Technology

Reddit just feels dirty to me now, not in a good dirty way... Just dirty, I want nothing to do with it. I see no coming back from this even if the backlash leads to Reddit reversing the decisions. Kind of new the IPO would do something like this. Looking forward to seeing this place bloom.

I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:

“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.

What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.

The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?

Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.

In my opinion, we're reaching a moment where people are realizing that having lots of users doesn't matter that much if you can't monetize them. We took a lot of services for granted that maybe don't make any financial sense, which probably only survived because both the company and investors hoped that as long you could attract users, you could monetize them later.

I think that "later" is now.

Today I noticed that youtube has a new feature that unlocks more bitrate, but only for premium users (there's two 1080p options, one normal and another with more bitrate). I'm expecting that these social medias and other tech companies will try to monetize us further

Something that seems to be missing: Someone is working on an API compatibility/translation layer to help in porting reddit apps to lemmy and have already got some basic features working in RedReader. The RedReader (opensource Android reddit client) dev has expressed some interest in this along with the user base.

https://v.redd.it/xzvh8kih8d4b1

https://github.com/derivator/tafkars

https://feddit.de/c/tafkars

I've been getting used to lemmy for the last couple days, going back and forth between here and reddit and following what's going on, and I think I just realized something that I hadn't been able to put into words.

The lemmy community feels responsive and fun to talk to, and I think that's because the people who are coming here from reddit are the people who are motivated to communicate, and are people who care about the topics in each community. That's pretty cool.

Sharing this because it should be shared

TechCrunch: Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

While tangentially related, if this shouldnt be here, let me know.

Reddit also appears to be experimenting with disabling mobile web access to circumvent ads.

I keep sitting here waiting for Reddit to backtrack. But it keeps not happening.

There was a response on the AMA where u/spez said "Reddit would always be profit driven and currently does not make a profit. Unlike TP apps"

You can no longer see this on the Reddit app, it is obscured in someway. Perhaps because of the potential impact for the IPO?

I just don't get how a site based on freely produced content thst employs volunteer mods can actually monetise.

That part just gets me. The site has nothing without the users and the users have nothing without the mods.

Lol. This sounds like a dig at spez.

Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You'd think spez was new to reddit with the way he's commenting.

Well, the AMA was a shining success…

I love how the AMA has 0 points. You down vote it and it comes back to 0. No manipulation there reddit. Just that alone shows what a disgrace that company is.

The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/

In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:

I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I'm fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.

[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]

This whole situation feels like a short term revenue grab. I bet shareholders are trying to inflate the numbers in order to cash out in the IPO.

I'm hanging on to my account until June 30th—so I can say a bittersweet goodbye to Reddit is Fun—and then I'm deleting it; Reddit is only going to get worse from here, and I don't want to be around to see it. I'm grateful that this mess has driven so many of us to seek out kinder, more thoughtful communities, and I hope said communities can retain their exceptional cultures as the Reddit exodus continues to escalate.

Here's a link to Cory Doctorow's article on the 'enshittification' of TikTok, which reads as supremely relevant here.

With how vast the third-party ecosystem is, one would have imagined a full year countdown but it's become obvious that this is nothing more than digital gentrification, one that kicks out the very people who gave it the spirit that is being monetized into an IPO.

Those 30 days 30 days was meant to break the ecosystem.

what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can't piece together a good and accessible experience for their users...

RedReader has been granted a non-commercial accessibility exemption and will not shut down. QuantumBadger is planning long term changes to support Lemmy, HackerNews, and Tild.es alongside Reddit in the same app.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/145du4j/update_4_redreader_granted_noncommercial/

Sync for Reddit is also shutting down on June 30th.

ReddPlanet also announced closure on June 30th.

Reddit creates API exemption for noncommercial accessibility apps (Ehhhh, grain of salt on this one. I'm getting a lot of conflicting reports.)

Relay is also out.

EDITS: fixed Sync names, added ReddPlanet. Will keep adding as I see them.

I'm out. Redact is busy just now deleting everything under my account.

I am wondering if, based on this horrible AMA, if subs are going to either blackout early, or decide that 48 hours won't really do anything so they opt to go indefinitely.

Man that whole situation really sucks. Reddit was by far my most visited site before they decided to light the house on fire. On mobile I always used Boost because the official app is terrible and (at least the last time I looked at it) would drain my battery like it was nothing even when the app was closed. RIP. At least we've got Lemmy. I just wish these 3rd party apps would take their users to the fediverse instead of shutting down entirely. As a developer it really sucks when you have to shut down a project you've put so much work into.

The AMA with u/spez has started. Get your popcorn ready. It’s already been a good start

I wonder how much backtracking will be done. Are they going to listen to the concerns of the community or are they going to double down on their decisions?

It's simply disappointing to see the disaster for the AMA. Saddens me to see Reddit go down like this. At least we got the Lemmy-proxy being a community project. Would love to still use Infinity as my main "reddit" browsing app, after all.