just so this doesn’t overwhelm our front page too much, i think now’s a good time to start consolidating discussions. existing threads will be kept up, but unless a big update comes let’s try to keep what’s happening in this thread instead of across 10.
developments to this point:
- Apollo for Reddit is shutting down
- Reddit is Fun will also shut down
- Reddit CEO (/u/spez) is going to hold a AMA about the API update
- Sync has announced it is shutting down
- ReddPlanet has announced it is shutting down
- Reddit creates an API exemption for noncommercial accessibility apps
- /r/videos is planning to shut down indefinitely, beginning June 11
- A subreddit dedicated to migrating to kbin.social has been closed by Reddit
The Verge is on it as usual, also–here’s their latest coverage (h/t @dirtmayor@beehaw.org):
other media coverage:
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.
I’ve been feeling weird about leaving Reddit; mainly because it’s been my main source of entertainment, news, and community for over 10 years but this is a really good point about any ‘social’ network. Even the link aggregator sites like Reddit. Over the past couple of years, I feel like my engagement has dropped significantly because it hasn’t been FUN to engage with the communities I was a part of the same way it was when I first joined. I’m hoping to recapture that a bit here specifically on Lemmy and in the fediverse at large.
There is an energy here that I haven’t really felt from reddit as a whole in years…
Certain (smaller) subs could still get that same feeling sometimes, but so far I am very much enjoying lemmy. Yeah there’s a bit of a learning curve to figuring things out but I think people will catch on fast!
Exactly! Reddit turned in a whine site.
I think you hit the nail on the head for me. I’m excited to see what comes from this community far more than Reddit.
Yes!
I can post and comment here without getting yelled at or worthless, and off topic, replies. I hope they keeps the trolls to a minimum and encourage meaningful contributions.
Great point. There will be a big wave i’m sure (it happened w/ Mastodon/microblogging fediverse platforms) and after a few months, some of the people tried it and left. The people who remained are such an engaging and fun group to talk to.
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…
No matter how many developers you get, you’re never going to have a good product if the guy calling the shots won’t allow it. I’m confident that the developers working on Reddit probably know damn well that their product is trash and there’s nothing they can do about it because their job isn’t “make a good site” its “do what your boss tells you to do”
I’ve been a developer for awhile and you would be surprised how many companies can’t get out of their own way to improve their products.
This is so true it hurts.
That’s absolutely right, I’m not a developer, I’m a UX/UI designer. I recently had a contract where the contractor slaughtered my initial design to the point where I almost started to hate it, but I was bound by contract to finish it.
If reddit wants, their developer can absolutely build a top notch app.
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.
It’s going to become a barren wasteland of bots communicating with each other.
Haha, you just reminded me of this cartoon:
yeah. this one’s always relevant
This right here. I’m not scared of AI itself. I’m scared of what humans will do with it.
100%. I’ve said exactly that to friends.
@myk @alyaza “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?”
Goes to show how important it is we use FOSS and decentralized tools for real community communications.
yeah, and multilingual on top of that, there are content in so many languages on reddit.
fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
Isn’t it a bit late for that?
I mean, GPT is on its fourth iteration, they’ve been working on it for years, I don’t know about Bing Chat but MS surely didn’t start develop it only yesterday.
How can Reddit be so sure “AI bros” haven’t already got the data they needed to train their models?
There’s going to be lots of other challengers out there: I’m sure every ML postgrad with any nous has spent the last couple of months contacting every funder they can track down to explain how their model is going to knock the socks off the old fashioned models used by these lumbering corporations.
And even the established models have been shown to contain content obtained in violation of user licences and copyright laws, leaving them open to all sorts of legal and political challenges. They will all be scrambling now to demonstrate that they’ve got clean hands in future models.
It will be like the NFT gold rush all over again—the only sure way to get rich is to sell the shovels.
r/iPhone mods 6 hours ago: In less than 24 hours, /r/iPhone will be going private indefinitely.
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]
No way Reddit is going to be able to replace so many mods on so many subs that deal with so many millions of users. They can try, but that doesn’t mean it will work.
Apparently they’ll be laying off about 90 workers (5%) whilst also lowering the amount of people they will hire. So, less staff to begin with. Less mods. It’s going to be a shitshow. The admins don’t even deal with moderation, really. Reporting is outsourced to their “Anti Evil Operations” team. So wtf are they going to do? I can’t wait to see the downfall.
At this point, after that poor excuse of an AMA, their reputation is tanked.
They’ll appoint new mods. New mods that don’t have any experience or any professionalism. New mods that may not even be the age of majority yet. It’s a dumpster fire waiting to happen.
It’s a damn shame.
Yes I was totally blown away when I saw how large that sub is. It’s incredible to see Reddit losing people with that much experience of managing and growing massive communities, but the board’s focus right is only on selling existing content to AI bros so they probably don’t care that much at the moment.
That’s why it’s important for normal users who leave the site to delete their comments and submission too.
Or for the paranoid, edit then delete 😀
They rely on the free labor of the community mods. They can’t handle that workload. They’d have to replace those mods with other free mods without the years of experience, or mods with experience that will suck up to Reddit to keep their unpaid job.
