If the performance weakness continues for a week or two, the agency would start recommending decreasing spend with Reddit or directing it to other platforms.
After the blackout, we will be closely monitoring user behavior on Reddit and guide clients when we can unpause,” said Freddy Dabaghi, managing director at Stagwell-backed Crispin Porter Bogusky, which has asked clients to stop campaigns, depending on their client goals.
Honestly, regardless of what happens, I have no plans to go back. Lemmy’s been a refreshing breath of fresh air.
Same. It’s really struck me both how little I miss it and how much I like the communities here. There’s a much friendlier vibe.
And for the most part, aside from the bullshit threads where it’s encouraged and expected, the comments are a lot more ‘high-effort,’ which is nice. That’s something that I would expect to tend to naturally go down with the lowest common denominator as user count increases, but we’ll see.
Yeah, I think the kind of people to drop reddit over this are going to be more my kind of people, if that makes sense.
Conversation seems deeper, less dominated by repeated jokes.
The forum wheel spins what the forum wheel wills.
Lemmy was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to Reddit-esque forums. But it was a beginning.
All praise the hamster
also you don’t have a karma system homogenizing behavior by making redditors constantly addicted to upcummies
As much as I’ll miss my karma crops, the higher bar here (at least, for now) is a welcome reprieve.
This is a really good point, and one of the reasons I’m happy to make my new online home here.
The type of people who act like this is nothing, or worse, act like there’s nothing that can be done and we should just roll over, won’t have gone through the trouble to come here. And yeah, I’m with you, they can all hang out and circlejerk the same jokes over and over along with the bots.
Best of both worlds, and we’re all happy. A bit of positive selection bias.
I also like it more and more, especially since more communities are popping up and they get more populated.
Lemmy’s biggest problem is lack of users and content, a problem that will right itself. Reddits biggest problem is kowtowing to advertisers, and it’s only going to get worse after the IPO.
It really is, there isn’t as much content as reddit and that may or may not change but the lack of people acting like they are better than everyone makes it well worth it. I deleted the app and won’t go back
Fully agree, let’s keep this attitude going here! :)
yup, let those folk stay on Reddit.
I wanted to leave for such a long time, but the alternatives weren’t active enough.
If enough people stick around, yeah, I’m never going back.
I’m really hoping the federated nature will make advertising harder. That’s what really started making Reddit suck.
Until all the communities I love move here I think I’d be hopping back and forth from Sync for Reddit and Jeroba for Lemmy, until that happens or Sync breaks lol.
What do you mean by Lemmy for Reddit?
A typo lol, I edited my comment, I meant Jerboa for Lemmy.
Ah ok, I thought I was about to learn something new again ^^
I just hope Mr Dawson magically creates support for Lemmy in Sync for Reddit…
deleted by creator
I love how these articles always frame the strike as “These needy people are mad because Reddit is now charging for something that was free before.” Motherfucker, we’re mad because the price was unreasonable and they were unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Third party app developers even agreed that charging for API usage was a reasonable thing but they expected the cost to be reasonable, as well.
I’m mad because of the slander.
The reason the price is unreasonable is because they’re butthurt that OpenAI and other companies have used the API to pull a LOT of text for machine learning datasets. They are sad that they didn’t get a slice of that cake.
On NPR they did interview the Apollo dev at least.
They still got the frame completely wrong, unless there’s a different radio segment I didn’t hear. The one I heard was mostly from an expert I had never heard from before who made it seem like “the developers” were mad because they had to pay. They included a single throwaway line from Chris. (I think that’s the Apollo dev’s name.) No mention they the pricing was clearly intended to be unreasonable.
There was a segment today, and one yesterday where they actually put Christian on air for a bit longer and he explained things a little better. The one today was definitely obnoxious. But whatever. There’s a lot of nuance in why the API decision is annoying and some of it really does boil down to old users feeling betrayed or having diverging preference. I definitely feel betrayed, and have a preference not to be tracked on my semi-anonymous internet forum.
