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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.

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.

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.

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