Reddit pulls a Twitter. Third Party Apps will cost some developers $20 MILLION/yr.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Again you are lacking a basics of business in cost analysis.

You're missing the point.

 

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Answer this, if all users used Apollo instead of reddit, what would Reddit's advertising revenue be?

The same as it is now. Zero. You know what what happens when you use a mobile phone to browse reddit? You are harassed to use the reddit app. That doesn't happen on the desktop BECAUSE THERE IS NO DESKTOP APP.

 

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's stupid to just compare cost to how much they would lets say rent a server for. 

It's correct. You somehow think that the Twitter and Reddit's costs are data, when it's actually staff.

 

If I setup a forum in a corner of the web and pay $50/mo to leave it running, and never touch it again. It will still be there as long as I'm paying for it. Completely unattended. It'll likely end up full of spam if left unattended, but that is what you're trying to claim. That some how Reddit and twitter has justified these costs, when it's clear they haven't.

 

They are trying to download costs not attached to the operation of the site somewhere, and deciding that the'd rather kill their business.

 

 

There is this really common thing I find pops up in video games, where the player will prefer to min-max short-term profit in their game (eg simcity) by maximizing their revenue source by actively chasing a negative-growth strategy.

 

So yeah, for maybe the first few months someone pays it, but then as the value of the company diminishes from the attrition, what are you going to do next month? Raise the API prices? No, that will just increase the attrition.

 

If reddit's data is so valuable, expect the site to become extinct in a few months as the next rabbit they will put out of their hat will be to make all subreddits subscriber-only. Worked so incredibly well for the newspapers crying poverty.

[LAwLz]

15 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

You missed the part where he accidentally left Answer: <generic bullshit> in one of his replies. Basically confirming he was copying and pasting from an existing pre-written answer sheet

Did he actually do that or are you being hyperbole?

I didn't read the answers but I find it very hard to believe that he actually wrote <generic bullshit> in his post.

[jagdtigger]

If this is true reddit lost quite more than a few nuts and bolts from their heads:

(Image from discord, IDK which "server", it was linked on an another forum [cant link to forum for reasons i dont want to "say"])

[Kisai]

58 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

If this is true reddit lost quite more than a few nuts and bolts from their heads:

(Image from discord, IDK which "server", it was linked on an another forum [cant link to forum for reasons i dont want to "say"])

Who saw this coming

And... what moderators are being paid to moderate this now hmm? Cause you know what's gonna happen, the people who regularly post there are going to cause chaos and get themselves banned so the subreddit ends up useless.

 

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Who saw this coming

Like that makes it right or acceptable. Anyway they pretty much cutting the tree under themselves.

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

If this is true reddit lost quite more than a few nuts and bolts from their heads:

 

Out of all the subreddits that protested and shut down why bring back those two subreddits.

I wonder if it's just that there were more than one moderators of the subreddit with top level permissions who kicked out the moderator who wanted it closed to protest the changes. Moderators fighting each other seems more likely than Reddit themselves re-opening it and appointing themselves the new owner of the subreddit.

 

But, it does pose the question. Should Reddit reopen popular subreddits that closed?

It's pretty tone deaf if they are reopening subreddits that are protesting changes made by reddit but at a certain point the subreddits grow beyond the point where they should be taken offline just because the moderator(s) are angry. If a subreddit has a million members and there are other people who are willing to take over to manage it then why shouldn't Reddit step in and transfer it to somebody who is willing to keep it going?

 

If all the members of the subreddit support closing the subreddit they'd just leave the subreddit and it'll be empty. That might happen with very niche subreddits that only have 15 members but realistically what would happen with any subreddit that is bigger than a few hundred members is a small number of the very vocal would leave but most members will stay and then it will just continue like normal with new people managing it.

[jagdtigger]

5 minutes ago, Spotty said:

but at a certain point the subreddits grow beyond the point where they should be taken offline just because the moderator(s) are angry.

This "but" part is pretty tone-deaf as well. This is the equivalent of governments forcibly disbanding otherwise peaceful protests......

[Kisai]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

This "but" part is pretty tone-deaf as well. This is pretty much the equivalent of governments forcibly disbanding otherwise peaceful protests......

