just so this doesn’t overwhelm our front page too much, i think now’s a good time to start consolidating discussions. existing threads will be kept up, but unless a big update comes let’s try to keep what’s happening in this thread instead of across 10.
developments to this point:
- Apollo for Reddit is shutting down
- Reddit is Fun will also shut down
- Reddit CEO (/u/spez) is going to hold a AMA about the API update
- Sync has announced it is shutting down
- ReddPlanet has announced it is shutting down
- Reddit creates an API exemption for noncommercial accessibility apps
- /r/videos is planning to shut down indefinitely, beginning June 11
- A subreddit dedicated to migrating to kbin.social has been closed by Reddit
The Verge is on it as usual, also–here’s their latest coverage (h/t @dirtmayor@beehaw.org):
other media coverage:
Man that whole situation really sucks. Reddit was by far my most visited site before they decided to light the house on fire. On mobile I always used Boost because the official app is terrible and (at least the last time I looked at it) would drain my battery like it was nothing even when the app was closed. RIP. At least we’ve got Lemmy. I just wish these 3rd party apps would take their users to the fediverse instead of shutting down entirely. As a developer it really sucks when you have to shut down a project you’ve put so much work into.
what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can’t piece together a good and accessible experience for their users…
Looks like the Chinese “investor” is the Communist Party. The actions Reddit is taking are pretty much how they take down all the companies and citizens they target.
Are you saying the ccp attacks people by messing up their third party apps? Or by giving bad AMAs?
I swear tankies and liberals are basically the same. Tankies blame the CIA for every single bad thing that has ever happened while liberals blame the CCP and the Russian government. SOMETIMES BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE JUST GREEDY AND SOMETIMES AMERICANS ARE JUST SHITTY, there doesn’t need to be a secret cabal behind everything
SOMETIMES BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE JUST GREEDY AND SOMETIMES AMERICANS ARE JUST SHITTY, there doesn’t need to be a secret cabal behind everything
while i’ll wait for the source i asked for and gladly correct this if i’m presuming incorrectly, i’d bet the odds are high that “CCP” is just being used as a shorthand/stand-in for a company like TenCent, because that happens a lot in discussions about China and it’s really goofy.
There’s no need to hypothesize about a shadowy government conspiracy when the situation is adequately explained by simple desperation for money. Spez outright said that Reddit is losing money and has always been losing money, and that he needs to make it stop losing money, presumably because Reddit’s investors are tired of giving him money and want to see some return on their investment.
In the interest of fairness, isn’t the difference between TenCent and the Chinese government basically just paperwork? I’ve always heard (anecdotally) that they work extremely close with the CCP.
In the interest of fairness, isn’t the difference between TenCent and the Chinese government basically just paperwork? I’ve always heard (anecdotally) that they work extremely close with the CCP.
i don’t know if i’d go that far? with Tencent specifically it is inarguable they have worked with the Chinese government on some things and that’s not nothing. but Tencent is still an independent company, and governments and corporations/their shareholders frequently don’t have the same interests at heart, so it’s hard to say where to draw the line here.
i think my position would be: i don’t think it’s useful to assert everything they do is intended to advance what China wants, especially in the absence of anything indicating that. i also don’t know how useful it is to assume they’re just a front for China–certainly i don’t think that the people most vocal about this consistently apply that concern to other countries like Saudi Arabia who use companies to advance their state interests all the time.
conversely, i think it’s ridiculous to confidently assert Tencent have never, or don’t ever, get influenced by interests China has, or that Chinese state officials aren’t capable at least theoretically of using the company to advance state interests. that stuff happens here, where ostensibly our system exists to prevent that kind of collaboration (this is basically what the “military-industrial complex” is, for example).
press x to doubt
Looks like the Chinese “investor” is the Communist Party.
can we get a citation on this–preferably before asserting it as fact, please? i’d like it if, on this site, we didn’t just say things (especially if they sound in line with our priors) but actually substantiate them.
Not fact. It’s my opinion based on the actions I see, and the fact things started to go down hill after the investors gave money. One of the big ones was Chinese.
We’ve seen how things go down when China is involved - loans to poor nations, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the disputed islands with Japan, Tibet, the Urghurs.
We’ve seen the various iterations of the “oops how did that key logger get in there?” discoveries (Lenovo, i’m looking at you), corporate espionage, Huawei telecommunications infrastructure being used to tap communicatons, etc…
Strict control of pretty much everything is the pattern, in which disinformation is easily dispensed and difficult to identify.
