‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
I have thoroughly enjoyed Lemmy and Beehaw over this weekend. I’m not expecting anything out of reddit.
Reddit was my home for 12 years and I really feel like it boiled down to three really uses of my time:
- cultivated communities
- niche knowledge
- scrolling through all
I have had a taste of being part of a community this weekend that reminds me of what reddit was like a decade ago. This really removed the sting of disconnecting all my apollo widgets and shortcuts. Lemmy, kbin, etc may lead to a new future for those of us looking for somewhere new.
Niche knowledge? I think that’s one thing that just will be on reddit for the foreseeable future but as communities move and shift away, it’ll disperse across the internet. I do see myself still searching through reddit results via google when searching for a personalized review or specific information. But it will become a get-in, get-out process.
Scrolling? Reddit leadership is so dumb. they’ve catered to this feature and this user base for all the marbles of their IPO. Scrolling is the least unique feature to reddit compared to other social media. And reddit’s scrolling was highly dependent on your feed and could sometimes not be that great. Scrolling can be replaced by anything from tiktok to instagram to other forums and new sites
Even this weekend on Beehaw, I’ve seen reviews of fountain pens, a storm over Scotland, trailers for new games on the horizon and little bits of people’s lives shared and connected. If I can continue to have an experience like this? I won’t even miss reddit.
It’s going to be an interesting new future
Agreed. I replaced the Reddit app icon in my launcher with the one for Lemmy (Jerboa). 98% of the time I’m just mindlessly scrolling and looking at images or memes and occasionally the interesting article. So far, even the minimal content on Lemmy (and Instagram and Tumblr) has filled that need.
Probably two or three times now I’ve pulled up Reddit specifically to look something up, and that just says to me how often I actually engage with the communities there that matter to me. Reddit will no longer be getting hundreds of hits per day from me. If I need to look something up, maybe I’ll go look, and hopefully the communities I joined, like guitar, motorcycles, ADHD, pizza, and other niche interests, will develop elsewhere.
Same exact situation for me, down to putting Jerboa where RIF used to be. I think the appeal to Beehaw for me is its emphasis on community. I’ve been on the internet for a hot minute, and I didn’t realize that I actually missed having a sense of community online. Reddit was basically a source of content for me, and I would lurk almost exclusively. With Lemmy, I’m finding myself commenting and responding far more often. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is here, but I just feel more inclined to actually participate here.
Same for me, but I used Boost (and before that, Slide).
On my phone, Jerboa is good enough. On the desktop, I’m more interested in finding specific information, so I still read Reddit sometimes. If Reddit doesn’t reverse course, I’ll just drop my account and only use Reddit read only with an ad blocker.
Most of my Reddit browsing was on my phone, and about half of the rest was me providing content to Reddit. I would’ve been happy to pay for an ad-free tier (say, $5/year; I paid for a couple others before I recently switched to Boost) on a decent mobile app, but I want my choice of app because the official one sucks. I would also be happy to pay for an ad-free desktop tier per account (say, $10-20 fixed), and if so, I would still be contributing content.
But no, Reddit had to go and ruin their platform. So I’m out, and I’ll simply be a leech from now on.
same here im accually interacting with people instead of just lurking i think the community aspect helps but for me its also thw fact theres less users around so the chances of accually having a decent conversation is higher
Yeah, I’ve noticed the same. I also don’t really have the same feeling that replying in a post with a bunch of comments already on it is a waste of time - on Reddit, if a post had 100 comments on it then it was kind of pointless for me to add my voice because nobody would see it anyway. Here, I’ve actually gone through and responded to various comments and posts regardless. I think that’s more of a “social norms/community culture” thing than a technological difference though. I mentioned my thoughts on what went wrong with Reddit elsewhere, but basically the way Reddit set things up led to the encouragement of low-effort popularity contest type replies so people would rush to get the highest-karma responses as quickly and easily as possible. There isn’t an easy way to see someone’s total score here though, so upvotes aren’t really the focus and actual conversation can happen instead.
From what i understand the karma system was meant to be a way to encourage people to be active early on to drive even more traffic to the site but as it went on it definitely devolved into a popularity contest like you said
The karma system had its advantages in that early on it encouraged people to be active and make the site seem more alive from what ive heard but as it went on it ike you said just devolved into an popularity contest
Yeah, tapping into dopamine bursts to encourage activity is a great short-term solution, but I guess it was also foreshadowing into what Reddit would become. I’ll take what I’ve seen here so far over the quick and easy hits any day; having a constant stream of bite-sized content to consume was wreaking havoc on my attention span and I didn’t even realize it until I found myself having to stay focused on some of the longer conversations I’ve seen around Lemmy.