Governments don't disband peaceful protests, they disband unlawful protests.

 

The only way a protest is allowed to perpetually last is if those in the protest actively follow every rule of law to the letter, because the second they don't, it's now an illegal activity. Hence, the police are called in to remove protestors who block railway lines.

 

You never see homeless protests disbanded, just occasionally the police get asked to clear them from camps, because some idiot brought a camp stove into it and now it's a fire hazard.

 

And that's the point of a protest, you are willing to be arrested and serve the time for standing up for what is right. So in the case of Reddit, the equivalent would be the "owners" of the subreddit blacking it out, and if there are moves by reddit to "re-open" it, delete everything.

[jagdtigger]

36 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Governments don't disband peaceful protests, they disband unlawful protests.

Yeah right.... /s And coincidentally they are also the ones who decide whats lawful and what is not, in short they can disband any protest theyd like.

[Spotty]

33 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

This "but" part is pretty tone-deaf as well. This is the equivalent of governments forcibly disbanding otherwise peaceful protests......

It's more like removing the protester who glued themselves to the road so that traffic can still flow.

 

Surely Reddit has procedures in place to prevent people hijacking and shutting down subreddits.

 

r/tumblr has 1.3M members and r/adviceanimals has 9.8M members. Should the entire community of millions of people be disbanded because the owners of those subreddits are protesting something?

 

I find it hard to believe that all 9.8M members of r/adviceanimals wanted the subreddit to shut down permanently. When you have a subreddit with close to 10M members that community grows beyond the ideals and opinions of one person and in a way it becomes its own entity.

 

Let's say for a hypothetical situation the owner of the unofficial r/linustechtips subreddit with 280k members decides to shut it down one day. Let's say they're annoyed with clickbait video titles so they put up a post saying they're going to delete the subreddit to protest and they get a few hundred upvotes from people in the community who are also annoyed by clickbait video titles. Should that moderator be able to permanently delete the entire subreddit? Or should Reddit step in and transfer ownership of the subreddit to somebody else to manage to keep it going? Should LMG take it over?

 

 

I still think that what has likely happened is other moderators in those communities just took over and re-opened it.

[Chris_UK]

On 6/1/2023 at 6:32 AM, hishnash said:

Reduction in trafic that they are not making any money from is not a bad thing for them.    But I do think they could have figured out a price that would have made them more money per user than the add revenue and still enabled some premium there party devs. 

True, however if that reduced traffic leads to less posts, and less engagement, it means that there is less need for the non third party users to go to those subreddits, which in turn will probably lower overall traffic. it just depends on whether the cost of this is a net benefit or not

Reddit for the past few years (possibly longer) has been following a pattern of delivery degrading the service provided with a push towards paid, or official app usage, however at the moment there isn't really a strong competitor that can challenge them. Possibly discord but that's not really the same

[WolframaticAlpha]

5 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

If this is true reddit lost quite more than a few nuts and bolts from their heads:

(Image from discord, IDK which "server", it was linked on an another forum [cant link to forum for reasons i dont want to "say"])

I mean, it is quite undemocratic to allow a bunch of moderators to shut off entire repositories of content that they didn't create. In the entire chain of reddit usage, they rank behind users and reddit. 

 

Like, no disrespect to the mods of this forum, but I wouldn't want them to shut down the forum because they want to protest against LTT paywalling some of the content.

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

"but" part is pretty tone-deaf as well. This is the equivalent of governments forcibly disbanding otherwise peaceful protests......

Should the librarian of the local library get to shut down their library because they don't agree with a decision of the local government?

3 hours ago, Spotty said:

subreddit has a million members and there are other people who are willing to take over to manage it then why shouldn't Reddit step in and transfer it to somebody who is willing to keep it going?

Exactly. If the users dislike the changes so much, they can very well delete all their content from reddit and then no one will visit the site. Realistically, millions of users come across the content of hundreds of thousands of redditors and out of that only a select few will choose to leave. Why should everyone's content be inaccessible because a few disagree?

 

The mods should stop moderating and give up your modship if they are so inconvenienced and let the community turn into a shitshow if no one else turns up. You own as much of the content posted by the users as does reddit, if not less.  And moderation isn't a black art that only select few can. A community of millions can put up moderators as good as you if not better.