But to someone who hasn’t spent a decade+ on Reddit, the argument makes sense I think. The API does represent an opportunity cost. Whether that opportunity cost is grounded in reality, or MBA brain rot is probably outside the scope for All Things Considered
It’s bullshit fr. I also haven’t seen one major news article report on that god awful AMA where Spez tried to lie about what Christian said and then claim he was blackmailed but was met with audio recordings of himself that proved he was lying
I know it’s not “major” in the sense of traditional news outlets, but Philip DeFranco is covering it at least
If I were world dictator I would just make advertising illegal. It’s the perfect dictator move. Simple policy that’s hard to enforce which will almost certainly have unintended consequences. But God damn do I hate advertising.
Your wish has been granted, all small businesses have gone bankrupt because nobody knows they exist and since the only form of advertising left is undercover guerilla advertising campaigns every post on every platform is secretly an advertisement!
I think people should be allowed to promote products and services, but those promotions should not be given any more weight than any other kind of post. The problem is when advertisers are allowed to buy spots on a site.
Wouldn’t that just turn into who can afford the most vote manipulation on their reddit posts?
Isn’t that how it works now anyway, in addition to regular ads?
You’re not wrong!
Ahh! Oh no! Who could have ever foreseen these consequences??
oh no
It is such a bizarre and creepy industry. I support you for world dictator!
sadly adverts are what allows some things to be free to consumers, it’s the funding that supports the content that people consume. It’s what it is for now, in the future maybe there would be better merit systems funded by tax or something if humans get together and stop being greedy.
don’t complain if all the free service become paid…
I honestly think I’d prefer that they just let me pay them outright rather than trying to use me as bait for advertisers. The expectation that everything should be free leads to what we see today
meh, good point but i’d prefer some reasonably placed ad (not like those website that have 99% ad and 1% content) instead of paying for something that maybe i’ll never use again
Yea I wouldn’t mind If some of these instances had like one stickied post at the top for a paid ad If that was enough to pay for most of these server costs
I agree with you.
You ever though about where the money from advertisers comes from? I would pay for Google if I would then pay less for products that waste money on “marketing” by paying millions to Google.
The thing is that there aren’t significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that’s working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.
The public broadcasting model.
Shout out to KEXP.org
Around 14 years ago or so, I actually turned off my Adblocker for reddit, because I respected the platform and how it was run. I’ve never turned off Adblocker for ANY other site before or since. Reddit can get fucked. I’m not going back period.
I did the same at some point. However, that place is long gone. There is no reason to be stuck there.
I think that’s admirable. Personally I’d rather just pay $1 per month or something and not see ads at all and have app access.
Sites need to understand that. No one wants to pay 10$/month for some premium crap, all we want is to replace ad revenue.
But sadly most of them charge ridiculous amounts, so it’s infeasible to support many of them. People end up choosing the big ones because they provide the most value per money, so we get more monopolization.
The point is that it is not one dollar, actual server costs may still grow, so subscrptions for social media are still not enough to support the infrastructure behind. Look at twitter, the subscription is there (they call it $8chan now lol) but it still costs a lot of money. The question is whether giant social media sties can be as profitable as other non-tech companies, and it’s a valid question.
I just moved to Lemmy after staying on Reddit for almost 8 years! Hopefully more people will migrate too :)
Social media should never be centralized and for-profit
Moved today. A big part of what I enjoy on reddit is reading comments and with how active communities are over here, I just might be here to stay!
me too. also really nice to just read normal commentsand not just upvote farming comments.
I personally hope they go bankrupt. I mean I feel bad for the average worker just trying to make a living, but fuck Reddit. Those folks should jump ship while they can and do something better for themselves.
I really like the idea that position if big social networks is not secure, that will make all of them think before making bad decisions.
Facebook is almost dead, at least around me (Meta is not with IG and Wapp), I am now starting to hope that reddit would not recover.
They have been digging this grave for some time now. We should let them go.
Reddit announced a layoff just this past week. Nobody’s job there is safe. Best the rest get out while they can.
Imagine after the 3rd party apps are killed!
