cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish… and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.
That was peak reddit.
I remember Reddit helping to make a kid do his homework.
holy fucking shit that’s awesome
Thank you! God the official site is so bad.
yw :)
Holy smokes. Beautiful
“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.
that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera
This one: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/
Make sure to click
[+][deleted] 14 years ago (156 children)to get even more.
I got rickrolled by Firefox built in translation.
What trips me out is that somehow they still have the video of the dude that somehow survived after blowing his own face off with a shotgun. It’s fucked up, sad and sickening.
Honestly I would have just put him out of his misery if I had found him like that. And no, I will not be linking that video here or anywhere for that matter, it’s pure nightmare fuel.
then what’s the point of crying about it
The point is that once they went public, they said they were gonna be removing certain horrible communities, and the particular community that particular video is on would have been like at the top of the list if I was in charge of Reddit.
But honestly I don’t give a flying fuck.
They banned bots from WholesomeMemes and there were no posts for 2 days. Dead Internet is now, and it’s at Reddit.
That subreddit always seemed so off-putting to me and now I know why. I don’t hate wholesome stuff, but there was just something off about that subreddit that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Let’s be honest, most of Reddit’s default subreddits (or whatever the fuck they’re called now) are basically just karma farms with no real moderation beyond removing extreme content. The real value of Reddit has always been in its smaller, niche subs. But as those grow in popularity, they end up having the same problems as bigger subs.
And Spez’s response?
“OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.
And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.
And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.
What does he care if a bunch of people that he thinks are losers hate him? He’s sitting on his private yacht, anchored just off his private country club, and eating lobster in the hot tub. He’s a major world player now. He doesn’t give a fuck what reddit users think of him.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.
I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.
Well, it’s dort of an anti-survivorship bias. Those that still sick around seem to not care even if it gets as bad as the other Corpo sites.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists
Those were the early days of Reddit. They’re long gone now that everyone has joined. Those so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists have now abandoned Reddit. It’s mostly just the sheep left there now.
It’s the same story with Twitter.
I’m a sheep and I left reddit. Bah.
Has anyone told them? I think they might not know that.
What do you think he would learn? He got like $190 million dollars in compensation last year, broke the protest, and only lost a small fraction of users. He doesn’t view the site with the same love that we did. It’s just a business to him, and he’s just a soulless executive.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing
He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.
he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts
This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.
Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)
actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.
ok…
but does this mean I could get my account back in the next few months/next year?😭😭😭
I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.
Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.
It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.
Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).
Could moderation be handled democratically with votes and such? Create a system with central authority and you’ll just get people trying to be the central authority.
You end up with the problem of Who Watches The Watchmen all the way down in infinite layers. We don’t really have an inherently trusted party here that could arbitrate a vote. Unless you try to do something funky with blockchain, but I couldn’t tell you about that, that isn’t one of my spell schools.
Corpos gonna corpo, there is a lesson here folks but people reading this right now, already know this.
And now they’re teeming with bots* and drove away the power users. Look how many posts and comments they’ve lost in the last year just from me alone.
Edit:
The beauty of Reddit was its decentralized structure.
Users created and moderated their own communities with freedom and autonomy, and it led to an explosion of niche interests and discussions. Want to debate the finer points of medieval weaponry? There’s a subreddit for that. Obsessed with pictures of birds with human arms photoshopped onto them? Yep, there’s a subreddit for that too.Took a bit but I’m glad we found the actual decentralized structure we needed
My favorite of the protests was DnDmemes becoming a goblin porn subreddit, and the final reply of the main mod “I shitposted me way in here, I’ll shitpost my way out”. That and demanding a d20 roll for persuasion(?) from the admins
I liked pics becoming nothing but sexy pictures of John Oliver, with the notice that all pictures of John Oliver are sexy pictures of John Oliver.
I’m calling bullshit on any user count they release. The site was filled with bots even when I still used it. People kept complaining about “karma farmers” as if there were users who repost popular content. It has always been largely Reddit’s own bots too keep new users entertained and recycle popular content so that it reaches as many users as possible. They turned this up to 11 before going public.
Now that they no longer provide an API, they are free to make up any fake metric they want to try to pump up their worthless stock.
“Karma farmers” is a major reason Digg collapsed and Reddit took its place.
I’m very doubtful too. I look at “active users” stats, and for every sub at every time it never goes above a few hundreds.
The millions subs numbers are bs
One of the really popular subs - with hundreds of posts per day - cracked down on bots and nothing was posted for two days afterwards.
