“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.”
The exit didn't start with the API announcement, just gained steam. What's truly baffling is that Reddit seems to want data on where users' final straw is.
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.
Either way, I'd be preferring alternatives. On desktop, old.reddit.com plus RES (which is not entirely clear if they will be effected, though it looks like it will not be), but the mobile experience is not good on a mobile browser and I really don't like the official app. Without RiF, I would not be participating much even without a direct alternative.
I don't usually fault companies for messing up if they own up to their mistakes and make it right. Everyone is going to make mistakes and things will go wrong at times. It's how a company handles events when everything goes sideways that shows whether they are good or bad.
In Reddit's case, they could have acknowledged that their API plans were too aggressive and overpriced. They could have paused any API pricing changes and worked with third party developers to come to a solution where Reddit is paid, but third party developers don't have to shut down due to immediate and insanely high costs being demanded. Everyone could have walked away benefiting and Reddit's reputation (in my eyes) would have been intact. I'd likely be posting there right now instead of here on Lemmy.
Instead, Reddit decided to double and triple down. Their CEO decided to accuse the developer of Apollo of threatening Reddit and, when phone call audio proved this was a lie, blamed the developer for "leaking personal phone calls." Then, that same CEO claimed that the API was never meant for third party apps (ignoring and trying to rewrite history) and said that any moderators who kept their subreddits blacked out would be replaced. All while claiming that the moderators should rest easy because Reddit would definitely provide tool themselves to replace lost third party tools despite no sign of this happening and trust being totally shattered. (And so much more that I'm not including because this comment is too long already.)
So Reddit messing up? That could have been forgiven had they done the right thing afterwards. But now, after completely botching the response? I hope Reddit withers away to nothing and the CEO's IPO dreams die on the vine.
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.
Sure, that is pretty crappy. But I liken that to employees who build their budgets and personal financing around bonuses. Nice to have, but not a guarantee and wrong thing to assume you'll get them. Always assume equity will be zero, IPOs benefit C-levels and investors heavily.
I can't find much on reddit's equity offerings for employees but I imagine it's, at best, a pittance. Their other benefits are top notch though. No wonder they "don't turn a profit".
Of course, if the workforce is dependent on the bonuses to survive, then the actual pay is predatory and artificially low. The bonus part is just a carrot on a stick, which they beat you with if you aren't perfect.
Damn if that's the amounts they're actually talking about, I don't know how much I would care as an employee.
My former employer introduced stock options last year in an effort to entice people into staying. This in the middle of multiple rounds of layoffs, real-wage paycuts, a 100% return-to-office mandate, and other shitty behaviours that had morale at an all-time low. That "incentive" to stick around amounted to...about $2k. Maturing after 2 years. Suffice it to say, that was not sufficient to get people to stick around, and by the time I left over 50% of the years of experience in my department had already left.
I honestly can't believe he's being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as "landed gentry" and users' concerns as "noise" - those are literally the people that have created this "valuable dataset" he's coveting so greedily.
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.
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.
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.
That’s been my attitude to this since it started to ramp up.
The top brass at Reddit know that ultimately all of this will die down, and while they might lose some value in the short term, the long term will see them bounce back enough to make some coin on the IPO. Then they’ll sail off into the sunset aboard expensive mega yachts, and never think about Reddit again.
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.
Exactly. Reddit itself should be a case study. Lemmy and Kbin offer an opportunity to build something great and learn from what made current Reddit (the good and the terrible) what it is and some things to avoid.
I hope the real thing is more just stop doing their volunteer work. I hope spam and bots run amok, NSFW gets posted everywhere, reports to unanswered and people devolve into screaming matches.
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
honestly, part of the reason I made a lemmy account at all is because it feels a little like reddit when I first started using it -- pretty niche, and less toxic and low-quality because of it.
reddit in the last few years has become very toxic. The smaller communities are still okay, but on all of the main subs it's just page after page of the same snarky jokes and tired memes.
so while more growth would be nice, I'm fine if most of reddit stays on reddit in the short-term. the fediverse can be its own thing.
The Lemmy and Lemmymigration subs have like 2k users, which also didn't really change over the last few days. If that is anything to go by I don't expect a digg like exodus anytime soon.
Where you on reddit when Digg collapsed? Because it wasn't just a solitary wave. Like human migration around Earth in prehistory, it was multiple waves, each motivated by different reasons.
The important thing is that this wave may have been enough to jumpstart something that can survive on its own. Just need to be ready for the next wave.
When the "vocal minority" are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.
