be there but the author will say ,[deleted] nobody will know it came from you only reddit will know

Nogami,

That's why I'm not deleting my account, only editing my posts to something like "I have revoked Reddit's license for this post due to the actions of Reddit's management towards 3rd party app authors. You may contact me on Lemmy instead".

jcb2016_,

@Nogami Sweet yes I updated my Bio on reddit to point to lemmy and Mastodon. I'm happy here

stankbucket,

That's why you use shreddit. It can go through and remove all of your old posts. I used to have it running on a chron to remove all comments that had no or negative votes after a few weeks. You can actually set it to edit the comment into gibberish as well to muck with the SEO.

darkstar,

Are you going to manually edit all posts and comments or is there a tool one can use to bulk edit?

Nogami,

Power Delete Suite is the one people seem to be recommending, though I'm sure there are others.

dax,

This is really nice, if the protests start to hurt their bottom line, they are going to be much more inclined to listen. I didn't expect these blackouts to do something.

animist,

Or even better, fire the MBAs who came up with the stupid idea in the first place

100_kg_90_de_belin,

3rd-party devs recognized that paying for API access is reasonable, but they rightfully objected to the pricing.

The Internet is moving towards a subscription-based model, mimicking the one it opposed at the beginning. Or to put it more succinctly: app subscription are the new bills.

animist,

Guess I should have worded better. I actually like subscription-based membership if it means we remove advertisements and data collection/sales. I personally think spez is lying about reddit not being profitable. They are probably raking it in via ad sales and selling harvested data.

Kleinbonum,

I think the internet at its best is when it's ad-free, not harvesting and selling user data, and free to use.

Wikipedia is one of the most successful projects on the internet, and it works exactly like that.

Hypothetically, I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of compensation model. But experience shows that as soon as you introduce a for-profit model, people in charge will eventually ask the question "hey, if this is making money, couldn't we squeeze much more money out of it!?!?"

animist,

Oh I'm with you on that. I meant payments more just to pay staff salaries and for servers. Definitely 100% against profiting.

Cavemanfreak,

Even if it was true, the decision to host all images and videos themselves must have helped with that lol.

PC509,

Yea, and they really implemented that poorly, too. Reddit video has to be the worst video playback (when it does play back) on the internet since 1996...

PetrichorBias,
@PetrichorBias@lemmy.one avatar

I don't think the idea is stupid, just poorly executed. From Reddir's POV, this makes sense (why wouldn't it?). They could have done this in a much better way.

Tsunami45chan,
@Tsunami45chan@lemmy.world avatar

Don't forget that in the end of the month and July 1st the third party apps will disappear on reddit. That means more redditors will to like lemmy or squablles etc.

skillissuer,

deleted_by_author

    •
    schnapsidee,

    Do you have a source on this? 5 days ago the message was "P.S. old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere".

    skillissuer,

    i indeed have no source for that, so i deleted this

    gmmxle,

    A few months ago, the message was also "Reddit is not going to start charging for API access."

    I'm not saying old.reddit.com is going away in the very near future, but I also wouldn't put too much trust into whatever spez says on any given day.

    schnapsidee, (edited )

    I don't disagree, but there's a big difference between "it might stop working sometime in the future, there's no way to know for sure" and "it will stop working somewhere around the date the API changes are made".

    The first is a good guess, the second is just flat out wrong. Look, I don't like the reddit admins any more than the next guy, but there's no need to resort to straight up lying.

    gmmxle,

    Yeah, we're not in disagreement here.

    animist,

    And reddit in mobile browsers

    DulyNoted,

    Yeah, this is what I'm most interested to see. Right now it's a forward thinking, principled thing.

    Once Relay, RiF, Apollo, BaconReader, and all the others go defunct, a lot more people are going to take notice. If they use the awful official app, they're going to realize Reddit has changed dramatically and not for the better, and they've just been shielded from the worst if it with their 3rd party apps.

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