I love when one of the richest companies on Earth (2nd by market cap, only behind Apple) just doesn’t make enough money that they need to consider this bullshit. Fuck this infinite profit growth. This is so fucking stupid. Everything is a god damn subscription. Gotta wring out every penny from our customers as the good Lord intended.
yes it does seem that way, but have you considered that maybe we should just all give all of our money to Microsoft and then just die of poverty? It would make their reports look so much nicer.
This is a disturbing trend. Apparently a lot of these major streaming services are discovering that they can make more from ads than people paying for the service. At least when calculated with the subscriber counts they currently have. It seems they don’t anticipate people leaving their services over this.
Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads. I’m not going to pay for a service even if its paid service doesn’t have ads if it has a free or cheaper service with ads as that would just be rewarding them for implementing ads.
For example with Amazon’s plan here. If you pay this $3.00 to remove ads then you are paying Amazon $3.00 because they added ads. This only increases the amount of ads that will be added to things.
It’s exactly this. Netflix makes more money from the average basic+ads user than they do from someone on the standard plan. It’s incremental revenue from all users that even occasionally use the service, and invisible to those that pay for Prime but don’t care about Prime Video.
If you pay directly for Prime Video only, it’s a little different.
It’s so frustrating. I pay for YT Premium bc that’s probably what I watch the most of…on my main TV in the living room.
The “sponsored” videos have the content creator do multiple commercial spots in their own videos and it’s so annoying. I don’t mind if they advertise their own stuff, like merch, but it’s everything from cereal to VPN’s to mental health apps. Irritating af.
Good job ifixit! This should be a cause for outrage. Pretending to support the right to repair while also softwarelocking repairs is not just two faced, but actively harming the consumers.
I left Firefox for Chrome about 12 years ago because Firefox had a major RAM leak. I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago after verifying they fixed the big and have never regretted it. People should use Firefox.
This definitely feels like a “you made your bed now sleep in it” situation. If they underbid to get the grants, that’s their problem. I am so tired of corporate socialism.
Yes, but think like the government: should we fine the isp, or do what it takes to get broadband to those underserved areas? Fines and other similar approaches just put those ISPs closer to going out of business and that makes it worse for the people targeted by the project.
Let 3 or 4 go under as an example to the rest and see if they suddenly find they can make it happen after all? I do feel like there’s some merit to the idea they are gaming the system with lowball bids.
I don’t want corporations to be regulated as they have been shown to offer services, prices and availability that is the most benefit to their customers and can police themselves.
/s
Not gonna ratio you but that’s basically what you’re saying…and time has shown that ISPs do not act on what’s best for their customers (many who are forced to be customers since there isn’t any other choices)
I’m not saying what they are doing/did is best. I think it’s been mishandled for decades. I’m just saying this is how the government “thinks” and why cost overruns and corruption is often lower on the priority list.
I’d rather the service providers be threatened with local government ownership if they mishandle the deal.
In fact I think last-mile delivery should be provided by the local government and be subsidized by taxes to some extent. Residents should have the option to use public funded internet with baseline bandwidth targets, have the ability to choose a different ISP that’s managed at a local colo going over the public wires, or choose a last mile isp using their own private wired or wireless infrastructure.
Local government ownership is not reliable. They’re already compromised. Hell many of them passed laws to literally prevent local competition. It’s why Google stopped fiber rollout because they couldn’t beat the corrupt state leaders
Google accomplished their goal of increasing internet usage. Where ever they threatened to go the local isp suddenly got their act together.
I’m suggesting local government 1)provide a baseline service and 2) treat last-mile delivery like a utility. In the pockets of the US where local government or utility provider is also an ISP, I have yet to hear of people being upset with it. It’s usually something crazy like $15/mo for 500/50 speeds that comes out of your water/trash/electric bill.
No, the government cares because they want a result and the ISPs are fucking with achieving that result and now it’s time to fuck them back for defrauding the government.
I mean I guess the best time to do anything is today… but it’s been over 3 decades of scamming and empty promises, so I could see people thinking the government doesn’t actually care.
this isint the first time ISPs received funding to extend infrastructure into rural areas but then sat on their asses. We shouldn’t enable them to do it again. Big ISPs make millions. They could do the expansion without the grant, its just incentive
Arrest every member of the ISPs, nationalize the ISP, seize all the assets of its investors and board members, and then force the members of the ISPs to install the promised broadband systems as community service as part of their debt. Make them pay for everything, and don’t allow them to file bankruptcy - all debts will pass to their children, their children’s children, and all their descendents in perpetuity until the debt is paid in full. They made their bed off the backs of the American people. Now let them pay it all back in full.
Netflix is forgetting that a large part of their success was due to being more convenient than piracy.
