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Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

402 points| UpToTheSky | 2 years ago |old.reddit.com

172 comments

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[+] GenericDev|2 years ago|reply
I wish they would just let Reddit die.

I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems.

We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.

Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.

God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.

Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.

[+] Levitz|2 years ago|reply
Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right?

You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.

[+] UpToTheSky|2 years ago|reply
What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?

Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?

Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.

Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

[+] tiedieconderoga|2 years ago|reply
Three big issues off the top of my head:

* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.

* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.

* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.

Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.

[+] blendergeek|2 years ago|reply
The hardest part is going to be the community itself. Reddit (the board and shareholders) are betting that the community is too large to migrate to a better alternative.
[+] pgwhalen|2 years ago|reply
There are many reddit clones. The value is completely in the communities and not in the technology.

r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.

[+] jrnichols|2 years ago|reply
> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

One already exists in Lemmy.

I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.

[+] lrem|2 years ago|reply
Bootstrapping an alternative. Growing it from nothingness, being easily welcoming but not overrun by spam and malicious content. Getting to a critical mass before losing the goodwill with users and runway with whoever pays for this. This is a very significant moat, one that makes Reddit's leadership believe they can turn the screw without worrying about competition for now.
[+] rvz|2 years ago|reply
> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit.

> Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI.

It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative.

But anyway...

...AI really is going just great. /s

[+] femboy|2 years ago|reply
The Network Effect.
[+] heavyset_go|2 years ago|reply
> Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?

Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.

[+] flangola7|2 years ago|reply
Moderation of large scale social media is a god-damned nightmare.
[+] super256|2 years ago|reply
The automoderator feature of reddit seems to be very complex. You can configure a lot.
[+] seydor|2 years ago|reply
creating momentum is hard, even with a better product. Even before the internet, the slightly technologies did not necessarily get enough traction to unseat the incumbents
[+] ninth_ant|2 years ago|reply
Can someone explain why this is such a big deal to some people? I legitimately don’t understand why this matters.

Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software.

I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users.

To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.

[+] Macha|2 years ago|reply
The first party clients are undergoing the enshittification process

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

They would rather direct users to content that Reddit wants them to see. High engagement content like quick meme pics, short videos or polarised political content that generates time on site and activity that looks good to investors. Profitable content like the awards programs. Not externally hosted content where the ad revenue might be going to YouTube or journalists rather than Reddit. Not comments discussions where a user might spend time reading rather than generating new page views.

This might be fine with you if you see Reddit as "that site for the memes", but for a lot of users, especially veteran users, it replaced forums and other sites for discussing hobbies or other content, and that content is both harder to enjoy as the official apps push you towards what Reddit would rather you see, and drowned out by the more casual content.

In addition, for many people, they would like an efficient experience where they can select what they want to dig deeper into and then get off the site, while Reddit would rather you doomscrolled for longer to improve their metrics at the expense of the user's time.

So it's been very clear for a while that Reddit's first party UX design does not gel with the aims of these groups, which, being veteran users and therefore having more time to get used to the site, are over represented amongst those creating content or in roles like moderation. And this has been mostly fine with these groups as long as they can just go to the refuges of third party apps, old.reddit and compact reddit and ignore Reddit's trend chasing. But compact is gone, third party apps are going, and it's hard not to extrapolate that to old.reddit.

[+] bastawhiz|2 years ago|reply
Imagine if Google started charging for POP3 and IMAP access. Either use the official Gmail clients or pay ridiculous client costs.

Sure, there's no inherent right to free third party client access. And you can obviously switch to any service you want, or start your own. The point is that Reddit is taking away features and workflows from users which have been available for longer than most users have been on the service. Moreover, the cost is specifically being put on clients rather than users: you can't pay for Reddit through your favorite client, the client itself is being forced to pay.

If you've been using Gmail with Thunderbird exclusively for the last decade, and Mozilla is suddenly faced with paying a billion dollar API bill or shut down Gmail access, imagine how shitty that situation is for the end user.

[+] patrickmay|2 years ago|reply
I'm an Apollo user and I'll be dramatically reducing my use of Reddit if and when the third party apps are killed. The official Reddit app is nearly unusable, with a remarkably poor UI and too many ads. It also doesn't offer the tools for subreddit moderators that third party apps do.

