“But I think the greater Reddit community just wants to participate with their fellow community members.”
When despite widespread protests and even after overwhelmingly one-sided polls against your view you still don’t see the discrepancy between what you think and what seems to be widespread opinion and concern.
As they point out it’s beside the point anyway. People want to participate. But protest becomes a necessity and is deemed essential under these circumstances.
Why isn’t he paying users for their content?
They want to make money while turning reddit into another right wing shit hole.
Right wing? Money is a pretty nonpartisan matter.
Most of the right-wingers have already fled off to Gab, MeWe, or Mastodon.
I was referring to the upcoming U.S. election.
Yes, Reddit is a big dataset and yes, Reddit deserves to make some money off that if other organisations are going to scrape that data, for AI or anything else.
That’s what they should be blocking and monetizing. Not those few users using 3rd party apps. Those folks (posters, mods) are amongst the ones creating that data set for Reddit, free of charge.
They are right about needing to make money to continue as a successful business. But they are doing it the wrong way and alienating their key assets.
Which is why I’m here :)
Why does reddit deserve to make profit from content made by others? They are service provider - they are not entitled to the work of people who used their service.
Ok. I’m about to abandon an account that’s 17.5 years old. I despise what reddit is proposing.
But, honestly, how do you propose they turn (some) profit so it could last forever? Losing money isn’t a long-term recipe for success. I’ve got no problem with reddit seeking to profit. I’ve got a problem with their short notice and their refusal to let third party clients be part of the ecosystem they wish to create.
Same. Late to the conversation here, but in the same camp. About to delete a 13.5 year old account.
I’d be fine with Reddit making money, if they did it in an honest and predictable way. The way they’re going about it though is short sighted, deceitful, and completely unnecessary.
They could make money hand over fist if they just tweaked their approach a tad, kept the community happy, etc.
Bundle API usage in with Reddit Premium. Have it use upper limits of say 100k requests/month to the API. Anything over that and it’s on a per 10k/requests billing cycle sort of thing.
Push the cost to the consumer, so if AI wants to scrape all the data, they can pay for it just like everyone else.
I just burned my nearly 12 year old account. It’s just not worth it anymore. Reddit has made promises it can’t keep and does not intend on keeping.
First I don’t see why reddit has to be a for profit organisation in the first place, since that’s kind of the rout of the problem. Users becoming a product that reddit is trying to sell to advertisers. At the same time if reddit would be respectful to users, creators and mods it would be a different story. But they are clearly not, they don’t respect the people who are making reddit work - but feel entitled to the fruits of their labor. That just irks me on a deeply personal level.
My main problem is not even with the API decision but with the way the CEO communicated with the community.
I don’t get it, if 3PA is only 1% of the traffic, why even bother murdering them?
from Umberto Eco’s list of 14 common features of fascism:
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
It’s no surprise spez worships elon musk
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
I mean holy shit dude. Do you listen to yourself? Where did that “data set of just human beings talking about interesting things” come from? It came from millions of people who gave you that content for free. And many of them used the site through third party apps because those apps made your site much more useful without charging you a dime.
The entitlement of Huffman is astounding.
He got free content and free app development work and now he’s going around whining about how “we’re not in the business of giving that away for free.”
Yikes.
🤣
also:
Huffman is engaging in the cardinal sin of the internet: trying to charge for something that has always been free. And acting as if he’s entitled to that money, and it’s the people who don’t want to pay who are the problem.
And, again, Huffman seems like all entitlement all the time:
“They need to pay for this. That is fair.”
I mean… the users of Reddit could just as easily turn around and say the same thing to Huffman for all the free labor, content, and data they’ve provided to him.
This man just does not know when to shut up.
I guess at least he’s being honest? What he has to say is shitty, but I guess it’s better than being lied to.
I wish he was honest to begin with and said “Hey, we’re no longer supporting third party reddit clients. I get you’ll be pissed about that but them’s the beans we have to drive more people to our app for money reasons”
Instead, this whole charade reeks of stupidity and desperation.
Exactly. Rip the bandaid off and be honest instead of trying to gaslight everyone. Probably would’ve resulted in far fewer people checking out Fediverse alternatives.
Amazing that he can’t think of a way to make money that doesn’t involve alienating the unpaid people who keep the place running.
I haven’t abandoned Reddit entirely, but I’ll never use the app…downloaded it once a year or two ago, and deleted it within an hour because it was ugly and confusing. I honestly think maybe the next phase of the protests, for those who still are active on Reddit, should be mass deletion of the app and using only the desktop site/mobile browser version. The API thing was meant to force people onto the app, so mass organizing to delete the app would hit them where it hurts.
“Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.””
I had to google Landed Gentry, it still don’t make sense; “The landed gentry, or the gentry, is a largely historical British social class of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate.” That’s a weird way to describe an unpaid moderator. Either way, there’s no reddit to return to if they’re going scorched earth on the moderators anyways. This is home now.
