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 @[email protected]):
other media coverage:
I’ve been getting used to lemmy for the last couple days, going back and forth between here and reddit and following what’s going on, and I think I just realized something that I hadn’t been able to put into words.
The lemmy community feels responsive and fun to talk to, and I think that’s because the people who are coming here from reddit are the people who are motivated to communicate, and are people who care about the topics in each community. That’s pretty cool.
I’ve been feeling weird about leaving Reddit; mainly because it’s been my main source of entertainment, news, and community for over 10 years but this is a really good point about any ‘social’ network. Even the link aggregator sites like Reddit. Over the past couple of years, I feel like my engagement has dropped significantly because it hasn’t been FUN to engage with the communities I was a part of the same way it was when I first joined. I’m hoping to recapture that a bit here specifically on Lemmy and in the fediverse at large.
There is an energy here that I haven’t really felt from reddit as a whole in years…
Certain (smaller) subs could still get that same feeling sometimes, but so far I am very much enjoying lemmy. Yeah there’s a bit of a learning curve to figuring things out but I think people will catch on fast!
I think you hit the nail on the head for me. I’m excited to see what comes from this community far more than Reddit.
Exactly! Reddit turned in a whine site.
Great point. There will be a big wave i’m sure (it happened w/ Mastodon/microblogging fediverse platforms) and after a few months, some of the people tried it and left. The people who remained are such an engaging and fun group to talk to.
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…
No matter how many developers you get, you’re never going to have a good product if the guy calling the shots won’t allow it. I’m confident that the developers working on Reddit probably know damn well that their product is trash and there’s nothing they can do about it because their job isn’t “make a good site” its “do what your boss tells you to do”
I’ve been a developer for awhile and you would be surprised how many companies can’t get out of their own way to improve their products.
This is so true it hurts.
That’s absolutely right, I’m not a developer, I’m a UX/UI designer. I recently had a contract where the contractor slaughtered my initial design to the point where I almost started to hate it, but I was bound by contract to finish it.
If reddit wants, their developer can absolutely build a top notch app.
Sharing this because it should be shared
This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo’s woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.
Ditto. I saw that, I deleted all my posts/comments and then my 11+ year old account.
Remember to check that it stayed deleted. My account rolled back my deletions. Possibly due to “stability”
Wait what! Things have gotten this bad!? Like, this actually happened? I’m guessing there was no follow up question.
I mean, it’s either a dumb corporate strategy to discredit or psychopathic behaviour, or, sadly, both.
Also something weird, when I saw this combo, iamthatis was the first reply. Now it’s way down there, despite the upvotes and gilds.
I really don’t like putting on the tin foil hat, but since spez admitted in the past that he changed other users comments, I’m calling it, this guy is still messing around with things behind the scenes
This whole situation feels like a short term revenue grab. I bet shareholders are trying to inflate the numbers in order to cash out in the IPO.
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.
The thing is, they have operating costs. I’m sure it’s a boatload of money as well, given the size and scope of Reddit. Almost all startups run at a loss. And then continue to do so long past when they’re a “startup”. The money they “make” is from rounds of investors who believe they will find a way to make money in the future. Eventually investors get restless and demand that they find a way to monetize so they can recoup. Without those investors money, the site will come crashing as soon as they miss some critical payments for stuff that keep the site up. I’m absolutely sure that’s what we’re seeing. I think either way, its time has come.
Pinch the users to try to keep it alive for a little bit more. Don’t pinch the users and it dies in a grinding halt when they miss some key payments.
They can always work together with platform developers to make profits. Yet they’re killing the very platform that bring traffics to the site. I can only see greediness here.
So realistically, what would a sustainable business model be for something like Reddit?
Something like lemmy or a fediverse platform is going to rely on donations and community support. In the case of mastodon, for example, it’s been shown to work well enough for sustainable operations. For those willing to work on something worthwhile for lower salary, it is potentially a great gig. In a commercial context though, it’s basically a subscription based business model.
If we’re to recover from this ad driven data tracking economy, subscriptions seem like a healthy thing for businesses to adopt.
Reddit may have already signed their deals with the devil. But generally, the point of the fediverse is to escape this corporate manipulation of our basic communications in the internet, and it’s still interesting to ask what profitable but sustainable operations can look like.
I think that federation will help Lemmy a ton–there will be a lot of small, cheap servers rather than a single extremely expensive one!
