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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38163 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Following up from my Reddit API post from last week, Spez (aka Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO) hosted a disastrous AMA yesterday clarifying on the updated terms of API access. Which means, starting from July the 1st, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app). They "promised" to talk with Pushshift to restore access to verified moderators, allow API access for bots and developers, third party apps, etc. However, apps like Appollo have announced that they aren't happy with the pricing and won't continue to operate anymore because doing so would now cost them $20 million. In reference to this, Steve replied to one of the comments, only to be exposed by Christian Selig (aka iamthatis), Appollo CEO:

Spez: His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.

iamthatis: Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.

It turned out to be a bigger disaster than I'd anticipated. No one's buying the profitability claims, because most of this labour is carried out by unpaid volunteers and dedicated users for free. No access to pushshift means harder time for mods and academics who rely on it, as noted by user SarahAGilbert here. Over 3000 subreddits, including the big ones like r/videos, r/music, r/gaming and r/pics, are going on blackout. Some of them, indefinitely. Probably the largest blackout reddit will ever see. Boy am I glad TheMotte moved offsite.

This is why relying on APIs for business model is always risky. Same for Apple app store. you are at the mercy of these companies. no diversification.

I don't understand why the third party apps are shutting down instead charging a subscription fee to cover the API costs.

Short notice is going to be a big factor. Imagine having less than 3 weeks to calculate out exactly how much you need to charge your users to be able to make the payments, accounting for the Apple/Google tax, implement and test all of the required functionality in the app, including however many new screens around creating and managing subscriptions, submit the updated app through app review, hope there aren't any major bugs, and get your accounting set up to collect these massive amounts of money and send most of it to Reddit, hopefully the payment and billing timelines line up well enough that you don't end up needing to float 8-figure sums for a month or two, hopefully you did the price calculations right too and don't end up owing Reddit an 8-figure sum more than you're collecting, by the way this is 10x to 100x more money flowing through your company than you ever had, do you have the right accountants for this, what are the tax implications, oh by the way these are mostly one-man operations so that's a hell of a lot to handle with no accountants or lawyers already on your payroll.

And if Reddit imposed all of this on you with such short notice, and doesn't seem to care much what effect it has on you, what might they do next week, next month? You're not a well-capitalized operation, can you handle the next time Reddit makes a snap decision changing your whole accounting structure by 2 orders of magnitude with less than a month to respond?

  1. Api is expensive

  2. Apple takes 30%

  3. You actually need to make some profit on top of that

So we are looking at something like 4$/Month to make sense. That is absurdly high.

Because that would never, ever work.

Nobody wants to pay for reddit.

Nobody wants to pay for reddit.

If only that were true.

The Apollo developer says that he would do that if he had three months to do it in and if the price were only half as large, but the one-month period that Reddit chose to provide is too short.

Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.

I still have no idea what exactly all the panic is about. Reddit is now going to charge third party apps for access? What does this mean and why is everyone losing their life over it? What is Apollo? What is Pushshift and why will sub-reddits close down if they can't use it?

There was always a charge for using Reddit's APIs above a certain rate. An individual toying around with a kiddie script was not going to hit it, but third-party apps (TPAs) like Apollo, RedditIsFun, and BaconReader have to pay for the number of API requests they're making. They're alternative ways to view Reddit and not owned by the company.

You have to understand, these apps are popular. People do not like the way the official Reddit app is built, as it promotes the infinite-scroll and hides ads as normal posts. There are also features in TPAs that are not present in the official app which make the experience better. An ad on RedditIsFun is not nearly as hidden, meaning you can avoid it. It also gives a better indication of how many "pages" you have scrolled, compared to the official experience.

In short, there are millions of users of these apps, many of whom do not like the official app for a variety of reasons.

Now, Reddit is coming down and saying that they will drastically increase the cost of using these apps to the owners. The creator of Apollo said he would be paying millions, and he can't afford that. Monetizing the app is always a risk as well, people are sufficiently turned away by even paying a penny. Apollo is notable for just how many mods use it, as it offers many features that making moderating easier.

