It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of research. Just 'API priced at ridiculous levels in 4 weeks'. They immediately had to walk a bunch of exemptions for those obvious considerations out. So extraordinarily half-assed. And for such a small sniff of revenue. They must be desperate.

I agree this is likely, which will extend the negative reactions further and alienate even more users. Unless Reddit execs do a 180 in the very near future I think the platform will be forever crippled.

Large networks rarely die overnight and whatever happens they will still have a number of users for the foreseeable future, but the steady fade to irrelevance will begin in earnest.

Power users drive a huge amount of content and moderation, and they are especially livid right now for good reason.

Huffman / Reddit Inc. have misread this repeatedly. Just saw he's reportedly assured staff it will "blow over" and "hasn't hurt revenue".

Wrong move.

Completely avoidable PR disaster, and until the ego(s) driving all of this step back, they'll just keep making the situation worse.

I will be extending my blackout on the site indefinitely.

Just one of the dumbest PR / corporate comms debacles I've seen. Almost as though the Reddit execs saw what Twitter is doing and said "hold my beer".

Barron's reports that Reddit's potential IPO is now in trouble.[1]

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/reddit-stock-ipo-revolt-6e8...

As a mod I am getting messages from regular users who are desperate to see posts that have likely troubleshooting answers to problems they are having at work.

Reddit is kind of a critical technical resource for some people and this is really hurting them at least right now.

I'm not convinced they lose out either. The front page doesn't really feel different than it did before. There are a handful of "Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments" posts, but I'm kinda blind to them the same way I'm blind to ads as I scroll past. Otherwise it just feels like any other day on reddit.

Another executive won't matter because it's not the executives determining direction. It is the investors. It is the investors that want to destroy one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet. It is investors that don't want Reddit to be a platform for speaking truth to power because they are that power that truth would be spoken to.

When people write posts like this, they are missing the forest for the trees. It is the investors who are to blame. The investors benefit when spez gets blamed and not themselves.

I see no reason to think we would get a new CEO better than spez. I am not defending spez, I am not defending his edits of people's posts, but the fish rots from the top, and the investors are above the CEO. The investors are the party that deserves blame.

I think reddit did change for the worse though. Restrictions to speech and opinions, aggression if you deviate from the allegedly correct perspective. The company did revoke their principles of free expression for sleazy advertisers and market "research". Typical corporation.

Of course they need a way to finance their costs, but I think in the long run they shoot themselves in the foot. I believe we will also see age restrictions in the near future and do away with anonymity. Might kill the platform completely though.

well, except for Buzzfeed, who seems to exist solely to repost Reddit threads with GIFs.

That's specially bad for the company in the light of the IPO.

>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.

They could, but this would cause damage on its own. People might hate the current mods but they'd hate the sycophants even more.

A prime example of cutting your nose to spite your face.

Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.

reddit always had extremely cringy but popular sides to it (Unidan, Boston Marathon witch hunt) and since the very beginning the decisions of the leadership have felt immature, off and wrong.

Reddit's leadership has always prevented reddit from being a thriving, productive community and their ineptitude has simply reached a boiling point now. For most of the time it felt like sifting through liquid poop to find a gold nugget once a week.

People keep saying this. It's true of the vast majority of protests. And yet, they keep happening, and I don't think it's because they're completely ineffective.

I'll grant I don't entirely get it either, but here's my theory of how they work: by being a show of unity, protests are an honest signal of power. In any case where the party being protested against is not willing to cause mass civilian casualties, unified rebellion is a genuine threat. It's an even bigger threat in a democracy, or a commercial setting. It's also a signal of willingness to accept costs (not guaranteed honest, but it's still pretty hard to coordinate a bluff in public).

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...

I think a replacement of spaz would be the only thing that could move the needle at this point.

Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.

Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.

Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry, particularly on a sub like Music or Videos. Finding a replacement mod team without specific agendas is going to be hard. Only the most power tripping or ideologically driven will want the position as paying mods seems out of the question given Reddit’s stance.

Inexperienced mods will also be unable to handle the torrent of spam and low effort posts and comments the big sub attract.

It’s not impossible to punish the dissident mods but having a functional replacement on short notice is impossible.

And when you have to insert paid moderators, the cost to moderate all of the huge communities will blow up Reddit’s internal budget.

It’s easier said than done. Just ask FB or Google (with YouTube), they have difficulty moderating their own platforms and they have billions of dollars at their disposal.

And you can expect people engaged with the protest to take full advantage of this if it happens, making the problem that much worse

If you simply reopen without any of the current mods, the site will be overrun

Trying to milk 3rd-party developers with excessively high API fees while expecting the community to provide all the value for their site free of charge was a very short-sighted move.

Is this not the answer to your question? Reddit can't afford to pay people to do this job. They rely on impassioned people to volunteer.

In my case, I've replaced my Reddit time ~50% with HN and ~50% with... something else, like doing work.

Personally, I’ve quite enjoyed using tildes.net lately. I know everyone is jumping on Lemmy and federation, which is great in practice but Tildes feels more accessible to me and for that reason may have more potential to actually capture a user base.

They are also screwing their moderators who use API-based tools, and people who need accessibility accommodations that reddit does not provide.

Not to mention the scummy behavior towards the Apollo developer.

AFAIK historically the % of GDP spent on advertising was more or less constant so it s not like advertisers bailed

Instead, I’m in far smaller niche and location-relevant subs. I didn’t realize what cutting off my city subreddit would do for my sense of connection to my city. I didn’t realize how shit general search results are for questions about hobbies.

It’s really made me question if can allow one entity to serve as such an important conduit to my interests again.

All the big subs are garbage these days

I think they should call it off, and announce that they will go back to the drawing board. Then restart talks with the API users and third party app developers.

