he seems really on defensive
Wow, his answers and arguments are really bad. Doesn’t acknowledge that AI scrapers abused their system, not apps to access and interact with Reddit. Practically says they will imitate Apollo. Admits that they unreasonable timeline was a way to coerce deals.
Wow. Dug in and desperate. That’s how it reads to me.
I appreciate that he apologized for framing this crisis as he has just let free API’s run for years, but he and they are really doing a horrible job of rectifying the community outrage. He didn’t answer the question about thr LLM’s, which feel like more of the root of the API issue. He’s acting like a child in a spat with Christian about Apollo. The deflection is painful to read when it comes to the IPO. Finally the time extension reads like a whine about other companies and his bad decision, rather than an answer why they cannot just incrementally phase this in, or postpone it, or something more tenable.
He does seem very defensive, and aggressive. Reddit is all his data he owns so we’re the leaches who just don’t want to pay, he has been so magnanimous to allow us to waste his money all these years with our stupid API calls. It’s amazing they let this guy be the CEO, it’s like he wants to piss people off at this point. Reddit IPO has broken his brain. I was ready to start paying Reddit to keep using RiF when this started, now here I am free from that shitshow forever and ready to spend that money supporting the growth of Lemmy. Incredible leadership from spez.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but the whole “Apollo is a leach who adds no value” is fucking weird. Wouldn’t an alternative and extremely popular app be a huge advantage if you charge reasonably for it? Or even just buying out the app like they did with alien blue??? Makes no damn business sense to me to piss off your users on purpose
From https://www.redditinc.com/blog/https-www.redditinc.com-apifacts:
As of now, more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities (by DAU) are open
The 48 hour blackout that was popularized was a complete joke and reminds me of all the corporations that change their social media pictures to pride-themed photos for like 2 days then revert back to not caring at all. Reddit literally did not give two shits about 2 days of ad revenue being gone because they knew it would be back to normal before most people even noticed.
Once July 1st starts a lot of redditors will move to lemmy or other sites because of the third party apps no longer available. Corporate greed practices should die. Also I won’t be surprise that reddit will add more bots in the comments.
Yeah, but I feel like Reddit has become the next Facebook. The young and techy crowd started using it first, and eventually boomers and non-techy people started using it. I would bet that the better majority of users don’t care about any of the issues that are going on. They just want the content.
Now hopefully, the primary submitters of the content leave and Reddit’s decline comes from a shitty userbase that doesn’t actually contribute anything. But that’s gonna take time.
Yes, tech-savy and high-literacy people are always the first to move when things go down the drain, I think those are the ones providing the most valuable content, the masses follow but that requires quite some time as you rightfully said.
It could even take longer for reddit masses to realize something has changed, if we consider reddit is full of reposting bots, there’s so much content in there that they could go on for years before content “consumers” realize there’s nothing worthy anymore.
Also I won’t be surprise that reddit will add more bots in the comments.
Without an open API, there’s no way to verify exactly how many “meatspace” users there are on reddit. This is a key piece of information to hold that, say, facebook has always held close to their chest.
Advertisers ultimately pay for “impressions”, and that number can be ofuscated and inflated (ie counting bots) to entice advertisers and IPO investors to continue to invest.
Turning off the API is turning off active user verification.
deleted by creator
You can already use Revanced to strip the ads and suggestions out of the official app. It still sucks shit compared to most every 3rd party app.
I think the reported number was like ≈10% use third party apps.
The real question is how much of the best content came from those users, how many of them are moderators, and how many will leave. Bc those people will have an outsized impact on the website.
With the first blackout, any user who didn’t bother to change remained on reddit. With July first, those on 3. Party Apps will be gone unless they actively surrender by switching to the official app.
U/Spez might think a majority uses the official app and that nothing is lost on 3. Party users who won’t generate ad revenue anyway. However those users are probably the content creators that make the website worth a visit for all the “normies” that use the official app and costume ads
idk, I think a few definitely will, however I think it will be like Netflix where people accept it until lemmy/kbin/fediverse as better options all together.
The problem with this is that Reddit, unlike Netflix, is a social media thing.
And there are two very different ways of looking at the ‘value’ of social media systems.
The first, and most common, is simply stating that the value is based on how many people are using it. The more people use it, the more valuable it is, and so first mover advantage is almost impossible to overcome.
Except… That doesn’t really match reality, social media companies die, or stop being nearly as popular. Even ones that used to be wildly popular.
The big key is that not all users are equally valuable. You want to be involved in a network with people that you find interesting. Even if you never even post, you want to view media that you find interesting.
For memes, you want to meme with other people who appreciate what you create, and who create vaguely similar works.
For conversations, you want to have them with people that have something that you find interesting to say.
On any metric which is just about ‘how many users’, the loss of third party clients, even if it causes the loss of every single user of those clients, is a very tiny drop in the bucket.
The problem is that many of these users are very likely to be important users. They are the people who give enough of a damn about their experience to go looking for a ‘better’ interface, and giving a damn sure looks to me like a good indicator of caring enough to contribute in a meaningful way.
Same deal on moderators, all of Reddit absolutely relies on moderators, unpaid moderators, and those are the people who both really give a damn, and who have been quite outspoken about absolutely needing better tooling than what Reddit natively provides.
If enough of those ‘high value’ users leave, the value of Reddit to almost everyone else drops through the floor.
It doesn’t go to zero, but it does make it much more likely that other users, the ones that maybe don’t post a lot, but who do view a lot, will follow them.
And those users are the ones that view a lot of ads, and thus fund the whole thing.
You simply don’t get this effect with something like Netflix, because the value of Netflix is what movies and shows they have, not what other users they have.
are you aloud to comment. many subreddits took that off. for me i’m still on reddit but only using RES. no more mobile. once old reddit is dead then usage will drop more
Damn, he really thinks our posts are his. I didn’t delete my posts or account for the sake of information and google search but that article changed my mind real quick.
I think there’s no turning back from what was put in motion with #redditmigration they just handed tens of thousands of users to the threadiverse. Many will stay and help this improve and grow