When prices went up a lot of people kept their subs because they didn't want to kick family members off of it that they were sharing with.
If Netflix becomes less convenient than piracy and no one else is using my account I see no reason to keep it
You mistake their actions for more than they are. The people that make decisions there aren’t the same folks that started their streaming service in the first place. And even if they are, the only thing that matters now is the bottom line.
It’s not that they forgot, it’s that they don’t care. There’s money to be made.
Netflix is forgetting that a large part of their success was due to being more convenient than piracy.
Oddly, I have noticed that most people I know aren't interested in taking the minimal risk to sail the seas now that there's widespread cause.
Back when Netflix was awesome, I knew a LOT more people who were willing to dive in to the technical stuff, risk, and additional effort to strap on an eye patch.
Anyone's guess on the root cause, but I feel like the amount of people on the interwebs now have absolutely no idea (or interest) how anything works. "Push colorful button to do things" seems to be it.
Or it has to do with ISPs being far more aggressive in sending threatening letters if you do it without burrying it behind obfuscation and encrypted vpns.
Also, people dont know what the new trustworthy sites are today, since all the ones they knew 10 years ago are probably gone.
It'll be just like YouTube, where people are huddled on the floor praying to "the algorithm" with each bit of "content" they post, hoping to make it big as a "professional Redditor".
I can't wait to see the per-user algorithmic feeds. One post from r/conspiracy or r/conservative scrolls past your screen, and suddenly it's all you see.
I see senior management written all over you! I promise ya - keep working hard n showing up early and that’s you in the corner office in 5 years. Ya just gotta stick around.
Just gonna hijack your comment for visibility. reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.
I wonder if that was born of the Dogecoin tipping system that was around for a while in... 2017/2018? I forget.
I'm pretty sure they thought the awards/gilding was going to be their best bet to Moneyville after Premium flopped. It's basically just a rebranding with the ability to gift it.
Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don’t care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.
In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don’t add traffic, but they add value - because they’re the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins’ decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And… well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that’s basically what the admins did.
Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there’s still content to be consumed there, but eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don’t expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and… well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.
So Reddit will die, mind you. But it won’t be a sudden death; it’ll be a slow bleeding.
I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.
No offence but I never understand this lurker hate.
Wasnt the hole idea of the web to have a website and be able to share your knowledge? Iam pretty sure that most people would just stop putting out content, if literally no one is reading it.
Just seems wrong to call those visitors of your publicly accessible site/blog/forum/whatever lurkers, or speak of them as if they would steal from your garden.
You're assigning a connotation to the word that I don't really agree with. There's nothing wrong with being a lurker.
There's encouragement to not be a lurker in the fediverse simply because engagement drives adoption and traffic, but I think the goal is ultimately to attract more lurkers
Thank you! (We need more content. Specially about other stuff than Reddit.)
That reminds me a caveat of the reasoning above: the “lurker” and “contributor” aren’t different people, but different interactions with a platform. Someone might be a lurker in one platform but a contributor, for example. The conclusion is still the same though, people avoid contributing to platforms that they feel to be hostile towards them.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts. If the value-adders go to other sites, someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
It'll devolve into something like instagram, where it's literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn't mean they stop making money.
It’s not impossible, just inconvenient. Instagram was made to show off pictures, so when you open someone’s Instagram, all you see is a grid of pictures by default. If you want to read the captions and comment, you have to click on a pic and then click on the 💬 to view the comments and add your own. In a world where most places only make you click “send” to comment, it’s slightly more work than most people want for an online discussion.
The comments by people consist of nothing but emojis and occasionally one to five words.
Scattered around that, you'll also find a lot of bots spamming websites that either sell cheap stuff like LED lighting and swamp coolers with ridiculous markups (about 10x) or are straight up scams.
Those could be filtered out easily but instagram just cares more about the traffic than their users.
With moderators leaving en masse, reddit will move into that direction. They won't ever get this shitty, but definitely a lot closer than they are now.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts.
Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, “marketing opportunities” (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
Usually you’d have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don’t care about sharing. But even if people consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they’ll arrive later. Reddit stops being the “front face of the internet” to become “yet another bottom feeder of the internet”.
where it’s literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean they stop making money.
In Reddit’s case, I think that it does. Reddit might’ve started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than “two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE”, it’s just yet another link aggregator again.
I agree and those reasons you listed are why I don't have any issue parting ways with this platform, but I don't think the general public does. People do use instagram and tiktok to view what I (and I'm guessing you do too) consider noise.
And after all, the general public is who views the ads on their site and brings in the money.
As someone who spends time curating the content I view without any care given to what other people enjoy, I'm often shocked at how terrible the content on something like youtube's front page is when I get logged out. It's easy to forget that a lot of people just don't care and use the internet to turn off their brain.
