Yes, but reddit is unique in the social media companies in that Twitter (pre-Elon) and facebook at least had to pay a shit ton of money to get people to moderate.
It's basically "no one cares as long as the trains run on time." In the extreme, I would bet that it's single-digits of TikTok users that actually make content. Reddit is probably not even that far from that. This move, let's piss off our unpaid moderators and the users that make all of our content, is going to effect even the normies.
Also a lot of the normies use those 3rd party apps that are going to cease to exist on June 30 and are not going to be happy with Reddit's "official" substitute. For a lot of people the app is Reddit.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's true. Have you looked at the numbers in the app stores?
The official reddit app on the google play store has over 100 million downloads.
RIF has only 5 million downloads. Boost, Sync, and Baconreader are all sitting around 1 million downloads each.
It looks like about 90% of mobile users are on the official app and won't notice any change.
The 'normies' don't go beyond searching for the word "reddit" and installing the first thing that pops up.
I suppose if it's truly that low then his claims of third-party apps allowing "free" browsing hurting their bottom line isn't true. Honestly, they could have worked with third-party developers and forced them to implement ads in a non-subscription tier while allowing the API to operate with minimal cost to the developer. But they went into this "negotiation" in bad faith because they never wanted to continue allowing third-party apps anyway. They wanted to kill them entirely. The problem is Reddit is scarce on offering mod tools and incorporating a lot of features people could get in other apps. Hell, the few things they have added over the years are garbage. The video player is pure trash. They implemented photo hosting because they wanted to undercut imgur which just adds to their own server and bandwidth cost. And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.
Also, his claims are probably off where he says 97% do not use a third-party app to browse the site. I'd say that's because the vast majority are browsing on a PC. Anything he says can't be trusted anyway because he's been caught lying. The truth is you are the product, and the real money is in selling your data to third parties.
Yep, spez is a greedy pig boy and this whole thing reeks of him being personally offended that any portion of the userbase can use apps where reddit can't squeeze quite as much value out of them. A deal could easily be worked out to appease all parties if reddit was willing to be even slightly less greedy, but corpos gonna corpo I guess.
Agreed on the 97% thing. I think that's reddit counting pc browsing in with mobile just to make the number using third party apps seem even smaller than it actually is. Which is ridiculous since the actual number isn't that much different. Going by the downloads on google play they still have something like 90% of the mobile users on official.
And in the end they rely entirely on users to deliver content.
Isn't it amazing how he's so insistent on how unfair it is that third party apps are profiting off of someone else's content when that's essentially reddit's business model?
Honestly Reddit is one of the few things where I wouldn't have minded paying a $5-$7 monthly subscription. When looking at how much hours and how much entertainment I got there, it's a better value proposition than half the streaming services I subscribe to.
Wouldn't be shocked by this. Twitter is / was this way. A small percentage of the userbase was responsible for most of the high quality content that drove engagement. Even before Musk's buyout, the leadership was concerned that this group was leaving in numbers and not coming back.
Quality matters, and Twitter was (rightly) concerned that they were losing their quality posters. I think there's a real chance of that happening to Reddit too.
Yeah I've been saying this all week, Reddit won't die here. But the product is different to what it used to be, and we all needed a push to go looking for that special thing that it used to be. Let the normies have their memes and clickbait who the fuck cares
Most "grown up" companies don't alienate a vast amount of their consumers. Greedy little dickholes have no problem fucking their userbase for a quick monetary boost. Spez is just a bitch who can see a payday, he is a shit founder who only pretends to be a CEO, fuck him and Reddit as a whole.
I mean, the very notion of "grown up" companies is a lie. Reading the article on the Instant Brands bankruptcy...
