I think the difference that spez failed to realize when he decided to turn the enshittification dial up to 11 is that, unlike facebook, whatsapp, instagram, etc, we were not on reddit because of people we know. There was no peer pressure or awkward conversations. We did not rely on reddit as a means of communication that was irreplaceable. When the whatsapp drama happened, we couldn’t really up and leave, because grandma doesn’t know how to download signal. because the local market down the road has whatsapp set up for orders and doesn’t really give a shit. the family group has important starred chats that we refer to, etc etc.
This is not at all the case with reddit. Reddit is where we went for content. But whether the content is on reddit, lemmy, or the back of a shampoo bottle in the bathroom, it made no difference whatsoever. In my jump from reddit I’ve had to explain to exactly zero people why I’m making this decision. You cannot do that with instagram or whatsapp; and it took me years to convince people that I will not use facebook (thankfully that’s now a little more acceptable of a concept, but i digress). they wanted to play like the big social media boys, but they forgot that, in their core, they are not a social media platform.
I hate to be harsh but can we stop fooling ourselves here? Many large subreddits have already ended their blackout and are continuing as if nothing ever happened. The mods are continuing to slave away for free. The blackout itself barely made a dent in activity. I usually don’t care to comment but even Lemmy is getting infected with comments/posts of people patting themselves on the back for achieving virtually nothing.
I’m not saying Reddit isn’t reliant on users but these blackout and “mass” exodus movements are meaningless gestures. I literally only moved to Lemmy because RiF is closing.
I get the feeling the new metric will be the loss of all the mod tools and accessibility for users. Difficulty moderating when the 3rd party apps die, combined with the inconveniences and frustration with the app and site may actually be a catalyst. Subreddits may be back now (not surprised) but I’m interested in seeing what happens over next month after changes. It really may be reddit shooting itself in the foot and genuinely believing loss of users is the publics fault.
2 day blackout really never looked like anything more than a warning
What these guys don’t realize is the “value” of their website is their users content. They tend to feel like they’re the value, that they’ve done something great. You see this in both Musk and Zuck. They feel like they’re the heroes of the internet. Except what is Reddit exactly, what is it’s value? It is only the users. These guys parade around the knowledge of other people as if it’s their own value and want to become rich off it. I’m sick of this Silicon Valley bullshit, honestly. That whole mindset is toxic from start to finish. And we see the finish on all of them: screw over the people who create the content for the next round of VC cash, or IPO.
I hope Lemmy or whatever comes next can resist this culture of “burn it to the ground for the payday”.
An old meme but checks out.
The scumbag Steve hat really gives it the age of a fine wine.
Remember secret Santa?
I was talking to my tech kids (programmers for a very well known company) I told them how puzzled I was. The guy that created secret Santa was gung-ho to create a new one the second reddit announced they were closing it down. Then he disappeared.
The kids then explained non-compete and why it’s always included with contracts.
Reddit closed secret Santa down but wouldn’t let him bring a similar thing back.
Why? What is wrong with them?
PS this is conjecture only I haven’t spoken to him as he truly is MIA
Secret Santa was back when Reddit still had a semblance of community, which I realize now means trust. I’d never trust a Reddit secret Santa these days. Heck, I’ve done successful 4chan secret Santas and I’m still not brave enough to want a modern Reddit secret Santa.
Least with a 4chan secret santa I’d know there’s an 80% chance of my gift being poop and cum instead of being surprised by it.
I actually ended up getting a really nice and thoughtful gift. (And cookies which I absolutely did not eat.)
(And cookies which I absolutely did not eat.)
Smart!
@setsneedtofeed this is not news! This is ?? You are destroying your “brand” - who wants to subscribe to this?
Mate, why are you posting on random comments complaining about them being news? What are you on about?
They think they are too big to fail and enough users will stick around up voting repost bots that it will be profitable.
They’ll be right. The quality of everything, not the least of which is internet scrolling, that the general public accepts is horrendous.
Somebody else put it best here that Reddit won’t die, it will still be around for all those people. Hopefully the rest of us move on and Reddit becomes “Oh huh? That place is still around?”
Having mainstream news sources reporting on this – especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes – is actually a pretty good sign. Even though I am enjoying Lemmy more now that I have tried it anyway.
Just a heads up that with their loosely moderated contributor model, you can find anything on Forbes these days. Up to and including outright scams and misinformation. It’s a far cry from the reputable source it once was.
Oh thank you, that is good to know.
Having mainstream news sources reporting on this – especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes – is actually a pretty good sign.
I thought so too. Been searching news sites since yesterday waiting to see when investors were going to chime in.
Betcha spez is in a well-deserved crisis mode rn.
Still ain’t gonna back down.
Humans are paradoxically really good at adaptation, and also not admitting mistakes. Dude is singularly responsible for the biggest PR fumble in Reddit history and seemingly has zero self awareness despite being at the center of it.
When the site treats you as product, but forgets you create the content they are trying to sell.
*You are the content they are trying to sell.
as if we would back down - or even need to
all glory to the Fediverse!
I think the thing that blows my mind about the pricing model is- AI using reddit for training data doesn’t need to up vote, downvote, subscribe, comment, or constantly ingest new data. They could ingest everything on Reddit once and be done, or come back every 6 to 12 months for an update. 3rd Party App developers need to download the same posts from the front page for every user, multiple times a day, constantly. They actually interact with a website. A $1 billion LLM ai might pay $1 million to download all the reddit data they need. Meanwhile Apollo might be worth less than $1 million as a business and is being hit with $20 million per year as operating expenses. The pricing model is set up in such a way that LLM’s are in a much better position to either pay a pretty insignificant fee to get all the data, or just build a scraper since they don’t need to support multiple users or website interaction. Meanwhile the price to app developers is impossibly high.
They are just lying. Blaming LLMs is just a convenient, topical target. If that was really a problem, why did they not react anytime in the last few years when thimgs like ChatGPT were actually gathering their initial data? It’s not like this tech popped up or of nowhere, it’s been around for awhile but just recently became a mainstream story due to the increased access.
Correct. Spez is either a pathological liar, or incomprehensibly stupid. But probably both.
I’d go with pathological liar given how he alleged that the Apollo developer threatened Reddit - allegations which the Apollo developer proved false by releasing the audio of the phone call - and then Spez doubled down on the allegations while saying the developer shouldn’t have released the audio. Basically, “I’m going to defame you and you providing proof of me lying about you isn’t allowed.”
I don’t get your argument. A service that uses the api once or twice a year, and uses much less of the offered features, and generally stresses the website much less… Is to pay more, simply because the application is worth more?
I think he’s calling out the fact that the justification for the API pricing changes was partially “we’ve got to stop AI training bots from scraping Reddit.” However, the pricing changes were actually made to hit third party developers hard and not hit the AI modelers that hard.
The stupid part is nobody really cares how much they want to charge to organizations wanting to train AI models. Literally all they have to do is offer a reasonable price for third party app developers. It’s not that hard to have different price tiers for different use cases.
This argument about ai companys is completely ridiculous anyway, the training data is harvested with scrapers, not the api.
