this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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[–] [email protected] 145 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So they designed an API that they didn't intend thirdparties to use at all? And documented it publicly without the intention of any devs reading the docs? Right.

What annoys me the most is that they would rather force users to see their ads and interract with their new and useless engagement features than just take payment directly from us, the users, for accessing the API. I'll gladly pay for a premium++ ultra gold plus reddit subscription to continue using Sync. I don't get why they would rather charge the 3rd party devs that literally gives them more users.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago

And the api didn’t expose ads. It’s not like the apps chose not to display them. It wasn’t even an option.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What should bother you is not the particularities of the pricing. It's the overtly dirty dealing. Even the Apollo dev said he might have been able to make the pricing work, but certainly not in just 30 days. Admins said there would be time -- months of it -- and only gave 30 days. They said pricing would be based on reality, but no sensible analysis indicates that it is. Admins told the users they were worthless and literally defamed devs that were trying to work with them.

There were tons of ways they could've gotten ads in front of people. This wasn't about ads. This wasn't about some particular price point. This is about getting users onto their official app or website, presumably to mine data and control conversations.

The infinite free VC ran out when interest rates went up. Suddenly, real financial pressures they had plenty of time to address and never bothered worrying about were at the door. So they revved up the enshitification engine and got to the hard work of destroying the only source of value the site had.

If they came out tomorrow and declared they would keep the API free and that Spez was fired, it oughtn't change how you feel. It's time to be off that site.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Despite what advertising executives believe, the majority of us would gladly pay if it meant not having to deal with ads. I hate ads so much.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think that depends on the price, but yeah, if they charged a reasonable price, sure.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Right, like.... take like Hulu. $+5/mo and I don't see ads? I don't even have to think. Done.

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[–] [email protected] 122 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So after saying for weeks, if not months, that the new pricing wasn’t designed to kill third-party apps, he’s now saying the exact opposite? And thus admitting that Reddit lied to its community for the whole?

Please, can someone give to this dude any PR training? Even the bare minimum would be an improvement at this point.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

He's so bad at this that I can't help but believe he's actually trying to kill Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Napoléon said something of the like "don’t attribute to malice when it’s incompetence instead".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

(your point is good, I going to be That Guy and mention that's Hanlon's Razor. And while a lot of people have made some similar quotes, Napoleon wasn't one of them as far as we know)

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At this point, he needs "stfu training".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’m no PR expert but that would definitely be an improvement compared to where he’s at.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

@osc I vote for sending him to the loonybin.

@okcool

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I worked for Microsoft for many years and the fact is many companies' marketing and PR departments think their customers are morons. Or perhaps it's that they think their customers don't mind being treated like morons.

The shit they would send flowing down the pipeline that we were supposed to say to our customers just blew me away. "You know our customers aren't STUPID right? I can't talk to them like they're stupid or they'll escort me off premises."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think he just doesn't care about any backlash at this point.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This just in CEO absolutely clueless.

If that would have been the case then why was the API not protected from public use? Why did it use API-Keys?

Omg what a dumb idiot. What is a third party app that adds functionality and usability? Certainly not a tool right?

And he didn't know that there was this increased API usage? Did he just woke up from a coma?

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huffman isn't clueless, he's a liar. He selectively remembers thing, the man is a snake who has somehow managed to fail upwards into the position he is currently in. Even Pao was preferable, as she at least believed in what she was doing. Spez just does whatever gets him paid.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ellen Pao was thrown under the bus

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Specifically she was thrown under the bus by kn0thing (Alex Ohanion).

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We live in a dark world where we got stuck with Ohanian and Huffman, and not Swartz

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

The guy literally built Reddit from scratch… He's more than aware why there is an API, and how it has been used for years. The guy is just a douchebag and a liar that want to kill third party apps and acts like he is right from the beginning, never said or did anything wrong, because the bad people are devs, mods, and users. Why? Because he created Reddit so he can't be wrong...

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (3 children)

By the looks of it, it was never designed to support first party apps either.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I don't think anyone is saying that Reddit shouldn't charge the 3rd party apps. Pretty sure they just wanted fair pricing.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If they would have just made it so that you needed Reddit Premium to use 3rd party apps I would have thought that was fair and subscribed

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Devs said that was discussed and rejected by Reddit. They're stuck on that $12,000 for 50M figure. Because the goal is killing the apps.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not even "fair pricing", because no one can know what is truly fair unless they have access to the P&L statements. Maybe this pricing really is based on the lost opportunity cost Reddit is paying as a result of third-party apps -- we honestly don't and can't know for sure, even if it seems completely absurd.