This is just the outrage that got a lot of people upset en masse, the prior one was the Pushshift issue. Pushshift is an API that lets you search Reddit's comment and submission database. It was made for people to gather data via parameters (between dates, by a user, containing certain text, etc.) but is also very useful for mods to look up archived comments that were deleted by the user in case they need to take action. I can't stress enough just how valuable Pushshift is, it's the only way to search for comments with any reasonable power, Reddit's native search abilities don't let you do nearly as much.

Pushshift was taken down because they archived comments that were user-deleted and that was against Reddit's privacy terms. It will come back, but you have to be a mod of a subreddit now and you only get access to anything within the subreddit. No more doing broad searches as before.

This is a long-standing issue users and mods have had with Reddit - it is not responsive to their needs. They don't provide features people have been asking for for years, they remove or modify existing ones that people like, and increasingly made the end-user experience disrespectful.

The latest issue of increasing API charges is yet another thing that is entirely unnecessary, as Reddit in no way demonstrated that they were seriously being harmed by these TPAs or even by Pushshift. On the latter, it certainly didn't require taking the full thing down for everyone.

As for motive, people suspect that it's money. With the rise in demand for lots of data for training LLMs, Reddit has possibly realized that it can make a lot of money offering researchers the billions of comments people have made. In addition, there's the IPO coming up, and some speculate that this is an attempt to get more people seeing ads on the one official platform.

As much as I dislike Reddit's own apps myself, I understand their position. If Reddit has a large userbase whom they aren't making money off of because these users are using third-party apps that fuck up their monetization strategies, then I don't see how Reddit has any obligation to facilitate this kind of evasion. All they're saying is that if you want to do something that costs us money then at least reimburse us for the privilege. I understand the concerns of mods but this is a red herring for the overall argument, since most people making this argument aren't mods but merely want to use the argument to keep the status quo intact. If the mod thing was really the concern then a workaround similar to the Pushshift workaround should satisfy everybody, where mods get special access to use tool that help them moderate their subs only. But I doubt such a compromise would satisfy most people.

The problem is that the pricing is way beyond the cost of allowing TPAs. Here's the creator of Apollo explaining it:

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.

In other words, Reddit has to pay $0.12 per user per month, Apollo would be charged $2.50 per user per month.

The creator was willing to negotiate pricing, he believes like you do that Reddit should not sustain a loss with TPAs. But this is far beyond that in the opposite direction. What's worse is that the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it. There are ways Reddit could have monetized more of itself, but this was greedy.

the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it

Wait, this was the "recording and leaking a private phone call" complaint? It wasn't "private" in the sense of "I don't want to talk about it", it was "private" in the sense of "I want to talk slander about it and not be proven wrong"?

That's my understanding, yeah. Supposedly, Huffman is in Cali (which is a 2-party consent state), but the Apollo dev is in Canada which is 1-party.

Isn’t that Reddit’s argument. Are current revenue per user is way too low precisely because people use these APIs and therefore this is why we are doing it? Thus using historic rev per customer seems off unless I am missing something.

According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network. Some of that is attributable to the fact that the official Reddit app and New Reddit are designed for showing more ads and infinite scrolling. But people who use TPAs may sometimes use those because they dislike the focus on ads (the deceptiveness of hiding promoted posts is what really grinds my gears).

No one is saying that Reddit shouldn't try to stay in the black if it allows TPAs to exist. The complaint is the speed and absurd pricing of the new system.

According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network.

As far as headlines go, that's a great one lol

Pottery

The basics of the matter is that nearly no regular to heavy reddit users use the official reddit app because it's shite, and because it came after the unofficial ones. So reddit now wants to force everyone to use their shit app by pricing the alternatives off the internet.

The pushshift thing is a fight over automated moderation tools, apparently they'll break without API access or something and the concept of paying to moderate is too far for even reddit jannies.

The pushshift thing is a fight over automated moderation tools, apparently they'll break without API access or something and the concept of paying to moderate is too far for even reddit jannies.

Partly that, partly that pushshift also enables dataset creation (it was literally made for that purpose). You can very easily download comments in bulk, and Reddit may have deemed it a financial boon if they are able to price that in their favor.

So I am still not sure what to think about this in Schmittian terms. Will this hamper the power of jannies to continue to turn Reddit into a woke echochamber?

no, because this just affects apps

Will this hamper the power of jannies to continue to turn Reddit into a woke echochamber?

The fact that this is where the conversation always goes is telling.