 

And most people on reddit don't use appollo or any of these apps. It is stupid to blackout entire communities of millions because a small percentage of users now has to use a worse app or if moderators have to use stock tools instead of the ones they had become so accustomed to.

 

[Drazil100]

If Reddit is behind this and it isn’t because the moderators of those subreddits staged a mutiny Reddit is going to find out quickly how unsustainable that is. People won’t stand for it. 

[wanderingfool2]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

It's correct. You somehow think that the Twitter and Reddit's costs are data, when it's actually staff.

Wow, your comprehension level is incredibly low given I have said the opposite

 

I have NEVER said it's just the cost of data.

 

Literally I'm talking about all the costs essentially not being the DATA.

 

The cost is lost revenue

The cost is ALL company expenses associated with providing the service

 

I HAVE said that if Reddit or Twitter wanted to they could bolster their profits by utilizing the data in a way like Facebook/Google has where they essentially sell your data to the highest bidder and monopolize off it by becoming an advertising company.

 

Reddit has had to use influxes of investments to what appears to stay afloat...so it's extremely asinine trying to somehow justify that things don't "cost" them much.

 

It's flat out asinine comparing a company's service cost that operates under a subsidized model to one where it's intended to make a profit.  This forum is subsidized by Linus, you can bet on that.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

 

The cost is lost revenue

The cost is ALL company expenses associated with providing the service

 

And dumping all the costs of operating the service on a third party accomplishes what? The early death of your business, that's what.

 

Again, this is a thing I see people learn from games, min-max the profit, while driving everyone away, and then wonder why they are losing the game.

 

You can not download costs to someone who is not required to be there.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, Spotty said:

It's more like removing the protester who glued themselves to the road so that traffic can still flow.

 

Surely Reddit has procedures in place to prevent people hijacking and shutting down subreddits.

It's likely not happened before outside of politics or piracy subreddits, of which I'm sure the policy is likely "transfer ownership to someone who is very active on the subreddit and willing to take responsibility for it"

 

 

9 hours ago, Spotty said:

 

Let's say for a hypothetical situation the owner of the unofficial r/linustechtips subreddit with 280k members decides to shut it down one day. Let's say they're annoyed with clickbait video titles so they put up a post saying they're going to delete the subreddit to protest and they get a few hundred upvotes from people in the community who are also annoyed by clickbait video titles. Should that moderator be able to permanently delete the entire subreddit? Or should Reddit step in and transfer ownership of the subreddit to somebody else to manage to keep it going? Should LMG take it over?

 

Realistically LMG should take it over, since it's established as being related to LMG in name. If they renamed it to "GenericTechTips" and passed it off to someone else, it wouldn't matter.

 

Which brings up a point I made earlier about abandoned forums. If there is no paid moderator to be there, eventually it will death-spiral into spam and coderot.  Trying to maintain forums where most of the activity has moved somewhere else is usually not worth it, and it's better to shut them down forever, because two things happen:

- "fan" forums eventually turn into "creator hate" forums, because the creator doesn't participate or even acknowledge the role the forum plays in the creator's content

- "fan" forums eventually are abandoned when the creator jumps into a political fight that brings the nutballs to the forum to fight the fans.

 

It costs nothing to leave a forum up to read, but it costs whoever maintains the infrastructure time and money to keep a dead forum up because the underlying software slowly rots away. Better to lock out signups (remember recaptcha? Remember how all these forums used it to prevent bot signups? Remember how google retired it? So now ALL old forums that never upgraded it, are now forever unable to reset passwords or create new signups?) and just leave it in a read-only state.

 

Reddit and Twitter's loss is Tumblr's gain, funny enough. That said, we're basically heading towards a future where public information is lost in favor of regurgitated GPT SEO content. 

 

[Jimmy Hoke]

This sucks, but it will be worth it if it brings back forums.

[dogwitch]

the ps5 sub. the mods where shock when .

1 the user did not get input on the matter OG and how they called out the mods for doing what they did.

 

[Kisai]

Well the backfiring has begun.