Can’t recall which sub it was,It was WholesomeMemes. I caught wind of that a few days later and it was truly a ghost town. Even now they’ve only got something like 5% of their pre-bot-ban traffic back - about 4-6 posts a day.People kept complaining about “karma farmers”
I remember the “Reddit is just you, me and /u/karmanaut” meme from 2008. He was the original “karma farmer”. It was a problem since the early days due to how they setup Reddit as a system. It just enforced his behaviour.
ngl i feel like reddit starting falling off after the api thing it became mainstream
I’m trying to upvote as many Lemmy posts as I can find on the Reddit search function to hasten the demise of the pet project of Spez since the third party apps are up to snuff now!
Let’s hope more people will join the fediverse so we can all stop feeding our data to these greedy companies.
I like my transparency, third-party apps, community and open source nature of Lemmy.
Tbh I doubt companies would stop scraping data. They wouldn’t care to respect the ToS (they never did) and feed in their AI models all the Lemmy posts and comments they can find. Still better than Reddit willfully selling these info
They still can’t game it for engagement optimization to that extreme, not like the closed loops of monolithic sites.
True. Let’s drive away from them as much as possible
You don’t think once Lemmy hits mainstream, companies won’t start polluting Lemmy and harvest data here?
As Lemmy users we always have the freedom to jump ship to a different Lemmy instance if the admins of the ones we’re on decide to sell the site out and/or let the polluters take over, or we can even start up our own Lemmy instance (with blackjack, etc.)
I’m not sure if there is any way you can promote links to my account, but feel free:
https://www.reddit.com/user/FlyingSquid/
Your page has been bookmarked. Thank you for the idea of updating the display name to LEMMY IS BETTER.
Good idea!
Despite this seemingly rosy picture, Reddit is still bleeding money. In the quarter ending June 2024, the company reported revenue of $281.18 million - a 53.63% year-over-year increase - but still posted a net loss of $10.10 million.
Most of the actual work on the site is done by unpaid moderators. Hosting bills are probably huge but not THAT huge. I’m sure they have a decent sized staff, but not THAT big. I wonder what’s going wrong…
Reddit Files to Go Public, Reveals That It Paid CEO $193 Million Last Year
Ohhh… Well, there’s your problem, dumbasses.
It’s a sign. Spez will now milk the company and make himself billionaires for the next few years, then sell the company for tens of billions, and new owner will run it into the ground, milking whatever left of it. Then it will become the blandest, soulless socmed.
Sounds like a job for Elon Musk.
Please let this happen.
No one can ruin a company quite like him.
Or sell it to Trump Media Group.
TBH that would ddos lemmy with new users, lol.
Imagine if they put 100 of that into developers and infrastructure and shit.
Basically paid that twat 200 mil to kill the site.
Wow, out of a total revenue of $281 million $193 million goes to a single person? Holy shit. What a selfish asshole you have to be to disregard all of your employees and take such a huge cut for yourself.
Nah, that’s mostly stock options, so it doesn’t come out of the revenue. His cash salary was only a couple hundred thousand.
It’s probably better from a tax point of view. Plus he’s planning to cash out big on his own IPO, so he prefers the stock.
Spez is the unnecessary overhead that creates extra work for the workers
You should look up the absurd pay structure of Musk at Tesla or how at Facebook, despite it being a publicly traded company, Zuckerberg literally cannot be fired.
The reason tech tends to chase stupid trends like AI is that there really aren’t that many people in charge of the whole place. They all know each other; they’re all buddies. And they all chase the same stupid fads together.
It’s actually insane. I’m not built for corporate jobs but goddamn I have no idea how anyone would want to work for such a company.
I’m still running Sync for Reddit using a patch from Vanced. I don’t know why I even bother. That site has gone so far downhill from 10-15 years ago. People used to get flamed for not reading an article or using improper grammar. Comments were, more often than note, well thought out and articulate. Now, the site is a cesspool or memes and idiocracy.
You want flaming for improper grammar, you have 2 flagrant violations in this post which absolutely does not detract from your message. You better continue going about your day not being bothered by this at all. Geez!
(I’m sure I made mistakes here too, go ahead)
It’s not fun when you give me permission!!
Saturn devouring his son, with reddit snoovitars
Somebody with midjourney skills needs to do that
It’s got viral potency
Midjourney skills
I think that’s an oxymoron…
Nah, just fucking draw it you cowards.