This is a blanket change that affects a great many people of all political ideologies. You might as well ask if a planet colliding with the Earth is harmful to Globohomo.

I think the analogy is more like maybe this is the meteor that kills the dinosaurs so the mammals can thrive.

Nope, not at all. This change is uniformly impacting everyone, and there is no reason to think "powerjannies" are likely to leave and get replaced by people who are more sympathetic to the average person here.

Everyone on Reddit. Reddit is not the world. Reddit is completely owned by Blue team, 100% top to bottom. Therefore, from a strict culture war perspective from a Red teamer, anything bad that happens to Reddit is good. Doesn't matter if it's mildly annoying a small percent of users or burning the whole company to the ground, it's still good.

I don't know why people pretend that Reddit has any pretense to neutrality when our whole forum left Reddit specifically because of their hostile rules and censorship regime.

Reddit has roots that are... well, not Blue Tribe. Ron Paul fans, the entire violentacrez stuff, rDrama. More of a public square, at least.

I'd be curious to read a narrative on how we got from point A to point Z.

And cladistically speaking, all humans are fish because we descended from them.

Ah yes, how could I forget to celebrate bad things happening to people who disagree with me? Truly, not a sign that every slight lives rent-free in my head.

Your post is a bit on the snarky and sarcastic side, but I do see the point a little bit. If we're keeping a little perspective, this is still just an internet forum we're talking about. There are many thousands of them, constantly getting created and destroyed for any number of reasons. The worst "bad thing" we're talking about here is a moderate number of people being a little sad for a few weeks until they find a new place to post on the internet. It doesn't exactly hit my sympathy threshold.

And you might want to check out, say, /r/ShitPoliticsSays. It's full of heavily upvoted posts on Reddit default subs usually wishing things considerably worse to Red teamers than losing their favorite internet forum.

Your post is a bit on the snarky and sarcastic side, but I do see the point a little bit. If we're keeping a little perspective, this is still just an internet forum we're talking about.

It's not just that. It's the fact that people here act so blindly hateful some times that they will celebrate literally anything if you frame it as hurting the "Blue tribe". Doesn't matter how far you go to the right, it's all about hurting the left.

We call that waging the culture war, and the reason I call it out here is because we're supposed to be above that fucking shit. What the fuck is the point of having a platform where people are supposed to set aside their biases if people get upvotes for doing the exact opposite?

Goddamn, this place prides itself as having better discussion norms for freer debate, and yet the number one thing I see here are a bunch of slaves parroting the same talking points every single time. You point to the existence of /r/SPS, but I literally hate their kind as well! The difference is that I never expected any better from their kind.

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This change is uniformly impacting everyone

This is plainly false. The API changes mostly affect third-party app users, and moderators that rely on bots/external tools that depend on the Reddit API. Users of old.reddit.com or even new.reddit.com aren't directly affected.

I always assumed that phone users made Reddit worse for people interested in information and discussion: following external links is harder in apps so this discourages citing sources or reading external resources, phone screens are too small to read long-form content, and writing detailed messages is hard. Consequently I imagine app users disproportionately write one-liners and upvote memes and short comments (the opposite of what people do on The Motte).

I think reddit without phone users would be an improvement over what it is today, even if it doesn't fix the moderation problem.

I misspoke, but my general point is that there's probably not a disparate impact on the political makeup of either the users or mods.

They will if there’s no influence to be had. What’s the point of being a powerful mod of a site that very few people know exists? Would you want to be a powermod on Saidit where the average post gets maybe 1,000 views and 6-12 comments? What kind of influence could you have when you can’t get attention?

Reddit is not going to die even if the TPAs all go away. There's hardly a better platform for communities to gather in one place with easy discoverability of related communities. The people at AskHistorians have said that they constantly debate this and most don't like the idea of having to go to one site just for that. Reddit has inertia and network effects on its side.

July 1st will come and go, and I guarantee most of the big subs will remain right where they are, doing the same as they did before the change.

I kinda disagree. There are other similar communities, they’re smaller now, but if people discover them and choose to move on, then the communities will move to wherever they want to. Saidit and hubski both have fairly easy to use and have good interfaces. Snapzu is kinda interesting because the original post can have more than one article attached.