[Isuck Assimov]

*Chanting* "TRUST THERMOCLINE"

[PDifolco]

20 hours ago, Drazil100 said:

If Reddit is behind this and it isn’t because the moderators of those subreddits staged a mutiny Reddit is going to find out quickly how unsustainable that is. People won’t stand for it. 

Reddit guys looks to me like monkeys pretending they're Elon Musk...

Reddit will never recover from their stupidity, too bad

[Taf the Ghost]

On 6/15/2023 at 3:15 AM, Kisai said:

Who saw this coming

And... what moderators are being paid to moderate this now hmm? Cause you know what's gonna happen, the people who regularly post there are going to cause chaos and get themselves banned so the subreddit ends up useless.

 

Something really important to understand about Reddit is that the major Mods are all controlled by Marketing Agencies. Now, that doesn't mean they maintain a majority of moderators in all major channels (that'd be expensive) or that Reddit's decision will impact them negatively. But there's certainly angles to all of this that we won't have the full answer to, at least not for a while.

 

The other thing is that I wonder if some subreddits mod teams wasn't just bought by some agency.  Considering the black market for verification on enough platforms, everything has a price to acquire.  I wonder how much r/Politics went for, haha.

 

On something not paid enough attention to on this: the API pricing also means most of the Mod Tools used to manage the large subs are going offline.  Creating a bunch of Lame Duck Mods without tools is a great way to watch it all burn down. Reddit has finally Digg'd itself, realistically.

[Drazil100]

Guess it's confirmed that they are indeed replacing moderators. Question I have is how sustainable is this strategy? Not only are they throwing out people, but they are throwing out all of their experience of moderating a community with them. The people who replace these moderators may not have any experience managing a community of that size, especially when that community is probably pissed that they took the position, and they will have no experienced mods to ask questions of.

If they keep doing this this will become a shit show really quickly and NOT just because they are pissing off the protesters.

Edit: Someone ping me if they delete this post. I'll replace it with a screenshot if they do.

[Spotty]

20 minutes ago, Drazil100 said:

Guess it's confirmed that they are indeed replacing moderators.

-100 karma on that post haha. I think that's only going to get worse. Reading some of the comments it seems Spez supposedly said they wouldn't reopen subreddits that closed which is why them doing it is even more controversial.

 

It's incredibly tone deaf of Reddit to ignore the reason why those moderators shut down those subreddits in the first place. Ultimately I think Reddit should have listened to the overwhelming feedback from the community and announced some changes, and then only replace moderators in large communities that still refused to reopen/were inactive/deleted their accounts. But, the show must go on. At the end of the day I don't disagree with them replacing mod teams who shut down large communities indefinitely. 

 

Now before everybody hates me for saying that, I just want to explain where I'm coming from. As a moderator of this forum (who could close the forum) I fully expect the LTT forum to continue on without me. If it ever came to that then kick me off the mod team and keep on truckin. I'm under no delusions that I'm pivotal to the community's existence. The forum was fine before I joined and it'll be fine after I'm gone. Everything will just carry on normally with new mods. Moderators don't make subreddits or forums - the community does.

 

Though, I will laugh if all the new mods Reddit appoints to these communities also take them offline. 

[Drazil100]

2 minutes ago, Spotty said:

At the end of the day I don't disagree with them replacing mod teams who shut down large communities indefinitely. 

 

Now before everybody hates me for saying that, I just want to explain where I'm coming from. As a moderator of this forum (who could close the forum) I fully expect the LTT forum to continue on without me. If it ever came to that then kick me off the mod team and keep on truckin. I'm under no delusions that I'm pivotal to the community's existence. The forum was fine before I joined and it'll be fine after I'm gone. Everything will just carry on normally with new mods. Moderators don't make subreddits or forums - the community does.

I am in the exact same boat. At the end of the day the moderators of these communities don't and can't possibly speak for every single one of their community members. Many people still rely on the wealth of data stored only on Reddit and a small handful of people shouldn't be able to force their community to protest with them.

That said I agree that it is INCREDIBLY tone deaf and I am frankly glad they are doing it just because it demonstrates how tone deaf they actually are. The community is the people, not the brand, not the servers, not the tools, it's the people. If Reddit is willing to throw away the people this easily then maybe we can move on to a new platform that is better than Reddit.

All things must eventually die so that new things can take it's place.