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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   1823 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 2, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Reddit is beginning to truly shoot itself in the foot. A new policy of charging for API calls of $12,000 for 50 million calls is going to kill 3rd-party developers who have developed lightweight apps that are superior to Reddits own awful app. Reddit is Fun is the app I've used for practically a decade, and Reddit itself has become one of the most important depositories for human knowledge online - how many of us have resorted to "product + reddit" or "problem + reddit" as a method of locating and finding specified information?

All of this seems to be to push reddit towards an IPO and to increase revenues (Especially for a company which has never made money), but I have a feeling their push for revenues will come at the cost of community it has been able to foster. Why reddit even wants to be a profitable company is beyond me - why not just become a nonprofit?

Anyways, I think this will cause a ton of people to leave reddit, or at least cause a lot of grumbling and virtue signaling about going to leave reddit. I haven't used Facebook significantly since the 2016 election, maybe people will flock back there.

I know when the 3rd party apps die (I wonder if that includes RES) I'll probably no longer go on reddit myself.

but I have a feeling their push for revenues will come at the cost of community it has been able to foster

If this contextless, scale-less graph is in any way representative of the situation, maybe not. The problem with this graph is that long-form comments are what makes up the backbone of why people come to the site, but most people are already using New Reddit for that and, even though it's absolute garbage in terms of user experience, is clearly the accepted solution.

And the website isn't itself changing; so while they might actually kill Old Reddit because that's what's getting scraped once they destroy the API (for load reasons, obviously- it doesn't even need JavaScript to work), most people don't even know it exists. So perhaps it's a gamble (or they're not paying attention) that the people using Old Reddit don't have an outsized contribution to the content other users are consuming on iOS.

Why reddit even wants to be a profitable company is beyond me - why not just become a nonprofit?

(Reddit is, de facto a non-profit company.)

Because that course of action is inconsistent with Bay Area values. So is formally acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that investors continue to fund the site because it pushes a particular political agenda, for that matter.

I'll probably no longer go on reddit myself

I'm going to 4chan. Sure, that means conversations are ephemeral and unsearchable, but the same thing is mostly true for Reddit and completely true for IRC Discord.

I have RedditIsFun, but never used it on mobile much myself. I guess I won't at all after this API charging thing goes out. I'm more into desktop, using old.reddit.com. If they ever turn that off, then I'll probably be gone for good.

So is formally acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that investors continue to fund the site because it pushes a particular political agenda, for that matter.

I look at the list of investors into Reddit, and I don't see the list being particularly woke. Reddit moderation does push a political angle, but what evidence do we have this is done because of the investor pressure?

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