Even if Reddit does negotiate manageable rates for “non profit” 3rd party apps (lol), wait until Reddit users figure out they still can’t access NSFW content except from the Reddit official app and the new Reddit layout. Break out the popcorn.
redditors around the world pounding their fists on tables
let us jerk, let us jerk!
I truly never realized how many people used Reddit for porn until this happened
probably a good 40/50 percent of reddit user use it only for corn lmao
Nebraska and Iowa lust intensifies.
Yeah, sway in the wind just like that. You know what I like.
Don’t forget Illinois! We lead the nation some years in… corn
Your governors certainly enjoy giving it to the people
The internet is for corn!
Sorry, Kate!
Ooh show me your kernel.
Linux users salivate
?
I don’t care if they fix all of that. I don’t care about nsfw so it’s no motivator but even if they offered to pay me I wouldn’t go back. Not worth the consequences.
The main draw was that people using 3rd party apps didn’t see (reddit’s) ads. If 10% of apollo’s users go to the official app, that is 10% that are seeing ads were they didn’t before.
Bit of a catch-22, because reddit is also counting all those 3rd-party users as part of their userbase when talking about how many users they have. These 3rd party app users also generate some of the content that draws undiscerning users to open reddit and view ads on the way.
Yupp, bit of a leopards ate my face moment! Is their a community for that on here yet btw?
I cancelled my Reddit premium today. I was hesitant because I was in the $30/yr and didn’t want to get rid of that pricing since it’s $50 now. But I’m liking the fediverse and the quirks that comes with it. Will cancelling make an impact? Probably not. But I’d rather not support them if they’re not going to give me a choice on which app I use.
Earnest question, what did the $30/year get you? I never gave them a penny out of my own pocket, didn’t know why I would.
It gave you 700 tokens a month. So you could give out awards to posts. It also removed ads. But I used Apollo and old.reddit(don’t know if ads are placed here) so it didn’t exactly benefit me much.
I also cancelled my Reddit premium. I was using Apollo so the no ad thing was not a factor and I never used my tokens. But I used reddit a lot over many years and wanted to contribute. Currently I am avoiding reddit and trying out Lemmy. Will decide before Jun 30 whether to delete posts/comments/account. I have also resrrected an RSS app which I had not been using for quite a while.
I never had premium. But I deleted my 8-year account today. I took a screenshot as I was using power delete suite. I was tempted to make a throwaway account and post it to some of their subreddits that are still trending and see if I could start some kind of stupid little movement. Maybe they think a little bit longer if they start seeing people delete long-term accounts. And I’m sure there are lots of accounts out there that are much longer term and much higher Karma than me. Actually sacrificing some of those accounts could actually make a difference.
Canceled my premium as well. I’m enjoying Lemmy so far and have no plans to go back to Reddit
yall are going around on the internet without ad blocker in current year?
I’ve used an adblock for more than a decade now. At work, due to security reasons, the way we connect to internet is quite restricted and I don’t have an adblock. Internet experience is terrible with that, like unusable. Most websites you barely can find what you are looking for, and the annoyance is constant. It’s like a nightmare every time I have to use it that way.
yk you could “side-load” install the adblocker extension manually from flash drive ;)
If they aren’t allowed to install AdBlockers, I doubt they are allowed to plug in random flash drives into their work machines
One possible solution: if OP is allowed to connect their phone to their work computer, and they have a rooted Android phone, they could get around this using VPN tethering. I’ll spell out how to do this, in case someone else can benefit from it.
What’s needed:
- a rooted Android phone
- a VPN based ad blocker (Blokada, AdAway, etc)
- a USB cable
- a VPN hotspot app
Steps:
- Connect your phone to a VPN based ad blocker
- Connect your phone to your computer
- Open the VPN hotspot app. Turn on USB tethering, then rndis0
If it doesn’t work, try turning on USB debugging on your phone, or changing default USB configuration under Developer options
only if I want to risk losing my job and potential criminal charges (not joking)
In this adconomy?
Also using my VPN’s DNS to block adware on phone and desktop as well as Pi-hole at home for guests who don’t use a VPN
Right? It’s like sleeping with strangers without a condom on. Even the FBI recommends an adblocker now.