Besides all that, it’s happened before. MySpace was big until Facebook started, Digg was the original of the Reddit type community, Usenet was probably the ancestor of most social media. If things get bad enough then communities will absolutely move to better places.

People mostly seem to be looking at federated alternatives, instead of the ones you mentioned. I'm not sure why exactly.

If anything, the more sympathetic people are more likely to go dark and get replaced by reddit admins eventually.

I don't use reddit because of powerjannies. It makes no difference to me if it goes down in flames. I am asking about the possibility that reddit might become usable again.

This change is neutral towards them. There is no biasing towards them because the fundamentals of moderating have not changed. The only possibility of it changing is if many of them en masse resign and are replaced by those of a different political alignment. I consider that to be unlikely.

As someone who's actually modded I'd say the exact opposite will happen. Third party apps were important quality of life additions for mods to even do their job on a basic level.

Your question is a bit like being upset that police policy mandates they target certain areas and asking if taking away their radios and cars will make for better cops.

Your question is a bit like being upset that police policy mandates they target certain areas and asking if taking away their radios and cars will make for better cops.

Ah. But I'm in the Defund the Jannies camp. I do believe that a lawless wasteland is better than the carefully curated echochamber we have now. If you're telling me the mods won't be able to do their jobs, that's a plus for me.

Nothing, short of a Musk-at-Twitter style purchase and purge, can do that. The best this could do, barring that, is make it a mostly-empty woke echo chamber.

Nothing, short of a Musk-at-Twitter style purchase and purge, can do that.

I really do find it hilarious that people think Twitter is that much different with Musk at the helm as far as Trust & Safety goes. It's basically more of the same, but Musk found a great way to appeal to right-wingers by talking about "free speech" and stuff. Twitter was already the most free speech media, nothing in T&S really changed much except for Trump being unbanned.

What is the point of posting something so easily disprovable?

The guy who said that subreddits always banned for wrongthink has the possible excuse of not being old enough to see it first-hand, but noticing the decline of twitters censorship requires a much shorter memory.

because it's pretty obvious unless your idea of "free speech" is literally just posting slurs. 4chan has more rules and will ban you for a lot less than Twitter ever would

I really do find it hilarious that people think Twitter is that much different with Musk at the helm as far as Trust & Safety goes. It's basically more of the same, but Musk found a great way to appeal to right-wingers by talking about "free speech" and stuff.

much more crypto spam, more ads . I see major signal boosting and recommendations of anti-woke content .

Twitter was already the most free speech media, nothing in T&S really changed much except for Trump being unbanned.

hardly. conservatives were getting banned for all sorts of dumb or contrived reasons pre-musk

Leagues of people who were banned are now posting there unimpeded. That alone is not "more of the same".

Community Notes are great too, if only because they wrest away control of the idea that "fact-checking" is a leftist thing.

there's definitely more signal boosting of certain content on twitter now. just a few weeks ago there was a kerfuffle over musk retweeting interracial crime statistics

Musk also allowed the showing of "What is a Woman" (and apparently got rid of or lost ANOTHER Trust and Safety head over this). And he signal boosted it on his own account. And he posts anti-trans memes. Saying nothing has changed on Twitter is ridiculous. I expect it all go back once his new MSM CEO takes over, but for now it's different.

Nothing, short of a Musk-at-Twitter style purchase and purge, can do that.

Given how much Reddit relies on volunteer work, it probably wouldn't survive that. On the other hand, once anti-spam is sufficiently automated...

Even when TheMotte was on Reddit, I never used Reddit for anything other than... interacting with TheMotte (OK, OK, I lurked some porn subs too). So for someone with very little experience interacting with Reddit, can you explain to me how the proposed changes would actually be expected to affect the modal Reddit user?

Because I expect that the modal Reddit user doesn't even know what an API is, and certainly never previously paid for it. So messing with its price ain't gonna affect him or her.

The changes sound like a problem exclusively for nerds and corpos who like to data-harvest off of the backend; something which has no effect on the modal user AND no effect on the stereotypical powermod who's there to defend Cathedral talking points. With these two vital demographics' interests therefore apparently having no intersection with this change, they SHOULD be completely disinterested. Can anyone explain / speculate how it is, then, that the nerds and corpos have managed to rile them into rebellion?

can you explain to me how the proposed changes would actually be expected to affect the modal Reddit user?

it would not affect the average user at all

Not really true. Lots of average reddit users use 3rd party apps. My wife has like 4 total posts and browses it once a day and still uses baconreader.

