Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually.
Aside from this move that is an obvious way to steer user toward the official app and have tighter control, the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit [1].
Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).
Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.
> the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit
For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out, so that's very on brand?
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
>Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually.
If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.
So far…
- PaLM
- GPT3
- Falcon
Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.
But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.
When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins not do it now if it worked then.
Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs.
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
I wouldn't be surprised if they try to stop this protest by allocating a large block of IPO shares to moderators. As they should given how much moderators contribute to their success.
That's part of a whole program; while reddit lets many mods work for free they are paying these "mods" $20/hour to "organically" drum up subscribers on non-US subs. I shared some links about this a few months ago:
I moderate a reasonably sized community (50k - 100k users). Without using an external app like Sync or Apollo, it is insanely hard. Their own app is so clunky: sometimes it just fails to load posts or the feed. At times the video doesn't load - instead showing a screengrab. The worst offender is that sometimes the UI shows moderator controls for even some communities one doesn't moderate (This is a known bug going on for several months in the official Reddit app and the admins/devs acknowledge it). You have to go about closing the app and clearing the cache. For e.g., here's a screenshot, which shows a warplane subreddit that I don't manage (having mod controls):
Keeping third party apps open for Premium users is one way out. Another alternative would be to keep API costs low enough that developers can reasonably pass that cost to subscription users. But the current state would just lead to massive disruption. They will end up killing the golden goose.
Honestly, hearing that killing off third party apps will make moderators have to work harder to do the damage that they do to reddit is the first positive thing I've heard about this API change.
It's interesting to watch Reddit lose control of the narrative on this. If you read the relevant threads Reddit admins swear up and down that the new API pricing is reasonable and not intended to kill third party apps.
Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the tracking in the official app vs third party apps.
I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if Infinity goes away.
I think it's very clear that the recent LLM boom is directly responsible for Twitter, Reddit, and others quickly moving to restricted APIs with exorbitant pricing structures. I don't think these orgs really care much about third-party clients other than a nuisance consuming some fraction of their userbase.
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
While there is much talk of protest, nobody in a position of power (like those organizing protests in various subreddits) seems to be offering a diaspora option. The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what they want.
I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.
I hate that it seems every community seems to start on Discord nowadays. That being said, is this not just a huge gift for Discord to eat Reddit up? A huge portion of Reddit users are millenial gamers and likely have Discord installed already.
Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way better.
I've seen the suggestion "why not let Reddit Premium subscribers access Reddit through third party apps" which seems like a fair compromise - Reddit gets cash in exchange for not being able to serve ads at that particular user.
That's very reasonable actually. Pay for the product or be the product, whatever suits you.
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
You can create a reddit account without giving out email but when payments come into picture you are not anonymous anymore.This will limit anonymous or throwaway accounts to official apps which again have tons of tracking.
I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
I've often wished for this (a system where some users pay to circumvent tracking/ads, others get the "general experience"). One theory I've heard as to why companies don't go for this idea is that the paying users are the ones that that are valuable to advertisers, because they are actually willing to pay money, vs. the free users who would be endlessly mined for little gain.
You wanna know the secret to significantly raising API rates without complaints?
You raise rates to a ridiculous number, drag out negotiations with devs and let them drop the news to their users, wait a bit for the revolts and news stories to happen, then make a press release saying "our bad, we love you guys so much, we 'found' a way to get our API prices down".
After all of that, API prices are still higher than reasonable, but all the users and devs are all happy and news stories go out saying how the users and devs won and got a better deal. All while you got the price increases that you wanted.
Honestly, I'd take this, because I think the far more likely scenario is that they just ignore all of this brouhaha and aren't seriously impacted as a result.
I've been using old.reddit.com for years, nice and snappy (enough) website and easy to navigate.
Similarly I use Baconreader on my phone which is also pretty great.
I've never seen a compelling reason to use "new" reddit or the official reddit app. If they want to kill third party apps then they need to make their own offering much better, which I highly doubt will ever happen.
