World News

22063 readers

15 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

401

Electronic Frontier Foundation shouted out Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon in their Reddit coverage today: What Reddit Got Wrong (www.eff.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by dirtmayor@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From the article:

"Moving to the Fediverse

This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even worse, their official app uses the same API -- and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.

They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.

[–] mizmoose@beehaw.org 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn't getting a slice.

RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I'm willing to bet they're next on the chopping block of his tantrum.

[–] sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To some extent, Reddit does get a slice - in the form of user engagement. User engagement is how they generate ad impressions, even if it's not from the users on the third party apps.

They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn't.

Their entire goal is to maximize "value" before their IPO. Control and number inflation. They don't care about the long term. Spez wants to cash out, and he doesn't care what it costs the company.

[–] mizmoose@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago

They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn’t.

OH, THIS THIS A BILLION TIMES THIS.

They shot themselves in the foot and are now angry about it.

[–] ngwoo@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fortunately something like RES doesn't need Reddit's blessing to exist. A browser extension that rearranges information the browser has already downloaded (to massively oversimplify what RES is doing) doesn't need API access.

They could shut down old reddit but the only reason RES doesn't support new reddit is that it would require rewriting the whole thing. If that was the only option, someone would eventually do it.

[–] the_inebriati@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

RES is hanging onto life with its fingernails - it's been in maintenance mode for the past 18 months or so with only 2 people actively working on it (at its peak in 2015ish, I think this was closer to 30).

By their own admission, they wouldn't be able to survive any major breaking changes.