What if they reduced the price of Reddit premium to $3/month and made API and third party apps only available for Reddit premium subscribers?

- Reddit would get many more premium subscribers

- App developers would be able to avoid managing subscription fee’s themselves and continue as before

- Users of the official Reddit app would not be affected

- Users of third party apps would have to pay for Reddit Premium - but maybe at a discount

I think being honest about their goal would've reduced a lot of the backlash. The issue is that they're claiming to be working with the community when it's blatantly obvious that they aren't.

Ideally they'd just go to more reasonable/free API pricing though.

An organization needs to make enough money to live, but it doesn't need quarterly RoI and growth. That is a demand of a public market. Reddit got greedy and sold out.

It's time to start building new communities outside reddit. It won't happen overnight, but it needs to happen.

- Extend the 30 day to apply the pricing to 6 months (at least) to let people figure it out their stuff ; - Give some leverage for the _existing_ 3 party apps that contributed to reddit till this point on the form of a smaller price;

GME / BBBY is able to raise money from a mountain of APEs by basically giving the crowd what they want.

Reddit needs more funding to turn into a profitable company. They also need these 3rd party apps and other such features (that they're cutting because they don't make enough profits yet).

Just be honest with the world. Reddit needs money, please support the IPO, lets see how much money is raised and where it can go. Promise to use the money to buy out Apollo or something.

Gotta make that profile shine for VCs!?

Is it incompetence? Not a priority because the focus was always on growth? Or just difficult/impossible as nobody wants to pay for anything and block ads?

I don't know the answer, but the answer matters. Both in this strike and the Stackoverflow strike many people are dropping claims that the company only cares about money. Those claims make little sense to me when the companies is making a loss.

You could have very valid reasons to strike, but you're striking against a company in financial trouble, facing an existential AI threat, and an advertiser pullback.

I ended up jumping to another department where I watched him bring in an expensive vendor to implement a replacement for a system I had been using, and then watched corrupt files start appearing in the production files. I was there just long enough to hear about his quiet exit from the company.

Someone else needs to quietly exit from the company if they hope to get this out of the grease fire. At this point, we'll all see what happens pretty quickly I think, but this looks to me like a ship with a thousand leaks and a drunk captain who won't come out of his cabin because people yell at him about problems that are not his when he does.

HN would hardly be better if random people mostly interested in cooking or martial arts were putting in their two cents here.

I really can't think of any subject that is better on Reddit than it was on an old message forum that was killed off by these giant platforms.

Compare any subreddit about psytrance or trance music to the corpse of forum.isratrance.com.

It isn't even close. The forum owner is also self interested to not be labeled oppressive. I can't think of any old forum I was ever on that had problems of oppressive moderation.

That isratrance forum of course though doesn't scale to a few hundred million people and early investors getting rich.

Then the content can be exported from reddit into each of those platforms.

The instances could be federated. Reddit users could redeem their account across the federated network by proving they control the same account on reddit (either send a message to a bot on reddit, or by generating a one-time password then posting its hash to reddit)

Moderators(who are doing tons of free work to make reddit a tolerable place) use API based tools to help them moderate. If reddit is going to make their (volunteer!) job harder, why shouldn't they just pack up and leave?

The official reddit app reportedly does not make adequate accommodations for some disabled users, but dedicated third party developers did. They later said that they would give exemptions for accessibility use cases, but stipulated that they could not charge for their service. Some people the perceived this as: "we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it."

Then there is the disingenuous interactions with the Apollo developer.

All-in-all, people think that reddit is acting in bad faith.

Surface-level: the API price hikes are at a glance meant to force out third-party Reddit interfaces. To speculate, this is aimed to funnel users to Reddit's official application. I can say that because the mobile website is getting crippled over time to "encourage" users to use the app.

Deeper-level: it is reflective of Reddit corporate's attitudes towards its users. They are gearing for an IPO, so they want to tell investors that they will be profitable (read: milk its users, monetize everything, remove convenient features if it will mean profits, etc.)

And no one should be surprised when I pick up my ball and walk home.

People are mad because instead of being open and honest about their play, reddit tried sneak it it in. They are trying to give Reddit shareholders their win while everyone else loses.

Sure. Technically they are within their rights to do that.

Would it be good for them to do so? Probably not. It'll piss off their user base. As others have mentioned, it'll open themselves to lawsuits due to content moderation. It'll cost them a lot to pay people to moderate these communities, which they currently get for free.

> I would expect them to [seize the subreddits] if they're gearing up for an IPO

See above. This would make them less profitable and most likely negatively affect said IPO.

> ... I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company.

It's not self-ordained. They're doing what they are allowed to do with these subreddits, at least until Reddit takes away their moderator access.

There are two solutions to this: google's cached pages and archive.org.

> Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO.

Reddit's sob story is that they are still unprofitable. They can't afford to hire moderators for the seized subreddits.

This isn't a drastic change and there aren't any competitors that are offering anything better (ignoring the benefits of something decentralized).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789

Stuff like r/aww and r/videos would probably survive if it was just the Reddit employees removing offensive stuff that gets upvoted high, but it will kill the long tail where the moderators are less garbage removers and more community organisers. Maybe just the generic mindless feed is enough for Reddit to be a successful business, but it's not what most people think of Reddit as, and it's not clear why such a rump reddit would be able to take users off of Tiktok etc.

Also, is it capitalism you love, or is it free markets and independent business? Cause capitalism is just when someone sits on their ass and collects dividends while other people work.

What happened to this new normal btw? Everything has reverted to pre-pandemic life here as it seems. Wasn't the expectation that we're going to have to live suppressed for all time?