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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38172 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 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.

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