The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.
Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but... Not by anywhere close to the same degree.
Alright, we're sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.
First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it's going to cost $x.
Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.
Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.
And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.
By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.
There. That's really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.
You'd probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don't get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.
Again... This shouldn't be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!
Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)
Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients... But I for one would have been... Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn't suck.
Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.
The only thing those people are signalling, in my opinion, is that it doesn't take much to bait people into engaging with reddit to give them traffic, can't wait for an article about how metrics are going up so investors have nothing to worry about.
Investors aren’t idiots. Advertising is a major draw for investors if the subscription model isn’t great. A site that serves millions of views of fuckspez isn’t attractive to advertisers.
You might of had a point of investors being able to look the other way during tech bro funding time, but a lot of the free cash has dried up. Reddit has to convince Betty Crocker that their platform is a great place for cake recipes. If everything goes “ ¼ sick of butter, 2 eggs, 1 pound of fuckspez.” They’re going to have a really hard time driving that point.
This is why it seems all the social media platforms are flying apart at the seams here. Pretty much all of them were flying high on the free to low interest cash. Now that a lot of them have to justify things for every penny and nickel they want, they’re realizing they didn’t have a great model to begin with and are hoping users will snap in place with the new “paradigm”.
But that’s the thing. Employees snap because their check relies on it. A lot of users don’t snap the same for the reason that lot of them just use social media as an outlet. Which for the users that are using these platforms for a source of income/word of mouth, they’re just watching this conflagration in tears.
I have the sinking feeling that they don’t care if anything is sustainable. They just want the IPO to happen with the highest inflated numbers then run away as soon as possible, leaving the whole thing burning behind them. It’s not about marking Reddit successful again, it’s about getting rich fast.
To be fair, Aaron wasn't really heavily involved with Reddit. He was involved with Infogami, which failed and was merged with Reddit. Per this post, he got equity in Reddit as a result, but only worked for a few months on the actual site.
After his death and the media portrayal of him as a martyr for free speech, Reddit started claiming him as "co-founder" much more vocally than they had previously. While technically he had that title, his involvement on Reddit was neither starting the company nor working on it for any extended period of time.
That being said, given what Reddit's become, wherever his spirit roams now, I'm sure he's relieved to have his name off the site.
I find that people who judge a statement, not based on the whole of it's content, but on the surface aesthetic of it to be wholly smart as a bag of rocks.
I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.
It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.
Ok now you’re just being a troll. Instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion, you picked up on three words each from the parent and myself, ignored the entirety of our respective arguments, and derailed what could have been an intelligent discussion about Aaron’s actual contributions to early Reddit and turned it into a superficial joust about some words you unilaterally proclaimed to be verboten.
Be better. Be more charitable and thoughtful. Otherwise we’re just pushing people back to Reddit.
Thus spoke reality? Aaron founded another startup at the y combinator when it got merged into the reddit startup. But the fact that they merged at the y combinator would suggest that reddit already was founded before Aaron was involved. This is all easily verifiable information you’re just so angry that you aren’t on your favorite website that you are just making shit up at this point.
This was probably the most cynical move Reddit could have made. A big part of what made r/place special was that it was so rare. I have such good memories of the first one.
It’s also just incredibly boneheaded. The API changes happened three weeks ago. People have not forgotten, they are still removing/threatening mods even today, hell there are almost 2000 subs still protesting. And now they give people a microphone during an incredibly public event that they coordinated with twitch?
Plato's cave. If all you have ever experienced is a shit app, then the shit app seems fine to most people. Others will recognize its faults but not how bad it is because they think that the only alternative is to have no app.
oh. well, there's artemis that in private alpha at the moment. should be out in a few weeks i hope. Plus kbin is a PWA, so you can add it to your home screen.
I got distracted by the post about the person’s boyfriend putting laundry detergent in their dishwasher. I guess that does mean RIF is better, since only one post is visible on the other one.
One thing I've noticed: if you land on Google from search around 20% of comments are from now deleted accounts. Try searching "best bike reddit" and see for yourself.
I think the hypothesis that power users are leaving is showing itself to be true.
Was trying to figure out why imgur just always seems broken now (it's because of my VPN) and as I scrolled past all the reddit results like 1/3 of the answers had been deleted. It brought a tear to this former lurkers eye.
