As usual another insightful article from Ars. It’s nothing short of remarkable how cowardly and selfishly Reddit management is treating people.
To the reddits still closed: “Don’t open up again like we say, and we’ll just appoint new mods that follow our orders.”
Reddit management stands to gain tens of millions (Never work again in your life amounts of money) based on free content provided by users and free moderation provided by users.
Those users won’t see a single cent of that money. Not one cent. Ever. For all of their free labour that reddit takes for granted and brushes off concerns about. Reddit is the Nestle of the internet now.
It's funny how he calls the moderators landed gentry, when he is the one benefitting from the mods' unpaid labor, all because they wanted to maintain their community, and then calls them squatters. In my culture, that sort of language means that he's trying to mock the moderators for being squatters "aspiring to be landed gentry"... then if you put his comments about owning slaves in an apocalyptic scenario into perspective... honestly I have no words left.
And all those "subtle insults" for the community just makes me wonder, why do people even want to benefit him, or be associated with him? This man was the ultimate reason why I left, not even the fact that I was a 3rd party user.
Exactly! I was a bit on the fence in the beginning, figured I would survive the demise of baconreader and use the web. Then they played the game with blocking the mobile browser, restoring deleted comments and resubbing, which is bonkers. Now with the latest news, there is no way for me to support this company. After 13 years I am done.
Dude is an absolute narcissist. The way he understands the world is in leader-follower hierarchies. He likes the position of power he's in and absolutely can't stand there are other people with power, especially if those people's power is a necessity for maintaining something rather than ruling something.
He can't understand third party app developers do it because they love reddit and want to make it easier and more fun to use. No, they must be doing it because they can't build another reddit and want to feel like they own something they can't. He can't understand moderators are mostly people who are trying to keep the communities they love alive against all sorts of situations which can drive members away. No, they must be doing it because they want to have power over people, and the more their community seems to like them, the more proof it is of how well the moderator manipulated them.
Is this really accurate? I get the feeling that most people don't really care about stuff like this, and don't want to be inconvenienced by having to leave Reddit and move elsewhere -- although it is interesting that mods in particular are leaving. I wonder what kind of effect that'll have down the road.
That was a pretty well written piece. I'm skeptical reddit dies because of all this that said I was a daily user for 16 years and im 7 days "sober" now and my being here is a sign of sorts. I want the time line where Aaron is CEO.
@halo5 What I see many comment on Reddit on is that they don’t necessarily have an issue with 3rd party apps going away or the API becoming a paid feature. I can understand that although I am an Apollo user since day one, and to me Reddit is Apollo. The problem is though, none of those are the key issue here anymore. It’s not about Apollo or APIs any longer, it’s about poor leadership and corporate greed. This is what a big portion of the community there is not getting. Even if they reversed course tomorrow, I’d still be hard pressed to return or ever give even a cent to Reddit because now I loathe the company behind it.
To me I think the scariest part is the unequal power dynamic of value-adders (contributors, content creators, and users) and administration. I'm so worried because reddit feels like the last remaining bastion of un-SEO'd, unsponsored information written by real human beings. Users don't have profit motives and instead care about sharing information in our shared "town square", but it turns out the owners of that space can and will revoke access to that information if it helps them make money.
Reddit is the proverbial, contemporary Library of Alexandria. Please don't set it on fire, guys...
Seeing all the recent posts here about people finding themselves subbed to places they unsubscribed from, as well as deleted comments coming back is what sold me to not return at all.
I haven't been back except for a few minutes on Wednesday. Most of my subs I was following were still dark. I had unsubbed from all that weren't participating in the protest (unless for good reason) and may go back to see if I was resubbed, but will not stay. Have also been wanting to use shreddit to delete everything, just haven't had the time.
Can confirm that I got resubbed to r/funny after removing it last week. Reddit is definitely tampering with its users now. Can't wait for the GDPR complaint if they decide to restore deleted comments pre-protest.
Reddit's biggest asset is its community. Charging for its API may be a necessary evil to survive an uncertain future, but Reddit's attitude against its own community isn't. Reddit is burning bridges on its quest for cash without showing an ounce of sympathy. That has brewed unprecedented furor amongst hardcore users and detracted from Reddit's effectiveness for more casual users, too.
That's it right there. Everyone gets that reddit needs to charge for API. But their attitude towards the very people who worked to make reddit what it is are being crapped on
I couldn't agree more, I have no problem with charging for API use they paid to develop it so charging for it is more than fair enough, but setting the price at literally millions of dollars (for the likes of Apollo) is absolutely absurd and then giving the affected parties 30 days to figure out what the hell they were going to do is so dishonest and underhanded. And then spez's completely out of touch comments basically calling us all idiots that are just going to fall into line because the lord says so was the smega sprinkles on the whole shit sundae.
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