The problem is that the new API prices are high enough to price almost all third-party apps and services out of existence. Many of them are shutting down before it happens to avoid getting stuck with huge bills that they won't be able to pay. The problem is that reportedly lots of sub moderators rely on these apps and tools to do their moderation work, and they say that the official app and tools are inadequate. Since they're all unpaid volunteers anyways, they might just quit, and it's not clear what will happen to Reddit if a significant number do quit.

The one riling the masses up are the powerusers who don't use the current modern version of the website and detest the official app. They see the unorganic and inauthentic from algorithms presented in the official site/app and tolerate it. With this change of the API is killing the customized experience of the powerusers and forcing a different reddit on them which they don't use but they are aware off. With this policy change is that they are being forced into using the official and it is not what they signed up for. The powerusers are able to rile up the regular Reddit users with ease because they know the sentiment and meta of the subreddits. And for all intents and purposes moderators are powerusers and can't work with the officlal mod tools, they have always relied on third party tools and those are about to be killed to.

The problem here is that the core of the protest is that we have a bunch of corporations that don't understand that regular people want something authentic if they can afford it. It is almost like all of the corporate college educated management read themselves stupid on Baudrillard and how the hyperreal supplant reality and how we can force the masses accept the new. Reddit is about to find out if they can force the new experience on everyone and keep the most profilic users and if they are truly important for regular users.

Thanks for the explanation. I don't use the app at all (I avoid the app version of any site because reading on your phone is horrible experience) and I agree the new Reddit is awful too.

But since I only use Reddit for a couple sites, at most, this doesn't really affect me. I suppose if I were technically skilled and used the tools to curate the experience, as it were, I'd be lighting my hair on fire now also.

something which has no effect on the modal user

Blind people can't use the official app and rely on third-party apps, which are getting killed by the API changes. So there's an ableism angle to this, which makes lots of people upset about the changes even if they aren't blind.

AND no effect on the stereotypical powermod who's there to defend Cathedral talking points.

Many mods, including those on /r/AskHistorians, rely on third-party apps to do moderation. AskHistorians in particular has a reputation for high-quality modding, which makes the prospect of losing concerning to average users too.

Blind people can't use the official app and rely on third-party apps, which are getting killed by the API changes. So there's an ableism angle to this, which makes lots of people upset about the changes even if they aren't blind.

Not my usual area of practice, but sounds like there might be an ADA lawsuit(s) incoming...

I think reddit is much more decentralized than you are implying; the super mods are vastly outnumbered by regular mods who care about these changes a lot and have the ability to pin whatever they want to the top of their subreddit. While a typical user spends a lot of time in big subs, they are also probably subbed to several small subs for their niche interests, and unlike the big subs they actually care about and interact with the mods in the smaller subs so they’re more likely to listen to what they say. If all the mods of smaller subs quit it would potentially change the reddit user experience a lot. I don’t think many of them will actually quit over this, in the end they will mostly cave and accept the worse experience, but it’s not surprising that they’re able to effectively get their message out and inspire a short-term boycott.

All the nerds use old.reddit.com because new.reddit.com is fully focused on centering content rather than comments and spamming page reloads so it can show more ads. (You get like five comments per page load.) Lots of people, me included, would leave the site if old.reddit was ever turned off, it's that bad.

The Reddit app imitates new Reddit. If you want old Reddit experience on a phone, you need an unofficial app. These use the API.

Regular Reddit app is shit. People use unofficial apps that rely on the API. API changes kill unofficial apps.

Boy am I glad TheMotte moved offsite

This seems irrelevant to me, since

  1. (afaik) TheMotte doesn't offer an API

  2. charging 3rd party apps for using your API to steal your users seems mostly orthogonal to free speech

Now that we're off reddit, we're no longer affected by reddit choosing to do questionable things.

It has been one year since my reddit account was suspended and I think I can officially say it was a good thing.

Wait, huh?? What were you suspended for?

I followed you and @zoink to /r/SSC and /r/themotte from your user pages back during my time at /r/goldandblack. I am very familiar with the two of you and was previously a semi-prolific ancap poster over there and at /r/anarcho_capitalism before g&b was created.