They haven't backtracked yet, but: a common strategy these days is to push an extreme thing, get people heated, then adjust to the thing they wanted to push in the first place so that it sounds reasonable and acceptable.
Ex: I have a product, it costs me $1 to make. I want to sell it for $10, so there's a nice profit margin. People will balk because they think it's worth $8, or once I announce any pricing they will protest and try to talk it down. So I announce it'll cost $100. That's exorbitant! Rage rage anger anger etc, then I'm like... does $10 sound reasonable? Oh wow you came down 90% that's really good sure I won't complain about that you are so good to us.
I wonder if Reddit tried this before with e.g. the previous content crackdown; they wanted to crack down to the point where the site would become ready for IPO (mainly get rid of porn), but they knew they'd suddenly lose two thirds of their engagement. They went for small steps then; remove hate subreddits (surely you cannot object to removing racism?? Oh right free speech), then remove porn from r/all, then remove porn from the API / 3rd party apps, before it gets removed entirely.
Another comparison: Trump. Put a far-right nutjob in the forefront, have him come out with some really racist and offensive shit every day, so that the more moderate but mainstream right-wingers get to put in a little racism.
Another stupid comparison: the Sonic movie. They did the first design badly on purpose, because it made people talk about and meme the Sonic movie for weeks on end. Then they did a redemption by changing the design to what they intended in the first place.
As a side note, I remember the days when Reddit had to beg the community to bail them out as they were at risk of being canned from their corporate owner's disinterest: https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/reddit-gold/
By all accounts, it was very successful and saved the site, also leaving them resourced enough (including in hardware resources) to embrace the userbase from the imploding digg.
I think it's clear Reddit's current leadership have forgotten how the userbase stepped in for them in the past.
I'm sure we have our fair share of reddit mods here on HN, so apologies for rehashing what I'm sure plenty already know. But I've been chatting a lot with other mods on discord as we get this effort organized, and the general consensus is "reddit has definitely been very generous with their API up to this point and it's totally reasonable of them to charge now, but the price is wildly out of line with everyone else."
I say this because the reddit admins keeps trying to hyper focus on things like "Apollo is inefficient" (it is) or "bots will still work" and other secondary concerns in an effort to avoid the very simple issue: their cost is exhorbitant and no amount of vague "we will adjust based on usage" and "non-commercial tools will be fine" comments are going to assuage our fears.
A quick story: a mod from /r/blind told us all about how heavily they depend on 3rd party tools just to be able to do basic moderation. Despite reddit having an app for seven years they still do not even remotely adequately cover the needs of the visually impaired/blind/etc. The mod said several members who are completely VI will have to step down under the new changes because the app is unusable for them in its current state. Why should they trust reddit will suddenly fix it if they've largely ignored their tickets for 7 years? Why should any of us believe any of their vague promises when this has occurred over and over again? Mods/users get angry, reddit says "we hear you," and everyone calms down.
They're panicking at this point because frankly they know we're too cynical/skeptical for their "trust us" spiel and we actually care about this. I know I am probably coming off as over-dramatic here - reddit is not the center of the universe - but this stuff does matter in my opinion. And I am for one am glad to be participating in this blackout.
There will always be tension with an interface for a freemium product since it’s bad on purpose. The Apollo interface is better for the consumer, but worse for Reddit. Their interests are not aligned. Even if Reddit were to purchase Apollo they’d never reskin Reddit since the UX does what it needs to do.
I just killed Reddit off my home screen after a decade of usage because of a totally different bullshit growth hacking thing - they have started injecting their “recommended” subreddits into my swipe stream.
I have thumbs downed every single recommendation they’ve ever put in my scrolling feed, and now am being forced to consume absolutely random subreddits that their models have decided I’m super interested in because at some point in the last ten years I clicked through an r/bestof link.