Same here accually having convesations with people has been pretty fun and ive yet to see anything not civil for now wich is a plus
Reddit’s spiral down was the boiling frog analogy for me.
I’d forgotten what it was like for people have conversations with each other. The change was gradual.
100% agree with you there. It’s been a nice change on here this weekend :)
Welcome to the Fediverse! I’ve found that people tend to have a little more realness when they’re part of something they co-create vs merely participating in a company’s space. Even if the server this “sub” is on dies, Lemmy and the Fediverse will continue.
It will hurt, leaving so many meaningless internet points behind, but like you said, I’m hopeful this can be my new home.
Make it meaningful and sell your reddit account!
I guess spammers are the only group I dislike more than reddit at this point :p
Can you explain the difference between Lemmy and Beehaw? I’m very confused, and currently (I think?) Using Lemmy… I’m on the Jerboa app right now.
Lemmy is the whole of federated instances. Beehaw is one specific instance. Jerboa is an app that allows you to navigate and interact with others on Lemmy.
Think of communities like beehaw as neighborhoods. The actual community groups are houses in those neighborhoods, and the town made up of all the different neighborhoods is Lemmy. Jerboa is the vehicle you use to visit different neighborhoods and houses.
It’s laughable that the CEO of a 10 billion dollar (in valuation) company https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/technology/reddit-new-funding.html is saying that numerous solo and small group developers are more successful than he is.
This is an absurd statement. Small app developers making ends meet are in no way analogous with a P&L from a corporation and it is disingenuous for Huffman to position himself in this “woe is me” argument.
Laughable, maybe, but not surprising. Since the Web 2.0 boom started picking up, the game for tech startups has always been to attract users as fast as possible, profits be damned, and hope a FAANG buys you out for your userbase before your VC money runs out. Post-Great Recession, debt has been near as makes no difference free, so VCs have been willing to extend very long runways to the companies they invest in, but with interest rates going sharply up the music has stopped and it’s time for companies like Reddit to show they can become profitable or else.
Also, if Reddit is truly so unprofitable and terrible… maybe they should get a new CEO?
Somehow I feel like Spez himself has made a lot more money during this time than 3rd party developers. Despite Reddit itself not turning a net profit.
I’m missing reddit less and less with reach passing minute. At this point I don’t know if I’ll be going back after the blackout. This is already WAY more fun to use than the reddit app or mobile site, and I have no idea what I’m doing yet.
Kudos to the developers here for putting in the work.
Same here, I’m trying to wean myself off the firehouse of relevant content, in favour of a more community feel. Truth is, quality over quantity is exactly what I need.
And quality of interactions. So far, anyway, this place is missing the familiar hostility.
edit: for those on jerboa (like me) who can’t see the image, it’s Willy Wonka’s “Good DAY, Sir!” meme
I’m on mlem so that’s helpful!
Reddit is really doing everything it can to scare away the users who are looking to move away from the uninspiring trash mainstream internet. Looking forward to some new sites blossoming.
Elon’s Twitter: coming soon to Reddit
+1 same here
It makes me sad that a site as big as Reddit is letting down so much of it’s userbase for a quick buck. At least it’s making people look for decentralized sites like this more, I suppose
From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.
I am also unsure what most of the 2000+ employees do, because by all accounts they are generally unresponsive to both users and mods alike when they reach out. This is as true now with the API stuff and small devs not getting traction to work with them, as it has been in the past and was a major reason there was backlash when Victoria was let go.
From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.
This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.
You’ve got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they’re supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don’t see the humanity or the nuance anymore.
You’ve got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it’s the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they’ve been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team’s ability to keep up with the mod queue.
And you’ve got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.
And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you’ll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don’t know how one keeps these people out, once they’ve taken an interest.
I think there are some things that can help. I’ve seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn’t so involved and won’t burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)
But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it’s just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.
I wonder how that’ll play out in this federated model. Many of these problems sound like general problems with being a mod (honestly it sounds horrible) rather than uniquely Reddit.
The federated approach will shrink communities for a time but I worry that there’ll be a sharp recentralization as instances stop federating with anything below some size to avoid a wave of spam/junk (similar to the problems small mail servers see).
But I’m new to this model so maybe there’s a reason it won’t play out that way
All your points are very true, unfortunately. It just saddens me seeing companies hurt the very community that even allowed them to rise to popularity
Allowed them to rise is an understatement. The content and the value comes from users alone. Reddit itself is his a shell without them. Even the moderation happens through the users. I don’t know what will happen to Reddit, but I do hope it will be painful for spez.