What happens to Rational_Liberty? Is Anenome a mod?

Yeah there are still mods at Rational_Liberty.

The suspension was related to some interactions I had one one of the larger subs (ill-advised, I know) which evidently crossed one of the increasingly strict lines about who you are and are not allowed to criticize harshly. I forget exactly what it was that apparently triggered the event, just that I genuinely felt it was unjustified.

I asked for clarification as to how it was actually violation but as one comes to expect no explanation was forthcoming.

They dinged my 10-year-old main account and alts all at once.

I was already posting almost exclusively to /r/themotte at that point and since they made the transition here it obviated any real need for an active account.

I was going to back off posting on reddit anyway since it's been a cesspool of censorship, bots, porn spam, controlled opposition (at best), and has ceased to have any influence on real world events, or to be an accurate window into real world events. Seriously, it is uncanny how the world-as-viewed-through-reddit is apparently utterly cut off from the world as it actually is according to my own two eyes and ears.

And when's the last time reddit coordinated to influence any current events in an impactful way?

So yeah. I still use Reddit when I'm looking up some specialized information on a particular sub (although ChatGPT is now my preferred go-to) but I've lost any urge to contribute my efforts to the site because what would be the point anymore?

One of my last posts on the site was pointing out how it had basically reduced to giving me cheap laughs by watching idiots interact in their natural habitat.

Huh? I'm pretty sure people use mobile apps for interacting with reddit. I certainly use Infinity (free app from F-Droid), orders of magnitude more people use Apollo. It's not a very convenient way to write effortposts, to be clear, but for many TheMotte was one subreddit among others, albeit a prominent one, checked out for new interesting content just as you scroll through more niche or entertaining stuff. It was the main, but not the only dish in my reddit consumption and I suspect this explains a lot in terms of our declined numbers.

I use Apollo too, but in that case one (e.g. OP or you) would have to claim that themotte.org's mobile website is better than reddit's mobile app. I don't personally believe this (e.g. I find collapsing comments to be unreasonably difficult on the mobile version of this site), and neither of you has claimed this.

To be clear, I have no strong opinion on our move off of reddit. If ZorbaTHut thinks it was worth it I guess I'm inclined to trust his judgement, if only because it was a lot of work and people are usually biased towards inaction. I just don't think the reddit API ban has much to do with it.

This is giving me some gamer boycott energy. There's no other real Reddit alternative with nearly the same amount of content thanks to network effects, so while a handful of users might drift away, the majority will eat the changes no matter how much they might dislike it.

Yes but this is going to change the communities. There is a minority of profilic users that drive the "usefullness" for people and if they leave... you got tumblr energy instead.

Yeah, that article about Tumblr made me laugh. It's a hellsite, but one advantage of it is There Is No Algorithm. It's not Twitter, and Lil' Miss Lemme Weep Into My Lace Hanky about Tumblr's sad state is really lamenting that she can't use it like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok to Build Her Brand and Monetise Her Content and Become A Thought Influencer.

Tumblr is constantly trying, and failing, to monetise content. We who remain after The Female Presenting Nipples Purge may be the dregs (they still haven't cleared out the pornbots) but we're the dregs who are fiercely proud of our dumpster trash home.

This is not to say that it's not run terribly (God bless their hearts, they keep trying to sell us merch) and that there hasn't been a ton of churn and selling it off at lower and lower valuations, but this "staff vision of how to make it better!" is precisely what pisses off long-term users and turns new potential users away:

"Our users are very opinionated, vocal, and passionate," explains Kahle. During her tenure, users simultaneously adored the platform while being resistant to changes that could save it, and "there were very few product updates that we rolled out that were not received poorly." Though she sympathizes — "any time Instagram redesigns their homepage I'm annoyed, too" — Tumblr users wouldn't let go. "A year later, we'd still get comments from users being like, 'literally no one asked for this stop changing things' or 'we want porn back.'"

I'm not one of the "we want porn back" crowd but even in the few years I've been there, they do keep making stupid changes that make the site less user-friendly and make content creation for the people who do art and video uploads way, way more difficult. The reason we say "nobody wants your stupid changes" is because nobody wants their stupid changes.