The hope is that, despite being a small percentage of total users, third party app users represent a large volume moderators and high value contributors. If that's the case, this change will hurt Reddit enough to potentially roll it back.

What will probably happen is Reddit will tell us all to pound sand and we'll find alternatives.

[+] spurgu|2 years ago|reply
The native apps and website are horrible for a number of reasons. I definitely wouldn't touch Reddit with a ten foot pole if 3rd-party apps and old.reddit.com went away.

I'd say people using the native apps are generally unaware that there's even an alternative. This whole shebacle will - if nothing else - change that to some degree.

Curious, have you always just used the native app/website and never tried 3rd party clients?

[+] xigoi|2 years ago|reply
For years, third-party apps were the only apps and some of them were really great. Then Reddit introduced the official app, which is inferior in every way, and now it wants to forbid the other ones.
[+] RheingoldRiver|2 years ago|reply
> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage

The question is: Who is using these clients, specifically?

1. Visually impaired people. The official reddit app has terrible screenreader support

2. The longest-term & most dedicated users to the site, who are responsible for the content that everyone else uses & who want a) ad-free browsing; and b) a better experience than the official app, which sucks

3. Moderators who require better functionality on mobile than what the official app gives

These are all communities that matter a lot, even if it's a small % of users.

[+] HWR_14|2 years ago|reply
A lot of power users use third party software that offers extra features (or just a UI they are familiar with). Mods of popular subreddits are power users and friends with other power users. So mods or people they associate with use third party apps far more than average users. If the numbers are small, they are concentrated among people who have a lot of reach on the platform.

It's similar to how Twitter shut down several tools only used by power-users to force a small number of people into using their first party app.

Obviously, Twitter/Reddit wants the revenue associated with supplying the app. But it's not clear if it will be worth pissing off their user base.

[+] liotier|2 years ago|reply
> Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage

Reddit's "new" UX is so dismal that they keep "Old Reddit" alive so that they don't lose their mature users en masse. On mobile, I would not even try to wrestle with Reddit's own - I depend entirely on the "Reddit is fun" Android third party client.

[+] tgsovlerkhgsel|2 years ago|reply
- Moderators use the poweruser tools in the third party clients

- I'm not sure how niche third party clients really are. Reddit started as a community of tech-savvy users who would not put up with the crap the official site/app is doing. There's probably a reason why reddit kept old.reddit.com online for so long.

[+] zouhair|2 years ago|reply
You already got good responses. I will add something many don't bring up in here: The death of bots.

Bots are a huge part of what makes Reddit decent. This API change will kill them all.

[+] stefandesu|2 years ago|reply
> small number of third party client users

I feel like that number is not that small. Apollo for iOS (which is not only a fantastic Reddit client, but an exceptional example of a great iOS app in general) has about 1.5 million monthly active users. And that's only a single client.

As you can see in your replies and in many posts on Reddit, people using these third party clients (which are soooo much better than the first party clients) are likely to dramatically reduce their usage without it or even stop completely.

[+] Hemospectrum|2 years ago|reply
If this change makes moderation more difficult, it negatively impacts all users of the site.
[+] abhayhegde|2 years ago|reply
I'm perplexed as to what to support here. For someone like me who brazenly hates Instagram, FB, Snapchat kinds of social media, Reddit is a gold mine of wisdom, advice, and content, if used appropriately. And the best way to use it was through third-party apps like Relay, Apollo etc.

The eventual loss of better user experience is saddening, but I'm not sure I fall into the category of not using it at all, because it's where I learn about a lot of useful stuff on life, personal finance, frugalism, unfiltered review of a product I haven't used yet etc. I hope this decision doesn't break the site.

[+] dt3ft|2 years ago|reply
I started to build an alternative: https://flingup.com

It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.

[+] awesome_dude|2 years ago|reply
The API arguments are interesting from another point of view - who really owns the content generated on a site like Reddit, Twitter, or Hacker News.

Once I send this post out, do I own it? Can I claim some sort of compensation for my comment being used in an AI training set?

Does HN (or whichever site I post the comment on) own the comment, and therefore should be compensated for the comment's use in said training set?

Do we both own the comment, and both have rights to its use?

[+] appleaday1|2 years ago|reply
The mobile reddit site is so bad, it is basically unusable and they tell you to get the app. I personally don't even prefer Reddit mobile, I use Apollo if I have to moderate on the go, and it's really good for moderation I haven't used the Reddits mobile app for moderation but I remember when I did that it was terrible.
[+] samtho|2 years ago|reply
I understand the purpose of this and that if they raise a sufficient enough stink, it will likely get them to cave for the time being.

