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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   39409 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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25/70 subreddits I follow will be going dark, although I might have missed some if they didn't have a message stickied while I was checking just now. None of the subreddits that aren't going dark left an actual stickied message saying they won't go dark when I checked. I didn't keep a count, but I think the subreddits that are going dark are very disproportionately the most active subreddits/the subreddits with lots of discussion going on and not just funny videos.

I agree that if Reddit doesn't reverse course, it'll be more Tiktokification. I'm sure that even if any subreddits I follow shut down permanently, someone will eventually make a replacement, and I think most regular users will follow. But I think you might very well see a lot of power users who mod and are the most important members of subreddits quitting. I see a lot of people making fun of mods and say that they'll never quit modding because it's the only power they have in life and they love abusing it, and while I'm sure that is actually true for some mods, there are a lot who only do it because they're passionate about the community. And if Reddit creates enough friction by getting rid of the best mod tools, and make the mods feel like there is 0 appreciation for their labour, a lot will just straight up quit and take a sizeable chunk of value with them. Power users are rare. A post can easily receive 10x as many views as upvotes, and 10x as many upvotes as comments, and 10x as many comments total as there are actually serious comments that add value with an original joke or analysis instead of a repetitive joke or pot shot at someone they don't like. And I would guess a similar pattern holds for there being 10x as many serious commenters as there being power users who'd make good mods. I think losing 10% of power users and making the burden heavier for the rest of the power users can legitimately make Reddit use a lot of value.

Also, I am very sympathetic to Reddit's need to make money and how difficult it is to make a free app supported by ads actually profitable. But what ultimately kills my sympathy for them in this case is their terrible communication to apps like Apollo and refusal to admit any wrong doing. Like this comment from the recent AMA: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk45rr/?context=10000 Apparently Spez thinks Apollo's dev has been saying different things publicly and privately. But Spez has no actual examples of that happening, and instead is just baselessly attacking the dev he's putting out of a job.

If I was a reddit executive, I'd have just caved and bought Apollo or another third party and made it an alternative official app. Since I think half the opposition from redditors isn't any real principled support for developers but rather anger that they're losing features they've enjoyed for years.

Isn't the whole concern that they'd have to monetize the app? Seems like that would involve putting in advertisements, inserting massive telemetry, perhaps gutting the UI, etc.

Do you really need telemetry? You are already logged in to reddit and reddit knows which posts you are opening etc.

I don't know about Apollo but RIF shows ads already in the free version.

Figuring out a monetization strategy for reddit is a separate discussion, buying out a third party app is just to avoid losing lots of users. If they paid the dev of Apollo a couple million I bet that’d have cost less than this fiasco. It wasn’t intended as blackmail like Spez thought, but that’s basically what it ended up being, and it cost Reddit a lot.

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