The porn ban of 2018 was a defining event for Tumblr that led to a 30 percent drop in traffic and a mass exodus of users that blindsided the company.

That is because it was done so awfully that it was in fact hilarious. See above about "female presenting nipples", that was the actual official line they put out. If your nipples presented as male, no problemo! Presumably non-binary nipples were also okay.

People started sharing the images that got their blog marked as "porn, for deletion unless you appeal". Sand dunes - okay, if you're using dumb AI (this was back in 2018) then they can kinda look like breasts. But bread? Grass? Totally innocuous images that don't even have people in them?

To add insult to injury, there are still real pornbots infesting the site to this day that never got banned in The Great Think Of Our Profits We Mean The Children Purge:

Tumblr has historically struggled to monetize effectively, and Christian recalls that in addition to being a legal and public relations nightmare, porn on the platform was a financial death knell. "We were told that we can't make money if we have any explicit content on our site, that specifically advertisers that will give us a substantial amount of money to keep things running will not come here."

Thing is, Tumblr is not one thing. There are vast and vastly different experiences depending on what blogs you follow and what interests you have, and you needn't ever interact with a blog side-by-side with yours because both of you are completely different themes - maybe they're about cosmetics and baking, and you're into swords and astronomy. That makes it really, really hard to turn into a slick, marketable product for advertisers and potential buyers.

Post+, a recent first step toward paywalled content to the platform, was met with disdain and frustration. Although the feature was completely optional, users protested that monetizing fan-created works negated the fair use of copyrighted characters and stories and put creators at risk of legal action. Post+ was a beta test, but "I think that users thought it meant that the entire platform would eventually become sort of like subscription-based," says Kahle.

Because it damn well would have become subscription-based if they got away with it. Users are not stupid, a lot of us migrated over from LiveJournal etc. and we know how this dance goes.

In January, D'Onofrio said that half of the platform's active users and 71 percent of its new users are Gen Z. Kahle who, at 25, is a zillennial, says attracting Gen Z and getting them to stay "may come down to the product." For example, Kahle says "if Gen Z's attention span is whatever percent shorter than millennials' then the recommendation algorithm needs to be used to churn out content way faster."

A lot of newbies came over from Twitter and the entire point is that there is no algorithm. Your experience is not curated. If you want to get your stuff noticed, you need to have people follow you, reblog, and like your content. And there's no magic shortcut to get that to happen, no paid content (well, you can Blaze but that does not necessarily mean you'll get followers or interaction), no Top Blogs Of The Day on a frontpage - you have to do the work yourself.

Fascinating stuff. As someone who was never big into Tumblr, it's interesting to see how one of the Internet's major sites shot itself in the foot.

I came to it late and for very restricted reasons (following a family member who got a Tumblog) and stuck around for fandom interaction. There are entire ecosystems on Tumblr that never interact, I've been lucky in avoiding the infamous Tumblrinas but yeah, the default attitude there is "liberal to progressive" and it skews young, though not as young as commonly thought - a lot of users are in their thirties or older.

They keep selling it off to new buyers who try in vain to monetise it, which is funny to watch. People are posting a lot of guides about Welcome To Tumblr (like this one) for the refugees from Twitter and Reddit. Mostly things like "We don't got no hashtags round here" because the experience is so different 😀

Reddit is hardly unique. It exists as the dominant platform for its niche because it was better at it when the last one collapsed. It continues to coast off network effects, but is not big as Facebook where it can not be supplanted.

"aaaaaany day now the big Reddit-killer will swoop in and save us! Trust me bro!"

I know it's certainly possible, but Reddit would have to screw up way harder than it has. The current drama won't make much of a difference.

Reddit lost it's catch as an organically driven community and later a free speech platform years ago. For at least a decade or thereabout, the site's been heavily botted, manipulated, and driven itself into self-referential echo chambers that cater to low-effort content. I think the things that made Reddit interesting in a strong sense of the word, are always destined to be things that don't scale up very well, but that you only find in smaller and decentralized communities. Those echo chambers are already floating by into places like Lemmy. I know, because I wasn't even there a week before a site admin banned me.