"Instant Brands was purchased by private equity firm Cornell Capital in 2017. While some of its products, such as Pyrex and CorningWare are long established brands — Pyrex is 108 years old, and CorningWare is 65 — Instant Pot was only launched in 2010. The company said that at least one of its products can be found in 90% of US homes"
Yet, they're filing for bankruptcy because some brainiac "disruptor" CEO is an idiot but other rich idiots gave him millions of dollars to turn it into a garbage fire.
Human beings talk about interesting things on Reddit. 'We are not in the business of giving that away for free'
"But we are in the business of reselling the content that those human beings provide, without compensating them at all, or even considering any of their complaints about how we manage the site they speak on."
And, of course, there are the unpaid moderators. He doesn't seem concerned at all that they're "giving it away for free". The experienced power-mods are the ones in the position to put a serious hurting on spez, and I hope they take the opportunity to do so.
Yeah, I think the power trip of moderating some subreddit with millions of members is very seductive. Sadly, it seems very seductive to exactly the people I would not want moderating, but I'm sure ousting conscientious moderators for puppet dictators will alleviate this situation in the future of Reddit.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
That line stuck out at me. It's bizarrely out of touch. What does Reddit actually produce itself? A shit-tier website (new) and an even shittier-tier app? Everything of value on the site was made by volunteers.
I guess this is the danger of being openly helpful on the internet. At any time your generosity could be snatched and monetized without even so much as a "fuck you, thank me"
Been reading Noam Chomsky, and the theme of democratic movements being quelled, one might say mysteriously, is a common global theme. Reddit was that social democracy for a time.
It is, and has always been, a feudal monarchy, if you want to define it's political structure.
You and I are the peasants, above us are the moderators acting on behalf of the local Lord Subreddit Owner, which serve at the whim of The Monarchs of the corporation, with His Majesty the CEO only being rained in sliiiiightly by the clerics of the venture capital Church.
Please elaborate on how you see this in any way as a social democracy.
“It’s time to grow up and be an adult company”… while implementing drastic changes that affect their partners with exceedingly little notice and willingness to allow them to have time to adjust to these drastic changes.
Sure, they're going to be an adult company now and turn all of those memes, anime and genital pics into sweet sweet ad money, just like a real megacorp!
Adults don’t lie to developers (the API will never go away! Our pricing will be reasonable! You’ll have years to make changes!), accuse indie developers of blackmail (holy shit!), and ignore millions of users and mods asking for answers (14 questions on my AMA and then I’m out!).
What, do you want to start to pay your employees now out of sudden? Whoa whoa whoa, calm down, dude! Now let's not put any absurd ideas into the world here!1!!!
It's a small group that's very upset, and there's no way around that... Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. He said "the vast majority" of moderators also do not rely on third-party apps.
But also...
"But the opportunity cost of not having those users on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant,"
So it's a teeny tiny group. Basically insignificant. But it's also such a large group that we can't possibly NOT try and monetize them 🤡.
"Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free."
He believes he owns our voice. I'm just beyond disgusted.
That's why I'm deleting my account and taking my thousands of posts with me. I will create a new account to lurk in a couple of subs I like until there's enough traffic here or elsewhere. I'm almost tempted to go into some of the more active forums and start posting ChatGPT generated garbage that seems superficially meaningful or relevant to start fucking with their idea to train AIs on Reddit posts.
Not a bad idea. I would love to do that, but a lot of my posts are to promote myself as an artist so, my plan is to promote my fediverse presence with my art if I ever do post again
I've been active in linuxquestions helping people with their issues and documenting problems and workarounds to the benefit of anyone who comes across similar issues. A major gripe is searching for a problem, coming across someone else who had the same issue but no solution, because they solved it but never bothered to detail what they did. "Nevermind, I fixed it!".
I gave that away for free.
It saddens me to read things like this. It doesn't sit right.
The one admirable thing about reddit leadership is how transparent they have been about the enshittification of their product. Usually companies will do some perfunctory song and dance about how great the changes are and how much users will love them. Reddit has been pretty clear that the changes will negatively effect users and that they are doing it for the money.
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