Inspired by this whole upfuckery by Reddit, I checked out a lemmy instance sopuli.xyz. It looks quite good actually, and I'm interested in starting to contribute to the discussion there rather than staying in Reddit. For more instances check out https://join-lemmy.org/instances.
[+] [-] maeln|2 years ago|reply
Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).
Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...
[+] [-] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply
For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
[+] [-] w-m|2 years ago|reply
On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
[+] [-] itsoktocry|2 years ago|reply
If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.
Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
[+] [-] jollofricepeas|2 years ago|reply
Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.
So far…
- PaLM
- GPT3
- Falcon
Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.
But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.
Source:
https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon
[+] [-] web3-is-a-scam|2 years ago|reply
When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
[+] [-] pixl97|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamacyborg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koyote|2 years ago|reply
I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.
Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.
[+] [-] intrasight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Bystander22|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478
[+] [-] roflyear|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmcer|2 years ago|reply
Sucks.
[+] [-] anlaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srvmshr|2 years ago|reply
https://imgur.io/a/4yOY4Vo
Keeping third party apps open for Premium users is one way out. Another alternative would be to keep API costs low enough that developers can reasonably pass that cost to subscription users. But the current state would just lead to massive disruption. They will end up killing the golden goose.
[+] [-] kwanbix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moneywoes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PrimeMcFly|2 years ago|reply
Very doable on desktop with RES though, which so far isn't going to be affected by the API pricing changes.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|2 years ago|reply
Whatever their intent, it's definitely a failure on the PR front.
[+] [-] quaffapint|2 years ago|reply
I was noticing a LOT of tracker dns queries in my pi-hole. It wasn't an obvious name (like having reddit in it). Speaking to a co-worker they happened to notice the same thing. Searching online allowed me to track it down to the official reddit app. I uninstalled it from my android phone and installed the Infinity app instead and I could still access reddit just fine and no more tracker queries. I will not be installing the official app if Infinity goes away.
[+] [-] 58x14|2 years ago|reply
Enterprise deals between these user generated content platforms and LLM platforms may well involve many billions of API requests, and the pricing is likely an order of magnitude less expensive per call due to the volume. The result is a cost-per-call that is cost-prohibitive at smaller scales, and undoubtedly the UGC platform operators are aware that they're pricing out third-party applications like Apollo and Pushshift. These operators need high baseline pricing so they can discount in negotiation with LLM clients.
Or, perhaps, it's the opposite: for instance, Reddit could be developing its own first-party language model, and any other model with access to semi-realtime data is a potentially existential competitor. The best strategic route is to make it economically infeasible for some hypothetical competitor to arise, while still generating revenue from clients willing to pay these much higher rates.
Ultimately, this seems to be playing out as the endgame of the open internet v. corporate consolidation, and while it's unclear who's winning, I think it's pretty obvious that most of us are losing.
(my comment on this topic from another thread)
[+] [-] tetrep|2 years ago|reply
I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.
[+] [-] Capricorn2481|2 years ago|reply
Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way better.
[+] [-] dataengineer56|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|2 years ago|reply
I'm curious how the laud power users would react to this though. I suspect they won't like it because it's not the same as using the product on VCs dime.
The good old internet that we all love and adore was built on VC money or creative people's content. Unfortunately, the VCs are not into philanthropy but in money making and the creative people need to be compensated too, so this can't last.
I really really hope that we can leave this behind and have good quality paid platforms as standart. Paying through extra steps(advertisement) or paying through political power transfer(free curated content with agenda) is bad for the society.
[+] [-] teeray|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devsda|2 years ago|reply
I hope they also figure out a way to use apps while preserving the anonymity like revenue sharing or ads etc.
[+] [-] olivierestsage|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politelemon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goda90|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingledork69|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asciimov|2 years ago|reply
You raise rates to a ridiculous number, drag out negotiations with devs and let them drop the news to their users, wait a bit for the revolts and news stories to happen, then make a press release saying "our bad, we love you guys so much, we 'found' a way to get our API prices down".