I mean. We’re all here. No idea how many people will actually stay, but I hope It’s enough. I like the change
Any amount will push lemmy closer to mainstream, so it’s always a good thing. The world won’t stop going into an anti-privacy and anti-freedom direction over night, so we might be looking at some exponential growth after the wave of new users.
I wouldn’t say we’re all here. The statistics really don’t show that unfortunately
I definetly didn’t write clearly, sry :p
I meant that everyone on this thread is already on board. I just hope people actually stay in Lemmy
I can only talk for myself. Since yesterday I lurk on Reddit but don’t really engage with it anymore other than that.
As soon as Apollo is gone, even that will go away. I don’t know if I will stay on Lemmy, only time will tell even tho I hope so. But my active days on Reddit are ending right now.
A new blackout tracker just dropped on the Discord: https://darktotal.com/
I’ve also been liking https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
That’s very useful. I scrolled through the out of blackout list and was disappointed to find quite a few of my most-visited subreddits were public again
It almost makes me more upset that the subreddits are going public and makes me resist going back even more. It’s obviously having some sort of impact from that article about advertisers. Like, do mods really need to have their subreddit public that much? Go touch some god damn grass It’s irritating
Oh that’s a great one as well! The graph bottom right tracking individual subs over time is super helpful
This one is much nicer.
I love how this contrasts with the CEO statement that many subreddits would go back to normal after the 2 days
Confused looking at r/gtafk jumping every hour from public to restricted to private to public to…
Mod fight, probably.
Thank you for sharing!
ps, which discord is this?
This is really nice, if the protests start to hurt their bottom line, they are going to be much more inclined to listen. I didn’t expect these blackouts to do something.
Or even better, fire the MBAs who came up with the stupid idea in the first place
3rd-party devs recognized that paying for API access is reasonable, but they rightfully objected to the pricing.
The Internet is moving towards a subscription-based model, mimicking the one it opposed at the beginning. Or to put it more succinctly: app subscription are the new bills.
Guess I should have worded better. I actually like subscription-based membership if it means we remove advertisements and data collection/sales. I personally think spez is lying about reddit not being profitable. They are probably raking it in via ad sales and selling harvested data.
I think the internet at its best is when it’s ad-free, not harvesting and selling user data, and free to use.
Wikipedia is one of the most successful projects on the internet, and it works exactly like that.
Hypothetically, I wouldn’t be opposed to some kind of compensation model. But experience shows that as soon as you introduce a for-profit model, people in charge will eventually ask the question “hey, if this is making money, couldn’t we squeeze much more money out of it!?!?”
Even if it was true, the decision to host all images and videos themselves must have helped with that lol.
Yea, and they really implemented that poorly, too. Reddit video has to be the worst video playback (when it does play back) on the internet since 1996…
I don’t think the idea is stupid, just poorly executed. From Reddir’s POV, this makes sense (why wouldn’t it?). They could have done this in a much better way.
I deleted my Twitter account and haven’t been back since blood diamond heir and purchaser, not founder, of Tesla Elon Musk bought it.
I’m done with reddit. I just hope the anti-capitalist subs regenerate here or I’ll have to find another place to vent (again, not reddit) in that regard.
I’d love to try to make one, but I’m too busy with wage slave survival to be an attentive mod.
Libel of this nature must not stand. They’re blood emeralds.
Green diamonds!
Cut my hands off why dont ya!
I’m just as happy here, for now. A community driven feed and a chance to interact with random people is enough to replace 95% of what I used Reddit for, and Twitter (which I was never really active in) and the alternatives that sprung up following the Musk cliff just don’t scratch that itch.
I’ve actually been expecting Reddit to die for a while and worried I wouldn’t find the Next Thing^TM until it was too late. I’ve gone through and deleted all my alts and their comments/posts, but will give spez another week before I purge my (almost 200k) main account. It would be nice if Lemmy got enough traction in my areas of interest to fully replace Reddit either way. I have some bad habits there I would be wise to leave behind anyway.