Predictions:

  • 95%: Reddit does not back down, defined as offering free API to Apollo and RiF

  • 80%: After two weeks, no top 100 subreddit is still blacked out. (99% no more than two are)

  • 60%: At least one case of admins stripping modding privileges from blackouters occurs

Bonus:

  • 70%: Assuming my preferred app stops working, I personally will cave and still be using Reddit on my phone this summer despite it being the perfect opportunity to quit.

I personally will cave and still be using Reddit on my phone this summer despite it being the perfect opportunity to quit.

I killed my reddit account last year and I haven't regretted it a single second despite hanging on there for over 15 years. You could atleast try to live without before caving.

It's very easy to get permabanned from reddit as well, just say a no-no word.

I'm pretty sure the point is to get users off reddit is fun. Meta's ARPU is about $13 a month, obviously that's much higher than Reddit's ceiling now but $1 a month is probably what they expect to earn from their users. Charging a third party app that's captured a user of theirs roughly the expected amount the user is worth seems quite likely. From reddits perspective, it's turning users who are pure cost into users who generate an average amount of revenue.

I always found the blackout thing funny. The average Redditor spend a lot of time on Reddit, and the blackout threats I’ve seen are “we’ll shut down for a few days”. Problem being that such a tack is pre-surrender. Reddit knows it’s a tantrum, and they know it wouldn’t last more than a week. It’s not intimidating in the least. It like a teen saying “I’m mad at you so I won’t talk to you for 3 hours.” Okay. What are you hoping to accomplish here?

My tinfoil hat conspiracy is that this blackout is actually orchestrated by the admins to head off an ACTUAL rebellion/migration.

They start by announcing a ridiculously expensive API cost, they have certain users coordinate a limited blackout and get buy-in from the proles, blackout occurs and reddit "capitulates" by cutting the API price in half. Everybody grumbles but feels like they made a difference, Reddit gets the change it wanted whilst clipping the downside risk of a serious revolt.

Blackouts are dangerous in that Reddit holds total power over the subs themselves. They can just undo the blackout and throw out the mods and replace them with those who will keep it up.

It's the same as when Russia or China fly a jet into US airspace or hold military exercises in a disputed area. The point is to make sure that the admins deeply consider the interests and possible reaction of moderators before taking any major action. There is also a not-insignificant effect on the admins' public image. If the community is more loyal to the subreddit moderators than to the admins, then the mods retain the option of moving the community off-site rather than submit to Reddit management (case in point: here). That's why we have these kerfufles every one or two years to remind the peasants that the far-away king cares nothing for you and your family, unlike the local nobles who feed and house you.

The problem being that sometimes you have to actually not be bluffing. And Reddit has seen this stuff with no real exodus several times. It doesn’t scare them because they’re pretty sure that a week or two later they’ll be back in full force. If I threaten to quit 10-15 times and don’t actually quit, it’s not a threat anymore, it’s just you blowing smoke, and it cannot work as a tactic because nobody takes the threat seriously.

Don't most people on, for example, /r/videos, just watch the videos and never comment, and probably rarely even read the comments? That's quite different than this place. I think it would be extremely difficult for most major subreddits to move off site.

I think it would be extremely difficult for most major subreddits to move off site.

One at a time, yes. As a mass going to something like what Reddit was when Reddit first started, not so much. Reddit is probably the most replaceable of the social medias because it is pretty bad at what it does already, and relies on so much free labor from people on power trips. Not so hard for them to powertrip together to a new startup offering the same low quality service.

I think it would be extremely difficult for most major subreddits to move off site.

This is what I'm casually keeping an eye out for. The Motte did it. Cringetopia did it. WatchPeopleDie did it. I think a few others have as well. I think the larger subs that are niche, such as PoliticalCompassMemes, have a userbase large enough where they could get by on their own dedicated platform.

Moral commitments are easy to make if all that's required of you is to make some false gesture or token of praise in favor of those like Christian, who are getting screwed pretty hard over this. So long as it involves no permanent or indefinite cost (e.g. 'deleting the subreddit'), I agree with you; it's ultimately meaningless.

I think Reddit's disintegration is long overdue, and this whole issue is just the watershed moment where it all comes to a head. I think it'd be a net benefit if the entire site disappeared tomorrow, as there's no room for nuanced discussion of virtually anything, it mostly just functions as an entertaining echo chamber of sorts; that occasionally pays lip service to 'open-mindedness' and 'free speech'.

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