You’re right that noise is subjective (it might be noise for one, content for another), but it’s only partially so. Most people don’t like old, repetitive or misplaced content; they don’t like spam either, so those things are almost always noise. And yet I think that they’ll become more and more common there over time.
You mentioned TikTok and Instagram; that’s less about noise vs. content and more about high quality vs. low quality. Plenty people have low standards, but even those prefer quality stuff; so once content quality drops down (I’m predicting that it will), they’ll have less reasons to look for content in Reddit instead of elsewhere.
Also, note that 47.58% of the traffic of the site is generated by “organic search”. Once creators are gone, those 47.58% are going away, too. They won’t be googling stuff like “how to shoot web site:reddit.com” if they know that Reddit will provide mostly junk results.
eventually it’ll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site
I somewhat disagree… you haven’t considered the increased incentive for occasional posters to become more regular contributors as existing contributors leave.
As the volume of contributions reduces, each contribution is more likely to garner engagement - those sweet sweet endorphins released when someone upvotes or otherwise engages with your post.
Even if it does, it doesn’t really matter if Reddit can’t become profitable.
It doesn’t really matter what we think but what the shitty capitalists bearing down on Reddit think. They clearly pushed for it to move into crypto and NFTs and I wouldn’t doubt if they push it to chase the next hype of AI. I wouldn’t doubt if the restrictions in the API are AI related and Reddit has lots of archived comments and posts to draw from.
I agree in general with you, but AI adds a wrinkle. Wouldn't surprise me at all if AI generated content continues to amuse the casual doomscrollers and reddit serves up a lot of ads to those mindless suckers and makes money for years with that model.
Doesn't hurt us, though. We can move on and do our thing here in the Fediverse.
AI posting + low standards does throw a monkey wrench in my reasoning, but not a big one: that AI will be available first for Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Meta/Facebook, as they’re the ones developing this stuff. And they happen to have services that overlap in functionality with Reddit, at least for people who are fine with AI-generated content.
Lots of people are probably just waiting for better apps for lemmy + the drop dead date for Reddit 3rd party apps. I am, anyway. I'd expect a shift in activity in July.
There’s Thunder which is in the works, still missing some needed features for me, like media downloading, however it is decent for simple looking at Lemmy.
“Lots” in relation to the Lemmyverse size, but not in relation to the Reddit userbase. This chunk of the Fediverse grew huge in a single month, but it’s still considerably smaller than Reddit.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).
Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.
Interesting. I just searched some topics related to a paper I'm working on and found some good resources which I haven't seen on Google yet. Really interesting.
The terms of service for reddit are based on California law. Based on liberal Laws of California, I would venture to guess that there is some grounds for back pay. I was wondering about this with all the discussion around volunteer moderators.
Similar to Uber drivers, the test for independent contractors is pretty difficult to meet in California nowadays. So I believe there is a solid case (cough class action cough). Fuck reddit. They deserve all the backlash and a mod class action for backpay would be legendary.
You don’t need a contract to sue someone in California. There are labor laws meant to cover situations that are inequitable or unfair. In my mind, having mods do all this work for the benefit of reddit (eg. Free labor) is unfair and seemingly rises to a level that should be investigated.
California has many of laws on the books which grandfather workers under various statutes of de facto employment. Even contracts can be voided. No contract is necessary for an employment relationship to exist.
That's a point in favor of reddit, but a small one. As my company's labor lawyer enjoys saying, "You can't contract around the law." Meaning, an agreement can be nullified by a court that finds the agreement is in violation of a law.
Right, but you also can't create a work agreement where one was explicitly denied. It's like mowing your neighbors lawn then asking them to pay you, but they told you they wouldn't pay you if you did it before you started. It's the same with the 3rd party app devs too. While I think reddits actions are insane and detrimental to the health of the site, they are fully in their right to deny those devs access to their API and their site as a whole.
You sorta can. The difference in your scenario is that your neighbor doesn't need you to mow their lawn, but Reddit requires moderators in order for the business of Reddit to function.
Here is a guide published by the state of California about whether someone should qualify as an employee of a company. Read through the first couple pages of checklists and ask yourself if a moderator fits the criteria they're looking for.
For the first 3 questions, a "Yes" answer is an indictator that the person is an employee.
Do you instruct or supervise the person while he or she is working?
I would say that likely counts as a yes, because moderators have a code of conduct which is mandated by Reddit, and they must follow it in order to keep their jobs.
Can the worker quit or be discharged (fired) at any time?
Reddit does not have protections in place for moderators, who can be removed from their positions at any time.
Is the work being performed part of your regular business?
This is definitely a yes, because Reddit relies on subreddits for its business, and subreddits require moderators.
For the next 3 questions, a "No" answer indicates that the person is an employee and not an independent contractor.