I just tried to find one of my very popular, but deleted help comments on r/synology via Google but couldn't find it.
What I did find heartening is that they've flagged the sub as NSFW so I can't view anything unless logging in (which I can't do because my account is gone). Also, r/plex is set to private so that's useless too.
You may want to use something like libredirect to access rimgo, an alternative front-end for imgur; although it must be said that public instances are often limited.
I've taken your suggestion and although it didn't do a whole lot for my Imgur problem, in general I like whats all going on with it. Thanks for the advice. It may not have been the outcome I wanted, yet it still feels like a small victory.
I'm waiting to do it because I want to leave no trace, and any closed subs are unable to have comments changed. Also, waiting til the last minute because I'm not trying to dead mod one of my subs; I hate Reddit, buts it's a smallish sub (30k) and I don't want to just leave it. Only two of the five mods are active, and he's thinking of leaving as well, so I guess we're gonna have to mod search?? At least get one person in and then dip.
I agree. It's just hard to do that to people I've been in a community with for 10+ years. Reddit won't even notice that sub getting deaded, but the users will. The only nodding we had to do was repost bots and very rare racist stuff (really not even relevant to anything either lol)
PowerDeleteSuite doesn't get everything, particularly on old accounts. PDS uses your New, Hot, Top & Controversial lists on your profile - however reddit has been limiting the length of these lists for a few months now.
For example, if you have a link to one of your older Top comments, you might see a bunch of low karma replies underneath that PDS didn't touch.
The only real way to get everything is to do a GDPR request and use the links in there. Shreddit can do this (in particular the github version, the website charges $15 for the feature), however even then it will panic and stop part way through. I've had to edit the files and split them down, and even then I haven't yet finished. Shreddit uses the API though, so it won't work after 1 July.
Also reddit have been restoring some comments evert couple days - you might find some that PDS removed have returned. Supposedly this is to do with how reddit's CDN structure works, but that may also just be an excuse. I wouldn't be surprised if reddit tries to claim ownership of everyone's comments and restores most if not all of them, so those google searches might start working again.
Looks normal to me. This phenomena though is perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing. It'll take years to build up a similar amount of excellent info.
Curious how the new results are affecting Reddit overall. I don't know how Google works these days, I got away from figuring out that stuff for websites long ago. Would a hit to a private page and the user backing out only affect that link's rating, or is there a bigger picture of the algorithm that would see a spike in low Reddit results and start reranking the domain itself?
Can confirm. I've been doing a lot of technical setup lately. Hardware, and niche software. Any issue I had or comparison of online services I looked for Reddit was the top result and of course I would click it because I'm burnt out and just want an answer. I'll say about a fourth of the comments on the comparison/help posts are now deleted or edited to make a statement about Reddit. Everynow and again it'd be a private sub. It was super wild. Luckily google has a cached version to view the sub in those cases.
I don't think Lemmy will ever be able to replicate that utility though. There can't be an expectation of a very specific technical post to still being around in 5 years since it'd be contingent on the instance to still exist.
If the instance is federated then the content will live on all the instances that it's federated with. Every single instance would have to go away for the content to disappear.
If anything, Lemmy is way more reliable than Reddit, which is currently controlled by a whiny crybaby making unpredictable decisions.
There are already plenty of support communities generating legitimately helpful information. I expect it to only get better.
I see this sentiment expressed more often by tankies, enlightened centrists, and Krazy Konservative Kommenters than mainstream media sources. Usually in reference to economic policy (and in fairness, the differences there are pretty subtle if we're looking at the mainstream).
What I'm seeing in media is an attempt to listen to "both sides." It's just that one side has grown more and more detached from reality, so airing their crazy unchallenged alongside a more normal perspective makes it look like the sides are on equal rhetorical footing. It's like what you get in a debate with Donny T and Biden.
Biden: Normal liberal policy ideas, maybe we leave the queer folks alone, maybe we do a little something on climate, etc.
SmallHandsOrangeBoy: Incoherent frothing about the immigrants, the gays, the "woke mind virus"
Reporters: And here are the candidate's positions, clearly no further comment or observation is required. Best not question the froth lest we be accused of bias!
Feels like a lot of reporters are either unused to dealing with a rising fascist bloc, hampered by corporate meddling, or complicit.
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