I care less for what happens to the website and more what happens to the users. Having a website where you build and found such large communities fuck you over like this must be heartbreaking
It’s my experience that it’s gotten better. T_D, way of the bern, brigading etc we’re all horrible in 2015ish. There were some truly awful subs like jailbait. You’d routinely see NSFW videos on the front page that were not properly tagged, like people violently dying.
Imo Reddit is much more pleasant to use. I think a lot of their decisions have worked pretty well
At some point reddit stopped deleting comments and instead edited them [Removed by reddit] that’s when it really started slipping.
It makes me sad that a site as big as Reddit is letting down so much of it’s userbase for a quick buck
Given that they had opportunities to actually monetize these apps (force displaying ads, charging a reasonable price for API access), it seems obvious that it’s a move toward wiping out the third-party ecosystem entirely instead of just trying to get compensated for it.
The backtracking to allow mod tools to continue operating (those that still added irreplaceable value to the platform) while refusing to negotiate with other apps just reinforces that.
It’s sad to see this happen but I’m (unfortunately) not surprised. Whenever a site/software/etc becomes the main/only thing most people use it starts taking advantage of that. I just hope it happens less in the future with the rise of decentralized nd federated social media
this article was from 2 days ago, hopefully there will be new light tomorrow. although, reddit’s history of corporatising at the expense of users, and their respect thereto, is still significant. let’s hope to see some awareness from the less technically & socially active reddit user-base tomorrow :p
I got off there as soon as I saw them slandering the creator of Apollo for ‘threats’, now I’m hoping he’ll just shift focus and make it into a badass Lemmy app instead.
Spez answered a total of 14 softballs, and 7 more questions were answered by other employees with ultimately no satisfactory outcomes or answers. You didn’t really miss much unless you like watching people pour gasoline on dumpster fires.
They were premade responses too. He accidentally full copy and pasted one.
Lmao of course he did, what a clown.
To be fair, it was a fantastic dumpster fire. I can’t decide if he fared better than Steven Seagal or not.
It’s definitely up there as one of the absolute worst AMAs of all time.
that’s a plot twist i’d pay to see
That article also is very pro Reddit.
It just accepts his claims without providing the Apollo app developers evidence that he’s lying.
If Reddit has not learned how to make a profit in 17 years, that is not the devs fault.
Tumblr tried to become profitable under Yahoo and look how it turned out. It was bought for 1.1 billion dollars and sold to current owner for 3 million lol
I feel like both Twitter and Reddit are trying to speedrun this kind of downfall at this point.
I feel like this is such a strange stance to take when you’re trying to go public with your company. “We’re not profitable, we’ve never been profitable. Would you like to invest?”
It’s because investors don’t care about profits - they care about the promise of profit growth.
You could make an investment, and normal valuation is like 3-5 years to break even. But if you’re rich already, breaking even does nothing for you - what you care about is what the value of your share of the company is worth in 5-10 years.
They’d rather risk it all and push for 100x ROI - anything from 0-5x is basically the same for them. Only exponential growth will matter for them financially, so at every turn they’ll push for you to take on more debt and reinvest everything in the hopes you become the Google (or get bought by them)
How tf is reddit not profitable? When I first joined reddit it had a progress bar to the side that showed the percentage of server costs covered by reddit gold and it was always filled. Since then they started showing lots more ads, added reddit coins, awards and premium subscription to increase their revenue. The increase in their cost/user has to be from the native image/video uploads and redisigning the website/app. If YouTube manages to be profitable hosting 4k videos, reddit must be doing something very stupid to become unprofitable with their low quality videos.
Server costs are probably a small proportion of their costs, labour costs are probably going to be the biggest part, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Spez’s salary/bonus knocks them from profitable to unprofitable, as being profitable is bad for tax purposes
With all due respect to reddit’s employees who do deserve gainful employment,
Does a link aggregator really need a huge labor pool? In terms of functionality Lemmy is already on par with how I remember Reddit 10 years ago (compared to which the experience of Reddit today is actually worse). And Lemmy achieves it with what, an extreme fraction of the labor cost?
Props to all the devs, admins, etc who are hosting all these Lemmy instances for us, btw :)
Yea I read somewhere that Reddit has upwards of 2,000 employees. Like, what.
Majority of them hired last year, back in 2021 they only had 700. The only reasonable explanation would have been adding hundreds of new admins/moderators, but I don’t think that was the case, so I have no clue what all of them have been doing for the last year and a half.
Half are probably involved in the ads side of things.
My guess? 250 devs 200 administrative folks (secretaries, hr, accounting, etc) 50 executive level 1500 marketing and communications and sales folks
:)
Don’t forget legal. Defensive and offensive.
