- cross-posted to:
- jingszo@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- jingszo@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
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Wow, out of a total revenue of $281 million $193 million goes to a single person? Holy shit. What a selfish asshole you have to be to disregard all of your employees and take such a huge cut for yourself.
Spez is the unnecessary overhead that creates extra work for the workers
It’s actually insane. I’m not built for corporate jobs but goddamn I have no idea how anyone would want to work for such a company.
You should look up the absurd pay structure of Musk at Tesla or how at Facebook, despite it being a publicly traded company, Zuckerberg literally cannot be fired.
The reason tech tends to chase stupid trends like AI is that there really aren’t that many people in charge of the whole place. They all know each other; they’re all buddies. And they all chase the same stupid fads together.
It’s a sign. Spez will now milk the company and make himself billionaires for the next few years, then sell the company for tens of billions, and new owner will run it into the ground, milking whatever left of it. Then it will become the blandest, soulless socmed.
Sounds like a job for Elon Musk.
Please let this happen.
No one can ruin a company quite like him.
Or sell it to Trump Media Group.
TBH that would ddos lemmy with new users, lol.
Basically paid that twat 200 mil to kill the site.
Imagine if they put 100 of that into developers and infrastructure and shit.
Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish… and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.
That was peak reddit.
Holy smokes. Beautiful
holy fucking shit that’s awesome
“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.
that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera
This one: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/
Make sure to click
[+][deleted] 14 years ago (156 children)to get even more.
I got rickrolled by Firefox built in translation.
They banned bots from WholesomeMemes and there were no posts for 2 days. Dead Internet is now, and it’s at Reddit.
I think that this article is accurate and sensible.
There’s a point that I’d like to add, that the author doesn’t mention: user trust.
The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users’ willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit’s case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.
And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023’s APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.
And when user trust is violated, it’s almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there’s no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it’s practically impossible to come back.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
Well put
And also because the only other place my niche interests have communities is discord
Wrote something similar 1 year ago 😁
I remember reading your text back then. It’s great, and it shows something that neither the article in the OP nor my comment show - the role of network effect in the process.
That das a nice read, but the site is weird to read on mobile i had to switch to the desktop mode lol
I can’t pinpoint when Reddit died in my eyes. But I can say the long road to where it is today started with Reddit Gold.
Reddit Gold was a minor change that didn’t do much of anything besides offer a way to collect money directly from the user base. But it was the start of monetizing the site and every decision by Reddit management after that point furthered that monetization at the expense of everything else.
I didn’t mind Reddit gold as a method of paying for upkeep on an ostensibly free site. If well-off Redditors wanted to chip in to help with maintenance resulting in fewer or less intrusive ads then that’s grand.
The point when they started losing me was when the Reddit front page modernised into the Instagram feed looking abomination it is today and when they shifted from Reddit gold to the silver diamond thing they have now. No I don’t want to make an avatar. No I don’t want to follow users or have them follow me.
It started as the last example of old social media like forums and got metric’d into this half-formed freak of a site that seems to actively resent the users that build and maintain their entire platform.
Hell, I chipped in for reddit gold. I’m not well off, I just used the platform loads and didn’t mind paying a little for something I enjoyed. Like so many others, my goodwill was pissed on, though, and I am just another paying customer that they lost. The API thing was the final nail in the coffin for me.
I can pinpoint the exact moment: When the admins actively gave t_d a full pass on anything they wanted to do in 2016.
That single act drove away more users than any previous exodus.
There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.
2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could’ve built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.
2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).
You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.
There were a few around that same timer period. IIRC, that’s also about when the whole /r/jailbait controversy happened, and the site suddenly had a really bad reputation among non-users. Like before it had been seen as a weird site, but then it was suddenly seen as outright predatory. Users suddenly didn’t want to associate with the site. Then the t_d stuff happened, which just compounded the issue of users not wanting to associate with the site due to the bad reputation.
Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.
If Reddit’s goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might’ve still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn’t run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.
However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different:
- There wouldn’t be a “gilded” sorting, as it enables astroturfers to exchange money for visibility.
- There wouldn’t be microtransaction mechanics associated with it, such as packs of “X+Y coins” associated with broken values in real money (so you need to pull out a calculator to know which one has the cheapest price).
- Even if platinum might’ve appeared, silver wouldn’t. Because the userbase was already joking about a “Reddit silver” award; so creating a Reddit silver was basically “nice meme you have there, it’s now my source of profit, sucker”.
- It wouldn’t change every five minutes as they were trying to find the best way to capitalise on it. “Gold! Awards! Coins! Back to gold! Rewards system!”
- They would’ve asked the users on potential ways to finance the site without contradicting its values.
Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.
You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.
