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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38171 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.

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?

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.

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