Either way, I predict it will end in fireworks.
Also they don’t have the language skills, I’d be serously impressed if they managed to scrunge up employees with the language and culture skills for many subs.
Sharing this because it should be shared
This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo’s woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.
Ditto. I saw that, I deleted all my posts/comments and then my 11+ year old account.
Yeah this AMA was eye opening for sure
Wait what! Things have gotten this bad!? Like, this actually happened? I’m guessing there was no follow up question.
I mean, it’s either a dumb corporate strategy to discredit or psychopathic behaviour, or, sadly, both.
Also something weird, when I saw this combo, iamthatis was the first reply. Now it’s way down there, despite the upvotes and gilds.
I really don’t like putting on the tin foil hat, but since spez admitted in the past that he changed other users comments, I’m calling it, this guy is still messing around with things behind the scenes
Christian should sue him for that, looks like libel to me.
I’m not a lawyer though.
doesnt that require monetary losses?
sure, he lost out revenue from the spp, but that is due to the api changes and not due to the libel. might be difficult to argue otherwise, but Im also not a lawyer
In the US, with slander and libel, there are two standards.
If someone is a public figure, they need to show actual damages in order to be successful, this is the scenario you’re describing.
If you are not a public figure, then you can sue for slander or libel without needing to show actual damages, just harm to your reputation or similar.
So the answer on that turns on whether Christian Selig is a public figure or not - I do not know the answer to that question.
Christian is Canadian so the laws might be a bit different. I know a few people in Reddit mentioned that the laws would be more favorable to Christian since he’s Canadian, but I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know how accurate that is.
IANAL but even though their statements are “in public” but I doubt either of them would qualify as public figures - that is reserved for politicians and such.
That being said, spez here seems to have actually slandered iamthatis. This occurred when when spez claimed that iamthatis was “blackmailing” reddit for 10M$, which incidentally lead iamthatis to post audio recordings proving that spez was lying.
Maybe I’ve got some of those details wrong, so correct me if I am.
oh interesting, I didnt know there is a difference there.
I think it can be just damage to your reputation but yeah… not sure really 😕
Any lawyers reading this?
Christian also responded to another comment made my Spez
'nuff said i guess, who doesn’t want to leave someone this full of shit.
I’m out. Redact is busy just now deleting everything under my account.
One of us! One of us!
What’s redact?
An app that allows you to remove all your posts from Reddit and other social media accounts.
By chance, do you have a link to it? I’ve been doing this manually, and it’s taking ages.
Amazing! Thank you!
Tonight, we erase the past!
Hacker News: Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin
KbinMigration Subreddit URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/KbinMigration
Hacker News Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268458
It’s sad to see Reddit go down this path, but the writing has been on the wall for awhile now. Losing Apollo is what had me make the jump to Lemmy.
Hopefully we build a strong community here.
Edit: typo
new refugee - hello and thank you for welcoming us 🙋🏻♀️ very first of what i’m sure will be many posts here in the fedverse. nice to meet you all!
reddit know the list of named 3p apps out there are. likely tens not hundreds.
they could have implemented an api management solution to charge those folks differently than what they charge a corporation training lllms.
i sell this solution to enterprises for a living and it’s not technically hard to implement. truly. thousands of companies large and small with fewer resources than reddit have done it.
reddit could have done it in less than a couple of hours and charged a fair rate to these developers while making bank on ai.
but no, spez the egocentric jackass chose this path instead.
corp controlled social media is both dangerous and toxic. the only way to fix this is to burn them to the ground so burn it we must.
deleting my reddit account & data on the 30th and watching the latest developments re: blackouts, communities going indefinitely dark even today … with excitement for the future.
would have never thought in just a week i couldn’t go from loving to loathing something so much.
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i think the goal is to shut them down - the pricing + time they were given is pretty effective at making sure the only way to access reddit content is via the paths reddit owns. they can collect more data, change whatever, charge whatever, and compete with nobody
it’s enough to make us leave forever, hopefully everyone else follows suit
I hope this bullshit kills their site. Monetization is necessary in some ways, but this is just pure greed.
If they started with something more sensible and than increase control if needed - cool, they at least tried. But this is just ugly.
Hate to see reddit die like this, but Lemmy does feel like a suitable alternative, and I’m glad I switched over. Hopefully we see a lot more users move over as subreddits go dark.
This is so weird and cool, like a bunch of different entire Reddits connected together, each with redditors all Redditing together. I am also a refugee, hi.
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.
I LOVE infinity so much it’s so sad to see it go…
I’ve seen some discussion that there may be a way to spoof the reddit API and basically plug existing third party reddit apps into Lemmy instead!
Yeah, a Lemmy proxy is in the works. Should be able to convert Lemmy instances into a reddit-compatible format for clients.
adding
engadged: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defends API changes in AMA
despite the title they’re not going light on him lolmashable: Reddit’s CEO’s AMA turns into disaster
p.s. non-English tech magazines are covering the protest too, I guess it’s worldwide known at this point.
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 predict that as the blackout goes into full swing, Reddit is going to start taking over major subreddits from their mods to keep the site going. Things are going to become ugly very fast.