Because we have an absurd monetary system.
Companies also need to “grow or die”, the capital holders don’t want to invest in a sustainable company that turns reliable profits - they want line curve up
Reddit probably took on loans and additional investments to push towards growth plans, like the website redesign or marketing. They might’ve bought fancy office space to look the part, and bought big booths at conventions.
And maybe it all even worked - but the pressure is always going to be “take more loans and try to grow even faster” - not “pay off the principal so your monthly payments go down”. After all, if you double in size, paying off the loan would be trivial
Except the way our systems are set up, you have to keep growing until you can’t - at that point, you pop and deflate into a shell of what you were
That, or the fact that they employ 700 people.
Sure, because YouTube was bought by Google - their investors already cashed out, so they no longer have the same pressure to grow at all costs
It’s pretty common for big companies to not show a net profit. Remember Amazon wasn’t profitable until relatively recently, because they would reinvest all their cash into growing the business. They could have shown a profit any time they wanted; just stop investing in infrastructure, etc. It’s often a choice to run at break-even or even a loss while capital expenditures are high. I have no idea if that’s what’s happening behind the curtain over there, but it’s one possibility.
Nah Steve isn’t smart enough for that.
I believe AD revenue is drying up for all tech sectors and the collapse of Silicone Valley Bank didn’t help either. You can see a lot of technology companies are cutting back on spending. Layoffs are happening in all sectors of technology. My guess is these companies are preparing for the coming recession.
Worthless trash wants to leech money pretending they’re “working”, that’s how.
undefined> How tf is reddit not profitable? When I first joined reddit it had a progress bar to the side that showed the percentage of server costs covered by reddit gold and it was always filled. Since then they started showing lots more ads, added reddit coins, awards and premium subscription to increase their revenue. The increase in their cost/user has to be from the native image/video uploads and redisigning the website/app. If YouTube manages to be profitable hosting 4k videos, reddit must be doing something very stupid to become unprofitable with their low quality videos.
Apparently Reddit’s advertising policy was wrong since their profits dropped. Reddit cannot be compared in popularity to YouTube.
I am disappointed that this article, in its apparent attempt to appear objective and neutral, didn’t do a very good job of explaining why people are so angry. I was hoping for more signal amplification to inform more people who may not yet know.
The first part of the article makes it sound like the point of the backlash is that Reddit will charge for the API at all, not the punishingly high rates or the very small window of time devs had to respond after pricing was finally communicated. It does ultimately say how much Apollo would have to pay to operate under that pricing structure, but the article seemed to be burying the lede a bit to me. It also conflates the 3rd party apps with big AI training use cases, which I think misses the point.
The article also really downplayed how unprofessional Steve has been, especially during the AMA, and how powerful the recording Christian released was in terms of causing the monumental backlash that is now happening. It didn’t really describe the magnitude of the backlash itself very well, either. It was mostly trusting readers to go look at the embedded links to understand what was actually going on, and the summary snips in the article don’t do much to encourage anyone to do so.
You can tell Reddit PR folks got their word in on this article.
On point 👍 If I may add, the arguments put forward by the Reddit team reeks of ‘welfare queen’ put forward by politicians to push austerity measures. If any one of them spoke English, they should read ‘social media’ and meditate on it for a moment. Social media without the social bit is largely a dud.
The article itself appears to be leaning on TC’s reputation in the hopes that the casual readers would not do their own independent verification. In other words, one business helping out another. Sadly, the article seems likely to achieve this goal. Does a good job of cheerleading Reddit’s move without coming across as such. Indie devs are forced to shoehorn accessibility features and self limit on the number of requests by the end of the month, or the door out is wide open. This is the point that the article is amplifying from what I can see.
It’s truly sad to see a website that I’ve been on for 8+ years turn to an absolute dumpster fire. I suppose I’m not surprised by Steve Huffman’s (u/spez) behavior, he has been deplorable to say the least over the countless years and this just does it for me and so many other users.
The sub I mod on (r/Moustache) has gone private and will continue to indefinitely. I’ve deleted all of my posts aside from subreddit announcements and all of my comments on the site (all 4,500) of them.
If anyone wants to delete their user data on Reddit you can do so by using this tool PowerDeleteSuite. It took a while for the suite to delete all my comments (make sure you overwrite your existing comments with whatever you like first to prevent future AI scraping and Reddit making even more money off of you) but it was worth it.
Make sure to use a fork of PowerDeleteSuite that respects the edit rate limit if you plan to edit your comments. Otherwise it will only actually get like 1/3 of them.