Power users maybe, but the last days have shown how little spine some mods have. The moment Reddit threatens to kick them as a mod they tuck their tail and say "We we're all in until they threatened to take out mod positions. This sub now goes back to normal because there's no world where we get removed as mods."
On the one hand, this does seem to be a case of spinelessness. On the other hand, having mods who are aware of the protest and also in on it is better than having them replaced. All the subs going the way of malicious compliance (ie wellthatsucks turning into a vaccum cleaner subreddit) will need mods who are in on the protest.
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.
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.
It also came out that Musk's businesses have a Musk disaster mitigation team that reverses his bad decisions, and "guide" him. But Twitter didn't have that, so that is why his reign has been so disastrous.
Yeah that's why things are so bad at Twitter. Musk's other companies have that team in place and a culture that can onboard new people in how to work in managing Elon. Twitter didn't have any of that social infrastructure in place, so it wasn't able to withstand his onslaught.
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).
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.
I switched to Linux this year for three reasons: I hit my limit on sales-pitch notifications from Microsoft, I learned about Proton in Steam, and I finally accepted that I don't really use Creative Suite anymore. At this point, it's faster and easier to install Ubuntu than Windows assuming drivers aren't an issue, which you learn at the beginning of the process with live media.
I agree it needs to be more intuitive, however, I would argue that Linux is far more intuitive than it used to be. Still, people didn't switch.
Another driving force is that people don't like change, and people use whatever others use. TikTok bought another company just to get their userbase, it's that important.
The fediverse is fighting an uphill battle. You'd have to provide a platform that is far more intuitive and engaging than the competition, while relying on volunteer labour.
People switch behavior patterns for a reason. It doesn't matter how good or bad either option is, most people won't even be aware that switching to something else is an option until whatever they are currently doing fails to meet their needs in some way.
We just saw this play out with Kbin and Lemmy. It wasn't something inherent about them that suddenly increased the userbase. It was an external event. The Fediverse just happened to exist already, but if Huffman hadn't gone on an ego trip then they probably would have stayed very small things for the forseeable future no matter how good the experience was.
It wasn’t something inherent about them that suddenly increased the userbase. It was an external event.
I agree.
However, we are the users that didn't get bothered by Lemmy's the interface, but were bothered by Huffman enough to leave.
Most people won't leave their comfort zone unless the external event is much larger than this. If all the mods suddenly left and reddit just became a spam-filled dumspter fire. That would affect reddit's usability enough that would make Lemmy's UX shortcomings enough for the average person to bear.
I agree, I think Lemmy needs to be more easy to use and accessible if we want it to go mainstream. Us tech nerds tend to grossly overestimate what the average computer user's tech skills are. Here's an interesting study showing that most adults in the world barely know how to use a computer at all: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ Of course, people who are on Reddit already have a certain degree of tech-savviness, but Lemmy still has a more confusing UI than Reddit.
Not trying to sound like La Palice but in all the articles and posts about this issue, they seem to miss the core of what is making users mad (the mods fight is different, although in the same direction, but solvable).
The thing to the user who's generating content and not only swiping their finger is: they don't want to experience Reddit as other users experience Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter. They follow issues, not people. If you get in the middle of this relationship between the anonymous user and their discussion on an issue, with your tricks to track them, to show them your promoted content, etc. you'll be told to fuck off.
There's nothing to improve in the Reddit Official App. Everybody hates the principles it's created on, much ahead of the poor design choices and lack of features. That's what's being taken from us, by hijacking third-party apps: the possibility to focus strictly on what's being discussed.
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.
That’s kinda what I have been doing. Sadly Reddit has Ana amazing database for tech stuff. Luckily I was able to find most of my info in non-Reddit spaces.
I went back on briefly today for the first time to:
Make sure I had read all my replies.
Check the Boost subreddit to confirm it was going dark at the end of the month. (There was an update so I was wondering if there was some hope of it saying online.)
Check is the two subreddits I actually still care about are closed. (One is. Another isn't.)
I didn't read any posts (except in the Boost subreddit to confirm that it was being shut down) and definitely didn't comment or post anything. After that brief check in, I'm not going back for some time.
Same here. I'm trying to find other ways to support the protests. The community I'm moderating there will migrate over to here (yay!) but I don't expect more than a couple hundred to move. I will keep moderating the community over there (because we're a gay community and a safe space for trans men which is sorely lacking on Reddit), but I've deleted the app from my phone and only use old.reddit.com with uBlock origin to make sure I'm not contributing to Reddit's bottom line.
“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.”
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.
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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