Reddit doesn’t provide anything I can’t get elsewhere. I don’t know anyone there, I just reply to comments that pique my interest. Heck I delete my Reddit account every few years for privacy so even my account itself isn’t precious. I’m just getting started here but it’s hard to imagine Lemmy couldn’t replace it entirely.
I nuked my 15 year 750k karma “main” recently because I ran afoul of a super mod who banned me from like 8 subs in one fell swoop because I talked shit on his favorite game or some dumb shit. IDGAF it’s just the internet I’ll burn my next one too if it feels appropriate (and I probably will now, I just want to find one of those comment scrambler things I’ve read about.)
@CannaVet @MagicShel Wow 750k ? How long you been on reddit? I been there 6 years and only got 350k
It was my first one, early on as a teen, I’m spitballing numbers because I deleted it but I had it probably like 15 years give or take a few.
@CannaVet Wow, Glad you are here now. lemmy, The Fedeverse gotta be the future.
I’ve been offloading various services to self hosting for a few years anyway, so moving to a decentralized social media is just a logical progression for me anyway haha. I primarily use a private email host and I have self hosted apps to replace Google Docs and the like along with music/media stuff.
I’ve been looking for the next thing for more than a year, because the things that made Reddit a (relatively) healthier form of social media were being eroded. I tried out tildes, and the community was much more friendly, but almost too friendly. It was like they were overcompensating out of fear of the community becoming toxic… It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t comfortable - it felt like meeting strangers who you really want to impress. They’re also somewhat anti-growth, which isn’t a bad idea, but they were well below the sweet spot
Plus, I never loved the old school Reddit visuals, and it’s design principle is html only and had no app or dark mode… All in all it’s a great place for a specific group of redditors that didn’t include me
Then I made up my resolution to leave Reddit when my apps go down and started looking at making a custom app to collate RSS feeds, and I started hearing about Lemmy.
I liked it enough that I’ve dropped everything and started building a better app. There’s a lot missing, but there’s so much good energy.
And the design principles of the fediverse address many of the fundimental problems with social media and the Internet as a whole. This might really be something important
Two Wpromote clients canceled two premium, takeover-style campaigns that were supposed to launch this week
“Takeover” campaigns are getting canceled. I wonder which blacked out subs were going to be taken over with ads this week.
Wait, the advertisers have campaigns to take over subreddits? What?!
Not literally take over a subreddit, takeover advertising campaigns are typically a high-key screen space domination type of advertising. Think of something like a video games news site where the homepage is completely covered in advertising for a new, high budget game. Ads at the top, ads at the bottom, ads in the normally-empty margins, and often a focus on articles about the subject.
How that reflects to Reddit I’d never know, it’s likely something that’s exclusive to the newer layout that I have no interest in using.
This type of advertising is the death-knell of any site, because at that point you’re interacting with an advert with some extra elements rather than a site with ads.
I’m of the opinion that it has a time and a place, but I do agree that it’s exceptionally intrusive to the site’s normal experience and should be very rare and short-lived. Any more than a day and its runs afoul of the people who just aren’t interested.
And that’s why they will get rid of old.reddit. If they are cutting third party apps to increase ad revenue, then they will do the same with old.reddit
Apparently “premium, takeover-style” campaigns are a thing that reddit sells to its advertisers. TIL The article says that the campaigns will relaunch next week after the delay.
Blood… reaching… boiling point…
What do you think the unblockable “He Gets Us” bullshit is?
Oh hell fucking no, if they start doing that reddit is for sure dead
They have been doing this since March 2020.
Source: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/introducing-reddits-new-offering-for-advertisers-trending-takeover/
I’m aware, With this new article it seems they are going to become much more aggressive with ads and I expect them to get rid of old.reddit in the future to force even more ads on people with this change.
At this point, even if they were to reverse all the decisions they’ve made, I have no intention or desire to go back to Reddit. Lemmy has been a great replacement and I’m hoping it’ll only improve over time.
100% agree. I do miss apollo, but I’m sure in time we’ll have some great apps for lemmy as well