I saw somewhere that the analogy was supposed to be “whoever got there first owned the land.” The idea I guess is that the landed gentry settled down on the land (subreddits) first, and now the subreddit is a dictatorship because the users could never vote on who their “landlords” are.
Yes, that analogy is also terrible, and it also goes to show that spez has no idea why people hate landlords.
Edit: everyone that’s replied to me has provided more reasons why it’s a stupid analogy, and that makes me happy :)
It only makes sense if Huffman considers himself King; the moderators are a threat to his land!
The moderators are unpaid workers farming the content. They’re serfs.
And the commenters and posters are the crops being farmed? (Some would be weeds, I guess.)
“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”
Wow. Clearly Reddit now believes that they own all of the conversations that people have had on the site. That explains why they’ve also been restoring comments that people have deleted when leaving the site. That has major implications for data security, privacy, and even safety in some situations.
This episode has revealed Reddit’s true colors, and they’re not pretty.
What I find interesting is this could be avoided by granting exceptions to the existing app devs and being done with it.
I get the api costs money and theres folks like pushshift aggregating data and using it for their own profit. I’m sure plenty of companies are using data for adverts and more. And there’s an argument there Reddit deserves a cut. Especially if they are using the api to train bots or ai to have conversations for their own inventions.
But just the ass backwards way they handled devs of existing 3p apps that constitute value add to their data sets is just…mesmerizing.
And if these users ARENT a majority of the usage or costs, why bother cutting them off and not just granting exceptions to avoid the PR issues.
I think you misunderstood
spez. He wanted no 3rd party app at all. RIF was paying Reddit for using their brand name andspezterminated the contract. It’s all about control.It would be much easier to just inject ads into data returned by the API. Apps will automatically display these ads and developers will understand that if they filter these ads, their access to Reddit will be either limited or completely cut out.
Wait really? Source? I always thought it was unauthorised name use that went quietly unacknowledged for a long time, until they decided otherwise.
Shu also tells me that RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. Shu says he says initiated the talks with Reddit to create the agreement, which allowed for the licensed use of Reddit’s trademarks. (At the time, the app was called “reddit is fun.”) Shu says Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman
Deleted my Reddit account today, not gonna let Huffman use my content to make money and his attitude is very concerning tbh
Waiting on them to fulfil my GDPR data request.
One I’ve got all my data (since there was some useful stuff there over the years) I’ll follow up with the “right to be forgotten” request as well.
Keep us updated how this goes. Are they even governed by EU law if they are in the US?
If they want to operate in the EU (for example, selling ad space to European companies to show to European users) then yes, they are.
There are some American news sites that don’t serve to European users for that reason. Instead, we get a screan that explains that GDPR is too much for them to handle.
It can be circumvented with a VPN, but I haven’t bothered so far
Genuinely don’t understand how reddit has failed to make money.
Reddit’s entire value is based upon the unpaid contributions of its users- they generate and moderate all the content on the site for free, and these are the things that bring people to the site.
How entitled must one be to think they can ignore all this and be fine?
Also how tf is reddit not able to break bank?
The functionality of their website was relatively simple - not underming the reddit devs here. The costs must’ve been minimal before the redesign and the dumb ass decision to host their own images and videos. Did they burn up all their money for the redesign and the shitty app?
They’re bloated. Thousands of employees. Tons of developers. Marketing people. And in the end? The real product is like you said, it’s the users and volunteer mods.
Those developers? Produced an absolutely terrible mobile app and mobile website.
The marketing people? They’re more focused on NYC time square ads than fixing sponsored posts on Reddit.
It’s an absolute shitshow but that’s what happens with these extremely bloated companies…
It’s amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.
And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can’t speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it’s not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don’t shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.
They didn’t even really need need to make a better app to make more money. If the objective is getting the telemetry for ads by forcing the use of the official app, they could have the equivalent just via APIs and user-specific tokens. The backend would be key, and it would take advantage of an established app market. They could additionally monetize the API, if they approached it more reasonably. They could have the data and have developers pay a toll. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but the animus they’re displaying here is self-defeating.
Yes, but then they would need to hire mature devs. I interviewed at Reddit a few years ago and the “staff” engineer was a smug 25 year old. Their engineering culture is one of elitism and a shocking lack of humility. IMO, the rot from the CEO goes all the way down. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone had your idea, but the organization is incapable of execution.
AlienBlue was reportedly good before Reddit bought it, so I’d say the official mobile app is intentionally bad.
Yeah, back in the day Alien Blue was better than almost any other app. It was the first place I ever used Reddit before I moved to Android. The official app is nothing like Alien Blue used to be. It’s been gutted and smeared in shit.
Can’t forget about https://nft.reddit.com/, the real moneymaker. Nothing says value-adding like nfts, the dumbfucks.
Holy shit, I totally forgot about how stupid that was lol
An NFT as your avatar? Wow, it’s dumber than I thought.