Just run it 3 times! :)
I did actually try that, but it seemed to hit the limit on the same comments (which isn’t that surprising). A fork that respects the limit took most of the night to run, but seems to have been thorough.
Any chance of a link to one of those forks that worked for you? I’ve been bashing my head against a wall trying to get any of the mass reddit comment deleters to work on all my comments, including the super old ones that don’t show up on my user profile page but are still accessible through search engines!
I used gbf-dtb’s fork. It seems like they’ve updated it to be easier to install since then as well. I used it by manually updating the URL to grab the script from in j0be’s bookmarklet, but gbf-dtb appears to have re-linked to a codepen with a corrected one for easy installation now.
so reddit does not have a “delete my data” request link? I will do that when June 30th arrived and the tool should be more mature by then. :)
Well, it was the kick in the ass I needed to get off of Reddit finally. Besides, I think at the end of the day I was only down to maybe 2-3 subs that I kept up with, the rest just got toxic as hell. So…hello to everyone on Lemmy, still learning how it works, but hopefully it’ll be a better mature community.
I think the trick will be working through some growing pains here while communities develop.
So far everything I’ve seen has been pretty positive though.
Of course they are. They had already done their projections and accounted for whatever melt they would incur over all this. The ad/whatever else revenue they expect to generate by forcing users to the official app outweighs the loss in users and collateral damage to subreddit moderation.
Reddit gradually became one of the single most important websites on the internet over the course of 17 years. Like Facebook, Reddit is functionally the ONLY website on the internet for a massive number of people. The IPO was always going to result in decisions that would tarnish Reddit in the eyes of the type of people who’d even consider migrating to a place like Lemmy. But that kind of user doesn’t matter when we’re talking about things like vaLuATioN.
I mentioned in another community yesterday that my most realistic hope is this whole ordeal fractures the power user base into various diasporas. I hope that people migrate to a bunch of different alternatives, and then they apply the community building energy there that they used to apply exclusively to Reddit. Maybe we’ll be lucky and enough people get excited about enough other places that we’ll have a [viable] diversity of choice online again.
Maybe I’ve been around too long but it seems like a decade or more ago the average Reddit user would be exactly the type of person who would migrate to Lemmy in the face of something like this.
I know Reddit has gotten much larger and it seems like it’s got a lot more generic over time but do you really feel like the user base as a whole has changed enough that This move won’t impact the feel of the site as a whole, as well as their bottom line?
I think the point we need to get from this is: they get to keep their ad machine and pretty numbers, but we get an influx of like-minded people to the alternative social media. To me that’s a win win situation.
Next time the wave will be bigger, and so on.
This is a good article, but is says nothing about his position on subreddits going dark.
It’s why I’m here, and I’m liking it so far
Same. Honestly I don’t even miss Reddit. Fuck that place
Yeah, only thing missing are the amount of people but that’s a problem that’s being fixed every passing day.
I’m actually having a lot of fun watching this place grow! It feels like a smaller community, but I’ve watched it expand so fast in the past week. Now that we’ve surpassed 100,000 people it feels like we’ve reached the point of it having enough mass that it can sustain itself. Once we reach a million I really think we’ll start getting more attention and at around 10 million we’ll be approaching terminal velocity. People on Reddit have been wanting a good alternative, but are just afraid of losing the large community vibe. It’s going to take time, but this week has felt like hope.
I just want enough people to have most popular/semi popular subs to have a decent number of conversation going. It doesn’t need to get AS populous as Reddit is right now.
Important to note that this article went up before the subreddits went down.
Cool, I guess it’s time to uninstall boost then. Guess I’m on Lemmy for the foreseeable future!
I’ve already uninstalled RiF - it was the only way to stop me from automatically opening it back up.
Check out Jerboa.
Signed, former RiF user
I’m trying to switch from Rif to Jerboa too. Setting up an account and the front page was a bit unintuitive, but once that was done the app works very well and feels at least somewhat similar to Rif.
The comment section is similar to baconreader, too. I’m trying to adjust to opening up jerboa instead but giving myself until the end of the month to uninstall
Do you think it’s better than the website as a PWA? I’ve been using that and I’m fairly happy with it. There’s definitely some weirdness here and there.
I’d say just try it and see what you prefer. The app also has some occasional weirdness as it’s still an alpha version, but it usually works well.
I just prefer having it in an app, and the app is tiny anyway (about 20MB on my phone).
Can confirm, am using jerboa. It seems to be scratching that itch pretty well… Despite the shortfalls. There are some additions I’d make, and maybe a little layout change but apart from that it works well.
Yeah, love boost but really starting to enjoy Lemmy on Jerboa for Android.
Long Live Lemmy