After all of that, API prices are still higher than reasonable, but all the users and devs are all happy and news stories go out saying how the users and devs won and got a better deal. All while you got the price increases that you wanted.
[+] [-] DamnInteresting|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brendinooo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] say_it_as_it_is|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shostack|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|2 years ago|reply
Similarly I use Baconreader on my phone which is also pretty great.
I've never seen a compelling reason to use "new" reddit or the official reddit app. If they want to kill third party apps then they need to make their own offering much better, which I highly doubt will ever happen.
[+] [-] lvl102|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quikoa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NotYourLawyer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
Ex: I have a product, it costs me $1 to make. I want to sell it for $10, so there's a nice profit margin. People will balk because they think it's worth $8, or once I announce any pricing they will protest and try to talk it down. So I announce it'll cost $100. That's exorbitant! Rage rage anger anger etc, then I'm like... does $10 sound reasonable? Oh wow you came down 90% that's really good sure I won't complain about that you are so good to us.
I wonder if Reddit tried this before with e.g. the previous content crackdown; they wanted to crack down to the point where the site would become ready for IPO (mainly get rid of porn), but they knew they'd suddenly lose two thirds of their engagement. They went for small steps then; remove hate subreddits (surely you cannot object to removing racism?? Oh right free speech), then remove porn from r/all, then remove porn from the API / 3rd party apps, before it gets removed entirely.
Another comparison: Trump. Put a far-right nutjob in the forefront, have him come out with some really racist and offensive shit every day, so that the more moderate but mainstream right-wingers get to put in a little racism.
Another stupid comparison: the Sonic movie. They did the first design badly on purpose, because it made people talk about and meme the Sonic movie for weeks on end. Then they did a redemption by changing the design to what they intended in the first place.
[+] [-] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply
> Right now I have no idea if I should continue to work on Sync but as a subscription only app or throw in the towel
> A subscription + incomplete experience (NSFW etc) to me just doesn't sound like a good deal for you guys
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/142dzy8/the_fut...
[+] [-] Macha|2 years ago|reply
By all accounts, it was very successful and saved the site, also leaving them resourced enough (including in hardware resources) to embrace the userbase from the imploding digg.
I think it's clear Reddit's current leadership have forgotten how the userbase stepped in for them in the past.
[+] [-] Euphorbium|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Forgeties79|2 years ago|reply
I say this because the reddit admins keeps trying to hyper focus on things like "Apollo is inefficient" (it is) or "bots will still work" and other secondary concerns in an effort to avoid the very simple issue: their cost is exhorbitant and no amount of vague "we will adjust based on usage" and "non-commercial tools will be fine" comments are going to assuage our fears.
A quick story: a mod from /r/blind told us all about how heavily they depend on 3rd party tools just to be able to do basic moderation. Despite reddit having an app for seven years they still do not even remotely adequately cover the needs of the visually impaired/blind/etc. The mod said several members who are completely VI will have to step down under the new changes because the app is unusable for them in its current state. Why should they trust reddit will suddenly fix it if they've largely ignored their tickets for 7 years? Why should any of us believe any of their vague promises when this has occurred over and over again? Mods/users get angry, reddit says "we hear you," and everyone calms down.
They're panicking at this point because frankly they know we're too cynical/skeptical for their "trust us" spiel and we actually care about this. I know I am probably coming off as over-dramatic here - reddit is not the center of the universe - but this stuff does matter in my opinion. And I am for one am glad to be participating in this blackout.
[+] [-] jwie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaosphere2112|2 years ago|reply
I have thumbs downed every single recommendation they’ve ever put in my scrolling feed, and now am being forced to consume absolutely random subreddits that their models have decided I’m super interested in because at some point in the last ten years I clicked through an r/bestof link.
Sigh. Now I need to actually figure out Mastodon.
[+] [-] karmakurtisaani|2 years ago|reply