I just don’t get how a site based on freely produced content thst employs volunteer mods can actually monetise.
That part just gets me. The site has nothing without the users and the users have nothing without the mods.
It’s disappointing that Reddit has chosen to prioritize money after their success :(
Money is the measure of success to a business. It’s what they exist for, at least under capitalism.
They’ll hold the very idea of community ransom. They’ll do it in virtual spaces, and they’ll do it in meatspaces. And they won’t stop unless it’s proven to be deeply unprofitable.
What a colossal shit show. They’re hellbent on destroying third party competition before the IPO. Next on the chopping block are old.reddit and porn.
Wouldn’t be surprised if $8 red check marks appear soon
In my opinion, we’re reaching a moment where people are realizing that having lots of users doesn’t matter that much if you can’t monetize them. We took a lot of services for granted that maybe don’t make any financial sense, which probably only survived because both the company and investors hoped that as long you could attract users, you could monetize them later.
I think that “later” is now.
Today I noticed that youtube has a new feature that unlocks more bitrate, but only for premium users (there’s two 1080p options, one normal and another with more bitrate). I’m expecting that these social medias and other tech companies will try to monetize us further
Yeah exactly. I think what we need is decentralization and a move back to smaller hobbyist message boards - the costs of running such communities is more sustainable for individual owners and they are not so big that their owners would look to sell them out.
@rimlogger @tango_octogono there is good argument to be made that these “unified services” were created to monetize them in first place.
Said that, federation as a concept of new era of social networking is good foundation. Hope it sticks and we work out quirks and people learn how to use it.That’s what I’ve been thinking, as well – if a message board (or any other service) doesn’t reach that critical user mass where it’s no longer sustainable, then there’s less chances of it selling out
That’s certainly my hope for the federated model. Scope and scale have been issues since the advent of social media, which encouraged users to centralize all of their interactions in one spot. One hundred people shooting the shit on a specific interest will always be a better experience than orders of magnitude more people who know nothing of the context spouting off to feel good about themselves.
I found the quality of my Reddit interactions had gone so far downhill that I took a month off to start the year. I’d gotten sucked into the belief that upvotes == quality of what I was writing, which creates perverse motivations completely unrelated to being more informed about the world.
I mean upvotes are related to how old a post is.
Anyways I don’t expect places like Lemmy to fix the ills of social media - eventually running something like this will cost their owners too much money and something will have to give. Also moderation has always been an issue, even with the message boards of old.
Agreed on the last point. That’s part of what I was alluding to in terms of scope and scale. The smaller communities from early internet days (my experience overlaps with the time of BBSs but never included them) were pretty light on moderation. If you were a dick on IRC, you got booted. If you spouted off about politics in places that weren’t about politics on phpBB, you were ignored then booted. These days, that sort of dynamic has moved to Discord, with people expecting that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want everywhere else.
But I feel you’re begging the question on funding. The ownership and profit model is the problem. User subscriptions can solve that funding issue in a vacuum; reality tends to be a bit messier, but I’m hoping we’ll find that it works.
Well on the Lemmy subreddit, some people are already complaining about moderation issues here, and how you can’t block federated servers you don’t want to see individually - that is up to the federated server itself. Honestly, while Lemmy seems cool, I can see issues arising as it scales, especially with regards to moderation.
Beehaw seems to be fine, but some users have explained that they take issue with Lemmy.ml’s moderation - chiefly from the main developer who created this platform to begin with. And that’s troubling too. For example, on Lemmy.ml, any talk about Russia or China (or anything similar) is banned. You can’t safely talk about the war in Ukraine here without getting banned from the main federated server.
I’m versed in ActivityPub to the extent the Twitter imbroglio landed Mastodon on Ars and Techdirt, so … not very well. But wouldn’t someone who really wants control over which instances they see be able to spin up one of their own and then just not let people join?
Yep, can always make your own instance and look at whatever instances you want
I guess. I’m kind of new to whole idea of federation myself, never jumped on Mastodon, for example. But we will see as Lemmy and its federated instances scale up.
deleted by creator
@tango_octogono @alyaza YouTube basically spams ads and begs to sign up for Premium.
Thanks to adblock i never see those on PC. Wouldn’t dream of opening u-toob on mobile though…
I use YouTube almost exclusively on mobile and TV devices, but I also filter my DNS requests to block things that I don’t like.
It’s because of market conditions. Low interest -> Companies spend money and chase growth High interest -> Companies try to monetize users
No more low interest rates…
Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You’d think spez was new to reddit with the way he’s commenting.
