CEO Steve Huffman said, "These deals aren't binary. They have to make sense for Reddit, but there are many ways, I think, for the value to return to Reddit."
lol - “The value has left Reddit”
-/u/spez
Who could imagine when you piss off:
…that the “value” would leave 🤣
Yep, it was the API thing that finally did it for me, but looking back, I should have seen it coming after all of the other stuff.
Third party apps made Reddit a dream on mobile, a big part of its success were the passionate people. And they showed us all the middle finger
For me it was the way they treated the Apollo developer Christian Selig leading up to the whole API thing. Absolutely heinous.
Same. Although I'm reading this on Voyager, which has borrowed heavily from Apollo
Remember when YouTube started having AI narrated posts from r/askreddit in its shorts? And how that slowly morphed into the AI generated slop stories about how one family member give the rest of them their comeuppance because the Henderson account valued results instead of random cheap business practices involving Sgt Menendez and his cheating ex girlfriend?
(This stuff is like candy to Boomers because it mirrors the reader write in sections of Reader's Digest.)
I should have noticed this earlier, but it dawned on me a few weeks back.
Reddit never was the same after the whole API/Mod fiasco. Many subreddits simpy died. Old users that made the site what it is left and there were new ones, but the whole vibe shifted.
I actually got an award as being in the top 1% of reddit karma earners for 2022.
In 2023 they banned me because I didn't buy stock when it was being introduced.
You'd think they'd want me there. Creating content. For free. I'm sure they thought I'd just create a new account. Nope. I just came here.
Weird thing is, I've had two main running jokes for years. One is being obsessed with corn. The other is calling George Clooney a smug bastard.
I don't browse Reddit since I switched entirely to Lemmy the day the API migration happened, but I did still reluctantly have to reference reddit on occasion. Now I can't even do that for niche issues I run into. I am so upset that millions of people donated their time and energy into making Reddit the place it was just to have all of that entirely gated off. I know we're likely all in the same boat, but there really are no words for what spez did. He ruined a really great place for community and knowledge and turned it into a slop fest.
but there really are no words for what spez did.
Profited. That's the word.
Let’s mods indiscriminately block users for arbitrary reasons; why do we keep losing users??
"please install our app to continue"
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it's former self.
After the apicalypse many subs seems to have died, also the new UI that has been pushed for a decade or so, seems to promote consumption of content and discourage creation of content, further reducing new content.
Reddit has been many, many times by AI companies, why keep scanning if the content stays 98% the same, with most new content being of mostly lower quality, simply due to people posting AI shit.
This was a very predictable outcome.
As soon as Reddit's history got scanned by AI models, it lost 98% of it's future value.
Don't forget that you can't use VPN now, use the web version on mobile, and most accounts gets banned as soon as they are created by the automod.
You also cannot view it without being logged in now. Which gets a groan from everyone in chat when a friend shares a Reddit link.
I have no clue why they decided chasing off users and being less useful was somehow going to help them. Particularly when they were the place to go for huge segments of the population.
Just within the last week or so old.reddit.com was effectively disabled and stopped working. (I think it might work if you log in, but i quit doing that 3 years ago). It was a nice resource and it’s said that it’s such a shell of what it was. Right when the internet is really needing human voices too
Never forget that they killed the API for a mere $60M AI deal.
Like, if spez apologized and restored API access, and made an effort to kick fascists off the platform, I might consider going back. But as is, I will watch with glee as he fucks over everyone stupid enough to buy his IPO.
Besides apologizing and changing course, spez would need to leave before I considered going back. The way he behaved during the API BS ended my capacity to trust him in any way. Reddit as an organization, maybe they can turn things around and return to their purported values, but spez is not an honest person and will do or say anything if it serves his own interests.
60M USD is insanely cheap for that data, remember, it was categorized and structured into threads and subthreads in specific categories, not to mention all different languages already being mostly sorted and ready for consumption.
They could probably have got a few hundred million USD for it if they held out longer.
Well I was banned for saying there’s never a bad time to punch a nazi in the face in response to a screenshot of Indiana Jones doing just that. So good. Fuck reddit.
There's never not a good time.
Reddit Drives away Their entire user base.
Reddit - "oh no what happened to my user base?"
Fuck off reddit
1% of people actually contribute. Many of those 1% have left or were banned for criticizing the president and ICE. The comments I see lately are becoming more like instagram. Just easy observations and drivel. Some of them are like paragraphs of AI slop that hurts my brain trying to comprehend.
"I wonder what we did to drive away engagement."
I don't think you can count on that level of introspection.
It's fucking laughable "us daily users metric dissapoints". What the fuck do they expect when they ban their long time users permanently with no appeal process, make it so you can only view the site through the app censor any revolt and start bringing on nazis.
It's literally the antithesis of how and why reddit became so popular in the first place.
It’s all bots and influence ops over there anymore
If anything this shows how totally fucked equity markets are.
So they're making way more money than expected, but they haven't sold out their users fast enough so dump the stock?
Why would AI want a continuous deal with Reddit? Don’t they get all the data they need the first time? I doubt the new content is worth as much as the previous deal… maybe I don’t understand what these deals are for.
Half the joke is that Reddit was ground zero for AI slop even before AI had gone mainstream.
The company got harvested back before the AI firms were overly worried with cross-contamination.
Maybe reddit should not have banned users that have been on the platform for years, contributed heavily but got kicked out because they disagree with the current US regime. Spez sucks Trump's mushroom.
Spez made his money, he doesn't give a fuck anymore.
He's milking the cow as much as he can before butchering its corpse.
Good. Fuck spez.
lol, ROFL even
Finally some good AI news!
I would be OK with Spez experiencing irreversible severe anal prolapse.
Wait till google decides to de-rank them for being login-walled. All those search results they're using as leverage.
It is genuinely impressive how unusable Reddit has gotten in the last 6 months, especially. Login walls, no All, Best instead of Hot default sorting, constant popups to use the app (RIP RIF, you were the best), obvious AI posts everywhere. Really speedrunning the Digg experience.
I love all those "deleted comment" that keeps growing on Reddit. Users are waking up and destroying any contribution to that site, making it ultimately useless.
Good. My wife and I both had our 13-year-old accounts permanently banned with no appeals process - all because we share an IP address and they decided without evidence that we were evading bans.
Fucking morons over there running reddit.
I did not know what Lemmy was a couple weeks ago. Reddit pushed me out. I don't want to be logged in or have an account with the way they harvest data. I got tired of weekly rotating ublock origin scripts and using incognito mode. You don't want me if I'm not a willing data whore? Fine, I'm gone! I am now actively trying to NOT even look at reddit when a random Google search sends me there!
Its probably going to drop a lot more now that they require sign in to view once public, indexed threads on google. It was a decent repository of knowledge while it lasted
Just a daily reminder that if you want something great, especially if it is made great by the contributions of hundreds of people, it can't be owned by a profit oriented business. If you don't want that great thing to be taken away and/or used against you, the ownership has to remain in the hands of the people.
Well yeah, everyone trained off the data there already. Reddit (or heck, any social media) is just the same old cyclical shit. The AI deals were not a sustainable long-term model, and I'm surprised no one at Reddit, or these companies selling their users data against their wishes, could see that. Like that was the shortest term cash flow they could've gone for, and now their reputation and trust is in shambles.
So many comments in here, I haven't read them all. I have some conjecture.
First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit's most valuable content ... their "virgin" data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.
Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.
Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.
Fourth, the corporate team's decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It's sheer luck they've done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they're also their own worst enemy. It's so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
