The Great Reddit power struggle of 2023

[TurkeysGhost]

Something unusual is going on over at Reddit.

Thousands of Reddit communities go dark to boycott third-party app charges

Thousands of Reddit discussion forums have gone dark this week to protest a new policy that will charge some third-party apps to access data on the site, leading to worries about content moderation and accessibility.

More than 8,000 subreddits were dark as of Tuesday afternoon, according to a tracker and live Twitch stream of the boycott. Participants ranged from small forums to large communities with tens of millions of subscribers — including the r/funny, r/music and r/todayilearned pages seen on the online discussion site.

“Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself),” other subreddits wrote in posts seen on the platform’s homepage.

The new fees are part of broader changes to Reddit’s API, or application programming interface, that the company announced recently.

Organizers of the blackout, which began Monday, say Reddit’s changes threaten to end key ways of historically customizing the platform — which relies heavily on the work of volunteer moderators. Subreddit “mods” often use tools outside of the official app to keep their forums free of spam and hateful content, for example, as well as improve accessibility.

Reddit announced they were basically going to kill popular third party browsing apps by making the fees astronomical, and there has been widespread resistance in the form of many major subreddits setting themselves to private and not allowing new posts. This makes the content not viewable to the public (unless you were already a subscriber to that subreddit).

Seems management is escalating, by removing mods who are engaged in the protest and replacing them with scabs willing to open up the pages again:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/21/reddit-experiments-with-removing-mods-blocking-attempts-to-switch-subs-to-nsfw/

Reddit famously relies on tons of free labor from volunteer users who do the lion's share moderation work for the social media site, in exchange for having control over their little section of the website. Paid admin employees generally only step in when mods aren't maintaining the site-wide rules or otherwise aren't holding up the bargain.

 

[catsmate]

Meh, I'll miss it as much as Twitter.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Meh, I'll miss it as much as Twitter.

I dunno. The hugely popular, more general subreddits are pretty much total crap, but there's tons of more niche sections of reddit that are quite useful. Reddit seems to be hosting a lot of the useful communities that in the past would have used their own BBS forums. Maybe centralizing was a mistake and the internet would be better off under the old model, but those horses are well outside the barn at this point.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Reddit's user base "goes on strike" about once every 4 seconds over something or other. This was like 4 days ago, 99% of Reddit has already moved on and 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999% of humanity never knew it happened.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Reddit's user base "goes on strike" about once every 4 seconds over something or other. This was like 4 days ago, 99% of Reddit has already moved on and 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999% of humanity never knew it happened.

Is that the case? I probably won't be using it anymore, not for any principled reason other than the official reddit app/site are total crap and just aren't worth the bad UI experience.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Another aspect of this perhaps the impossible business plans of these social media companies generally.

Reddit seemed to have been operating under a very common type of social media business plan, where the company will invest heavily and even run at a loss in order to amass a huge user base, with plans to monetize this user base in the future... somehow.

Reddit makes plenty of revenue selling ads to the huge number of people that visit the site, but it also has huge expenses (sounds like Twitter).

Reddit is planning to go public with an IPO scheduled for later this year, so it makes sense that they are now pushing to actually show profitability, even if that means going to war with their own user base and trying to claw back more money from these third party apps.

Remains to be seen if they stick the landing.

 

[dudalb]

Geeks going to behave like Geeks. What a surprise.

 

[dirtywick]

I dunno. The hugely popular, more general subreddits are pretty much total crap, but there's tons of more niche sections of reddit that are quite useful. Reddit seems to be hosting a lot of the useful communities that in the past would have used their own BBS forums. Maybe centralizing was a mistake and the internet would be better off under the old model, but those horses are well outside the barn at this point.

i agree, 10-20 years ago you'd google search an interest and find a forum dedicated to it. reddit is basically a collection of these and those forums are gone, for better or for worse. i'd assume there's a skeptics subreddit and likely some users from old jref and here are on there as well.

of course, reddit is kind of annoying since it's constantly trying to engage you by jamming other **** into your face and apps reminding you that you're not on reddit at the moment and could be, but that's what being beholden to advertisers does. the entire internet is full of annoyances driven by advertising.

 

[pipelineaudio]

This pretty much means you can kiss reddit goodbye if you are blind, but hey, who cares about them right? Also, translator apps are going to be back as crap as google translate as it will be pretty much your only option, but who cares about them foreigners right?

 

[Olmstead]

Another aspect of this perhaps the impossible business plans of these social media companies generally.

Reddit seemed to have been operating under a very common type of social media business plan, where the company will invest heavily and even run at a loss in order to amass a huge user base, with plans to monetize this user base in the future... somehow.

Reddit makes plenty of revenue selling ads to the huge number of people that visit the site, but it also has huge expenses (sounds like Twitter).

Reddit is planning to go public with an IPO scheduled for later this year, so it makes sense that they are now pushing to actually show profitability, even if that means going to war with their own user base and trying to claw back more money from these third party apps.

Remains to be seen if they stick the landing.

Which is why it should be the sworn duty of any consumer to immediately leave a platform the moment they start pulling some ******** and crying about having to be profitable. Maybe play the world's smallest violin on the way out.

Of course it doesn't actually happen, and I can't even judge anyone. I myself love reading, so I'm still using Amazon, regardless of their ********, because it's just more convenient.