Yeah I think it was too much to hope there would actually be good-faith engagement at this point. It was just more corporate messaging.
classic bully behavior
I don’t get what his angle is. Is it just dumb ego or am I missing something?
It’s all corpspeak. It means nothing except to lie and gaslight users into staying so he can cash out.
He’s selling and he’s going to point his investors to his AMA comments.
Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors’ confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he’s trying to sell them damaged goods.
I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of “We’re very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we’re all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time.”
Instead it’s all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they’re done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.
Again anything public facing is a lie. The rich investment firms know that it’s designed just to try and placate an unruly userbase. Now if something comes of it? Then they’ll care. If the blackout happens I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s wholesale usurpation of the mod teams to reopen the big ones.
e: typo
I fully expect that subs with major frontpage presences are going to get taken over by the mothership and reopened almost immediately. They may even be able to find some poor saps to mod them, at least for a couple weeks until they realize that’s a full-time job. But the smaller subs are what long-time and power users end up diffusing to and what keeps them engaged with the site over time, and those are likely going to be dead or zombies shortly. Any investor putting money into Reddit for any reason other than short-term trading or hoping to be at the front of the line to pick over the corpse in a few years has failed to do their due diligence.
Now is the perfect time to short reddit stock :o
I think the way I see it is that the vast majority of Reddit users have no idea that any of this is going on, and wouldn’t care if they did.
So from Corporate’s perspective, all they have to do is deal with a few weeks of whining and teeth gnashing, before everything calms down again and they can get on with whoring Reddit out.
Ultimately they’ll end up back in the black again, and making enough money from the IPO to not give the tiniest rats ass about any of this. They’ll sail off into the sunset on a fleet of expensive yachts, and never give Reddit another thought.
The people who don’t notice are probably not the people bringing the content or moderating the subs though.
It’s bizarre to read his comment on that. It’s either psychopath behaviour, or… I just don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. It is worrying though, to see a human in charge of a social company act like that. He should probably be removed by some legal means just for that comment alone.
I do not know much details about the internal power structures of a company like reddit, but it seems like this guy seems to be a real liability at the moment. I wonder why he is being allowed to go around doing this.
Maybe they are giving him enough rope to hang himself so he can be removed from his position in a few days. Firing a disliked manager is a common union busting tactic. If he can be made into the centre of gravity for all the ire, canning him and making some small backtrack could have a lot of people reconsidering leaving reddit.
Or maybe there truly is no plan…
Wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done that
He is one of the founders and likely holds a big amount of shares.
@chrislenz @alyaza Spez is hitting on twenty.
Yeah that was completely disgusting. Steve dun goofed yet again. And here I thought nothing could get worse than the whole Ellen Pao incident lol
Pao was used by design to piss people off. They made her CEO and had her implement on the changes they knew would be unpopular with the community, then “fired” her, complete with her own golden parachute.
And kept all of “her” changes.
Wow, RedReader somehow managed to get spared due to its accessibility features. Was not on my bingo card at all. I guess somehow I can still manage to use Reddit completely ad free, but who knows for how long. Even better, the RedReader dev might have plans to integrate Lemmy into it.
Lol. This sounds like a dig at spez.
Sharing this because it should be shared
Just deleted 2 of my 3 (don’t ask me wny I have 3 Reddit accounts, bc I don’t know)
I mean I had my regular account, my porn account and my hookup account
With how vast the third-party ecosystem is, one would have imagined a full year countdown but it’s become obvious that this is nothing more than digital gentrification, one that kicks out the very people who gave it the spirit that is being monetized into an IPO.
Those 30 days were meant to break the ecosystem.
EDIT: Grammar
Digital gentrification is an interesting term. But yeah, TPA users have to be a particular type of users. Like power users, or just generally more discerning people who don’t want to use a crap interface. And they’re just happy to be rid of us it seems.
Edit: Why does it say “bot account” next to my name?
Try going to settings and unchecking “Bot Account”
Guess I skimmed through the settings page too fast. Thanks.
That’s exactly what a bot would say.
I’m not a bot, I’m an AI language model designed to assist you with your queries.
Just changed to lemmy and using the lemmy mobile app. If you set it to ‘subscribed’ its great.
By “Lemmy app” do you mean “Jerboa for Lemmy”? Because I don’t see any other apps on the Samsung app store. Maybe the official one is only for iPhone?
No its in testflight for ios called Mlem. Unsure if there is an android version. Maybe?
The Android equivalent is Jerboa
Good to know. Tnx.