The devs and users of the site were lied to. Repeatedly. We were told one thing while the C-suite planned something else. We were gaslit and lied to about timelines, pricing, and intentions, and more. We were told our opinions are just worthless noise and that the only goal of the site is profit, not community.

It's our job to believe they don't want us, at this point, no matter how much they do or do not backtrack in the coming days, weeks, and months.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It's absolutely a fuck you price, reddit doesn't want the press of saying they wan't rid of 3rd party apps. But they're trying to do it anyways. IDK why though, because it's nakedly obvious to even people not involved in reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don’t add value to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way. They need to pay for this."

I don't think anyone has ever said they want the API to remain free, they just want a fairer price model and/or more time to allow existing year-long contracts to be valid. Why the sudden urgency to push out this stupidly high pricing model? The only time-critical event I can think of is Spez's precious IPO, and he's doing a great job at showing potential investors that everything's under control

/s ( <-- are we allowed to use that here?)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But... 3rd-party apps are literally a free advertisement to the service which the app connects to?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

These apps helped build early reddit and now reddit is pulling the ladder up after reaching the top.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Reddit also launched their own phone app YEARS after third party apps became popular. Like 5-6 years later. Presumably because they felt those apps were a good thing -- or at the very least not a bad thing.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit gave the 'fuck you' price for third party apps, then the guy in charge lied through his teeth about convrosations that has happened.

Deleted my reddit account. Twitter lost my patronage. Soo too will reddit. I'm not putting up with this noise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Don't forget they also planned on blocking NSFW and other posts as well from any 3rd parties.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Oh, that’s rich. The API was created for third party access. And if he didn’t like it, why was it tolerated for so long? Hmmm…maybe because they brought in more users and their data to fatten the pig before IPO?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Damn, bro really just essentially said "get fucked". He also in essence admitted in the interview that the intention was to kill off certain third party apps, saying they provide little to no value to the platform.

I really think the root problem here is that we're building communities on private platforms owned by for profit corporations. The intention is to make money off your interactions, and to an extent how you have them. Instead of providing you with a service, you become the service. A commodity to be sold to advertisers and whatever nonsense they can get you to look at on their platforms.

This is why ActivityPub is important. You (mostly) don't see this kind of fuck shit happening with SMTP, instead they just couple services in with your email (O365, G Suite). Communicating and connecting with other people shouldn't be a business venture, and I hope social media continues to become increasingly unprofitable for these companies.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Absurd stance to take, but that's why we're here and not there after all.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Let it go, overwrite your content and leave reddit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

From this article:

While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that; more than 80 percent of the top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open

Meanwhile from https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/

If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If it wasn’t for old Reddit and RES I’d be off there today or if platforms like this one get a good user base of quality people. This Fediverse thing is really neat but I think most people will not want to invest the time to learn how to use it. Today is my first day here and I still have a lot of questions for example I know that Mastadon is part of the Fediverse. Does that mean I can use that service due to having a Kbin account or do I have to sign up with one of their servers?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, well, that makes it ok then. Everybody back to Reddit!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@okcool Math is not my greatest skill but "Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site." Are they so bad that they can't cover the cost of 3% usage? Why is he still CEO?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Deleted my account with the message "Your contempt for your users disgusts me". Oh well, account since 2012 permanently gone. Long live the Fediverse!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

So, Alien Blue was not a third-party app?

Great Snoo Platform... lie.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It was never designed to support third-party apps.

My brother in Christ… you bought a third party app that used the API

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He's a liar, there is no way the would have let 3rd party apps use their API for over a decade if they "didn't mean for 3rd party apps..."

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

🤦‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Wow, the reddit ceo is a dick! Also, someone needs to tell him that one reason we use 3rd party apps is because his official reddit app is an ugly piece of crap that most people are only using because they didn't realize there were choices.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Does a CEO really understand how the products that his company makes operate at the nuts and bolts scale? To me this sounds like if the CEO of GM was discussing the merits and deficits of a limited slip differential. If they know anything about it they know what some engineers dumbed down enough for him to grasp it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Says the company who bought alien blue.

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