Possibly. I’m not sure how true it is that the fediverse necessarily leads to more efficient computing needs per user. I’d bet it’s the opposite.
But, as you perhaps allude to, there are other factors. For those who only want niche smaller communities, they can enjoy a more stripped down experience without needing speedy and beefy servers. Similarly, the platforms here are probably slimmer and not bloated with features that are trying to engage and monetise.
The major factor, IMO, is ownership. Admins literally own their servers. And should have a much closer and codependent relationship with the users in their servers, except in the case of large instances which become different beasts. Additionally, users have much more choice and mobility on the fediverse. All of which means admins/moderators and users have more at stake in their relationship. More ownership over their platform/instance. And therefore actually have a reason to donate and contribute and help out.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:
“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.
What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?
Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.
It’s going to become a barren wasteland of bots communicating with each other.
Haha, you just reminded me of this cartoon:
yeah. this one’s always relevant
@myk @alyaza “Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?”
Goes to show how important it is we use FOSS and decentralized tools for real community communications.
yeah, and multilingual on top of that, there are content in so many languages on reddit.
fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
Isn’t it a bit late for that?
I mean, GPT is on its fourth iteration, they’ve been working on it for years, I don’t know about Bing Chat but MS surely didn’t start develop it only yesterday.
How can Reddit be so sure “AI bros” haven’t already got the data they needed to train their models?
I’m out. Redact is busy just now deleting everything under my account.
What’s redact?
An app that allows you to remove all your posts from Reddit and other social media accounts.
By chance, do you have a link to it? I’ve been doing this manually, and it’s taking ages.
Amazing! Thank you!
Tonight, we erase the past!
Check that it stayed deleted. My posts came back after deletion.
I keep sitting here waiting for Reddit to backtrack. But it keeps not happening.
Reddit isn’t going back. Even if they did I’m sure they just convinced multiple users to not go back. I hope the blackout and tons of users moving will have a big enough impact to devalue Reddit even if somewhat.
I predict Reddit backing out, lowering the API price to something realistic, and then everyone forgets what happened, like every other time something like this has happened.
Reddit just feels dirty to me now, not in a good dirty way… Just dirty, I want nothing to do with it. I see no coming back from this even if the backlash leads to Reddit reversing the decisions. Kind of new the IPO would do something like this. Looking forward to seeing this place bloom.
100% too gross for me
My concern is that communities on Lemmy are fractured by instance. You CAN read or subscribe to communities on any instance, but communities with the same topics (or even the same names!) on different instances are in no way connected. For example, there can be a community called “Books” on every instance, but if you subscribe to one you will NOT see posts in any of the other Books communities on other instances. You’d have to go out, specifically find each one of them, and subscribe to them separately.
Not to mention communities with different names, but that cover the same essential topic. For example, I’m subscribed to the “Literature” community here. It’s nice. But it’s entirely disconnected from any of the “Books” communities on other instances. I’m not sure how that sort of fracturing could be addressed. I understand that there’s a plan to eventually allow “MultiReddit” style aggregating, allowing users to group a number of communities into a single reading group, but that would only apply to what that individual user would read. No one else would have the benefit of seeing all the posts from those communities in a single group unless they individually recreated that collection.
What might work would be to bake in a set of standard all-instance communities which would automatically merge the content from all instances for those topics for all users. But I’m not sure that would work, since not all instances have to federate with all other instances.
I don’t think of that as a negative. It’s a different structure than Reddit.
Each instance would be a community in the cultural sense. All of the Lemmy communities within that instance would be a place for primarily the same instance users to gather. Each instance having its own cultural identity. Decentralized.
I agree. On reddit, there are a bazillion different “gaming” subreddits that are only named different because that’s the only way to have different communities around the same topic: r/gaming, r/games, r/truegaming, r/patientgamers, r/girlgamers, r/transgamers, r/gaymers, and so on.
Each of those communities has a different feel and different moderation and different priorities, and no way no how would I want r/gaming posts mixed in if I’m trying to browse r/transgamers, for example.
Similarly, I’m mostly sticking to Lemmy instances that disable the downvote button, because it makes for friendly places I think, and lowers the barrier to posting for socially anxious users.
I like the idea of there being a way for users, or for similar groups of instances that agree to it (like if beehaw and an instance with similar rules/community feel wanted to collaborate a bit), to set up a multi-lemmy ‘all’ community thing that shows posts across similar communities, but it should still be optional.
Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You’d think spez was new to reddit with the way he’s commenting.
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.