Reddit could’ve become a non-profit for users, financed by them. So the outcome was avoidable, at least years and years in the past.
But for that Pigboy and kn0thing would need to give up the pretension of drinking champagne in an IPO. kn0thing gave up too late; Pigboy never did.
A good “dividing line” where the outcome became fixed was the introduction of Reddit Gold.
Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.
My favorite of the protests was DnDmemes becoming a goblin porn subreddit, and the final reply of the main mod “I shitposted me way in here, I’ll shitpost my way out”. That and demanding a d20 roll for persuasion(?) from the admins
I liked pics becoming nothing but sexy pictures of John Oliver, with the notice that all pictures of John Oliver are sexy pictures of John Oliver.
And Spez’s response?
“OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.
And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.
he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts
This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.
And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.
I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists
Those were the early days of Reddit. They’re long gone now that everyone has joined. Those so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists have now abandoned Reddit. It’s mostly just the sheep left there now.
It’s the same story with Twitter.
Has anyone told them? I think they might not know that.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing
He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.
Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)
actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.
Fuck reddit …fuck the mods who abuse their power. Fuck the bots. Fuck the corporate greed bs. The admins have always been cool to me until I was perma ban. But kind of seem like nice folks.
Thank you for all your posts here
I’m trying to upvote as many Lemmy posts as I can find on the Reddit search function to hasten the demise of the pet project of Spez since the third party apps are up to snuff now!
Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.
Tbh I doubt companies would stop scraping data. They wouldn’t care to respect the ToS (they never did) and feed in their AI models all the Lemmy posts and comments they can find. Still better than Reddit willfully selling these info
They still can’t game it for engagement optimization to that extreme, not like the closed loops of monolithic sites.
True. Let’s drive away from them as much as possible
You don’t think once Lemmy hits mainstream, companies won’t start polluting Lemmy and harvest data here?
As Lemmy users we always have the freedom to jump ship to a different Lemmy instance if the admins of the ones we’re on decide to sell the site out and/or let the polluters take over, or we can even start up our own Lemmy instance (with blackjack, etc.)
I’m not sure if there is any way you can promote links to my account, but feel free:
https://www.reddit.com/user/FlyingSquid/
they’ll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave
Hasn’t Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there’s probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.
I’m also willing to bet a ton of the remainder are bot or alt accounts for people too.
My girlfriend doesn’t use Twitter but the platforms she does use she has multiple accounts on and I bet a lot of people do that too.
i guess you dont remember digg https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
Fuck, I remember Yahoo.
It was never cool but in the stone age it was hip for about 30 minutes.
Let me tell you tales of the mythical Geocities…
I wish my old angelfire site was still around…
I missed digg. I was on fark before reddit and somehow fark is still around and hasn’t changed at all
Weirdly enough, I never cared for Yahoo. Back in the late 90s, their homepage was a cluttered mess
Interesting, I never used digg and didn’t know about it’s history. It seems like they could have easily fought back bots with captchas, email verification, phone verification and so on.
That only works when there’s competition. There’s like 5 sites left on the Internet. It’s been centralized and monopolized.
Digg era is very different than today. Peak user for Digg is 30million, while Reddit and Twitter is 330million and 368million respectively, almost 10 times the different. As demonstrated by Twitter, even in its worst form they only lose like 30million user. Reddit won’t go anywhere, the vibe though, will.
I keep seeing YouTubers who host their own subreddits still mentioning Reddit a lot in their videos. Yeah, some people probably don’t even care what happened.
A big streamer I watch is sorta in that camp. He mentions his subreddit all the time and it’s an active part of stream/communication with chat, he bitches at reddit and it’s broader base all the time but I see no signs of moving away from it.
That’s because there will alway be new 10-year-olds who are just discovering “new” parts of the Internet. They are growing up with the enshittification, so they don’t know that things were better before they were born.
And now they’re teeming with bots* and drove away the power users. Look how many posts and comments they’ve lost in the last year just from me alone.
Edit:
The beauty of Reddit was its decentralized structure.
Users created and moderated their own communities with freedom and autonomy, and it led to an explosion of niche interests and discussions. Want to debate the finer points of medieval weaponry? There’s a subreddit for that. Obsessed with pictures of birds with human arms photoshopped onto them? Yep, there’s a subreddit for that too.Took a bit but I’m glad we found the actual decentralized structure we needed
It gives me great joy to be reading this via Boost.
I’m calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about “karma farmers” as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit’s own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.
Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.
I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.
The millions subs numbers are bs
I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.
Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.
It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.
Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).
Will Reddit seize this opportunity? Or will it continue down its current path of self-destruction?
HAHAhahahaha
Reddit was cool. Reddit management had Head Up Ass Syndrome, though. Reminds me of some other social sites too lol.