However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduction but overall, the writing is on the wall: Reddits corporate priorities are no longer aligned with the community’s.

[+] ryandrake|2 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how a "one-day anything" is supposed to get anyone to cave. This seems like those performative one-day big-tech "walkouts" where it's just people waving signs over an extended lunch break and then getting right back to work as usual. How does that practically have any effect?

"Go dark indefinitely until change happens" might get someone's attention. This is barely a blip on the radar, and even if there's a minor revenue impact, Reddit knows it'll be over in a day so they can obviously weather it.

[+] suddenclarity|2 years ago|reply
If Reddit caves, it just gives mods more power and they'll use that for any future change or nonechange. What will it be next week? Force Reddit to shut down all subs that these power mods dislike?
[+] croes|2 years ago|reply
Investors hate a shrinking user base, so this move can massively backfire.
[+] rilindo|2 years ago|reply
I wish Usenet becomes popular again.
[+] add-sub-mul-div|2 years ago|reply
The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale.

Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance.

I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing their future for short term gain. It's the only path to being eventually rid of them.

And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.

[+] tomatotomato37|2 years ago|reply
I'm curious how the logistics of this strike are going to happen. With the old reddit themes you could just put a black everything over with squares in CSS but the new themes are so uncustomizable (especially in the app) that your average mass consumer may not even notice. In addition, anti-spam/anti-bandwagoning measures may be leveraged by reddit to censor protestors in the subreddits, along with banning of "malicious" moderators who attempt to enforce the strike on the most popular of the subreddits. While that would obviously degrade the moderation of those subreddits the sheer inertia of the communities will result in the consuming masses thinking everything is working as usual
[+] bezier-curve|2 years ago|reply
Mods can set the subreddit to private.
[+] dom96|2 years ago|reply
I've been following this since it erupted and am currently developing something that I hope will either enable the Reddit community to transition to a new home or force Reddit to abandon its paid API plans.

The first step in my plan is to implement a read-only API proxy which does not use Reddit.com's API but instead scrapes the necessary data. This should cover 80% of the API traffic, if it works then third-party apps will be able to transition their apps to this new API. So if Reddit does put their API behind a paywall there will be a way for developers to avoid at least some of the ludicrous costs.

I already have next steps in mind, but they really depend on what Reddit does. I sincerely hope they reassess what they are doing with their API.

[+] fluidcruft|2 years ago|reply
Doesn't reddit's website use an API? It's new.reddit.com seems like some single page app bullshit, right?

The real problem you will run into though is that Reddit will restrict what you can access without login. They already tried to flip the switch once on requiring login to access NSFW content, and had to backtrack at least temporarily. I'm not exactly sure why they had to, but supposedly they have now added some missing feature to their web version that allows upload of NSFW content on desktop, so maybe they're ready to unpause. And the official API will block NSFW so I think that's returning. And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.

[+] rekoil|2 years ago|reply
Why not just impersonate the official mobile app and use its API?
[+] Ekaros|2 years ago|reply
They will be back. I don't think they will stick to their guns.

They should step up their game if they really want to voice it. Delete all the posts and the accounts. Then if decision is reversed come back with new account.

[+] MisterBastahrd|2 years ago|reply
What is a one day strike going to accomplish?

You want to strike? You strike until there is a real financial harm to the company and shit gets changed. Otherwise, keep your useless opinions to yourselves.

[+] s1k3s|2 years ago|reply
I know I'm not contributing to the conversation, but this is really funny.
[+] throw-4e451c8|2 years ago|reply
I agree. Please let Reddit die already.

Just before I stopped using, some stranger messaged me (in the same language) and offered to sell me video sex with a young person.

Reddit has become a prostitution platform.

[+] seydor|2 years ago|reply
I see this as a grand opportunity to start new subreddits. It's been decades that the biggest subreddits are being ran by the same aging small group of moderators. The new ones may not be better over time, but it's worth giving it a try.

There's nothing wrong with reddit finally being a bit more serious about their content which is awesome compared to a lot of what is today's internet.

Maybe if they focus on making money they 'll stop their childish grandstanding and culture war