Does the worker have a separately established business?
This is a bit of a gray area. For the majority of moderators, this would be a no at surface value, but some subreddits that concern a specific product/company sometimes have representatives from that company on the mod team. However another criteria of this category is that moderators have the ability to add/remove other moderators at their discretion, which is an indicator that they qualify as independent contractors and not employees. Should this go to trial, this will be an item that is argued.
Is the worker free to make business decisions which affect his or her ability to profit from the work?
This would likely be a no for most moderators. To expand further, one of the example criteria is whether the individual is free to utilize their own tools/resources to do their work, and Reddit limiting API access is specifically one example of this not being the case. But if the subreddit is a front for a business (as in, the subreddit's primary purpose is to sell/support a paid product or service), it likely would not qualify.
Does the individual have a substantial investment in their job which would subject him or her to a financial risk of loss?
Similar to the above, I think this would be a no for most moderators. Reddit controls the platform and dictates what resources moderators are/aren't allowed to utilize when doing their jobs, so there is no independent financial investment from the moderators that is at risk.
It's not cut-and-dry, and I think that's what might make this difficult to take to court, but the argument certainly exists and the case could at least result in better terms for how Reddit must work with their moderators.
Reddit could operate without subreddit moderators. The main reason mods exist is to remove abusive users and bots, both of witch could be handled by the vote system.
I don't think Reddit could operate without moderators. On a technical level, sure it's possible, but as a business they would not be able to operate. If the content didn't have a reputation of being vibrant, interesting, and reliable, no one would use the site and they'd have no income. Reddit's business is only possible with moderators there to cultivate their communities and keep things civil.
facebook, twitter, and tumbler all got along without community moderation, i don't see how reddit would actually be any different. every subreddit is a glorified hashtag in the grand scheme of things.
It's a bit more complex than that. Reddit hires staff to do moderation. If moderation was done solely by users, and never by paid staff, your analogy would hold more water. However, because there is a mix of paid and unpaid labor doing the same tasks, there is enough gray area that a court could weigh in either direction (although I think it is unlikely that one would find for the mods, personally).
A better analogy would be that reddit had a landscaping business, and hired some workers to do landscaping, and you just tagged along and did unpaid work for several years. Sure, the owner did tell you he wasn't ever going to pay you for your work, and you agreed to that. But the owner sold and profited off the labor you provided alongside his paid laborers. He did this knowingly.
There may be a case there.
But it this case, it’s more like… you’re mowing your neighbor’s lawn at his invitation, you have to follow his guidelines or be fired, and when you mow his lawn he saves money because he doesn’t have to have the lawn care service come.
mods had unilateral control over their communities until very recently. short of doing anything illegal or breaking TOS, mods could ban whoever they wanted for any reason. what stopped this was the fact that communities would riot if mods were to ban random users they simply didn't like. look at places like /r/latestagecapitalism, /r/blackpeopletwitter, /r/witchesvepatriarchy, or /r/conservative, they will all aggressively ban users or block users from posting if they do not go through verification or disagree with the group think. and the community loves it because they're stuck in their echo chambers.
It's more about the principle. He's saying that they can't provide reddit for free, they're not a charity. But with the same logic, should mods work for free, since they're also not a charity?
No, they shouldn’t. When subs reach a certain member threshold modding becomes a job for many. Mods should absolutely form a union, but asking for back pay is a stretch. What they should do is asked to be paid moving forward stating that profiting off the backs of volunteers is no longer acceptable not only because Reddit has made modding much harder by giving third party apps the finger, but also because the mods should in theory value their spare time. Another thing is that people posting free content to Reddit without reimbursement should be viewed as an atrocity, even YouTube reimburses content creators once the content gets a certain amount of views.
I don't think anyone's denying that. Lawsuits in the US always follow a "throw everything at the wall" approach because there's no downsides to it. The actual worst case for including it is that particular claim gets rejected and the rest of the suit continues.
Negociation 101: ask for more than you actually expect to get (within reason, you don't want people to think you are a joke).
They ask for backpay not really expecting for backpay, just to give them wiggle room to settle in court for better rights from that moment on.
Last and only time I had to sue someone (and won) my lawyer told me what the usual result of cases like mine is, then we asked for that and like, 20% extra. Then on the mediation we "negociated" for the amount we were really expecting to get.
(This is all personal speculation, Im not a mod, clearing that up just in case).
Pretty sure the courts will view volunteer work that enriches a non profit very differently from "volunteer" work that enriches a for profit enterprise.
Not at this point. I don't want to give bad faith actors my business, and Mr. Huffman has shown himself to be a big ol' penis. At the beginning? With unadulterated access (i.e. NSFW content) and gentler rules for 3rd party apps? Sure, I would have been ok with that.
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