just so this doesn’t overwhelm our front page too much, i think now’s a good time to start consolidating discussions. existing threads will be kept up, but unless a big update comes let’s try to keep what’s happening in this thread instead of across 10.
developments to this point:
- Apollo for Reddit is shutting down
- Reddit is Fun will also shut down
- Reddit CEO (/u/spez) is going to hold a AMA about the API update
- Sync has announced it is shutting down
- ReddPlanet has announced it is shutting down
- Reddit creates an API exemption for noncommercial accessibility apps
- /r/videos is planning to shut down indefinitely, beginning June 11
- A subreddit dedicated to migrating to kbin.social has been closed by Reddit
The Verge is on it as usual, also–here’s their latest coverage (h/t @dirtmayor@beehaw.org):
other media coverage:
I’ve been getting used to lemmy for the last couple days, going back and forth between here and reddit and following what’s going on, and I think I just realized something that I hadn’t been able to put into words.
The lemmy community feels responsive and fun to talk to, and I think that’s because the people who are coming here from reddit are the people who are motivated to communicate, and are people who care about the topics in each community. That’s pretty cool.
I’ve been feeling weird about leaving Reddit; mainly because it’s been my main source of entertainment, news, and community for over 10 years but this is a really good point about any ‘social’ network. Even the link aggregator sites like Reddit. Over the past couple of years, I feel like my engagement has dropped significantly because it hasn’t been FUN to engage with the communities I was a part of the same way it was when I first joined. I’m hoping to recapture that a bit here specifically on Lemmy and in the fediverse at large.
Exactly! Reddit turned in a whine site.
There is an energy here that I haven’t really felt from reddit as a whole in years…
Certain (smaller) subs could still get that same feeling sometimes, but so far I am very much enjoying lemmy. Yeah there’s a bit of a learning curve to figuring things out but I think people will catch on fast!
I think you hit the nail on the head for me. I’m excited to see what comes from this community far more than Reddit.
Great point. There will be a big wave i’m sure (it happened w/ Mastodon/microblogging fediverse platforms) and after a few months, some of the people tried it and left. The people who remained are such an engaging and fun group to talk to.
Yes!
I can post and comment here without getting yelled at or worthless, and off topic, replies. I hope they keeps the trolls to a minimum and encourage meaningful contributions.
I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:
“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.
What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?
Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.
It’s going to become a barren wasteland of bots communicating with each other.
Haha, you just reminded me of this cartoon:
yeah. this one’s always relevant
@myk @alyaza “Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?”
Goes to show how important it is we use FOSS and decentralized tools for real community communications.
fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
Isn’t it a bit late for that?
I mean, GPT is on its fourth iteration, they’ve been working on it for years, I don’t know about Bing Chat but MS surely didn’t start develop it only yesterday.
How can Reddit be so sure “AI bros” haven’t already got the data they needed to train their models?
Hate to see reddit die like this, but Lemmy does feel like a suitable alternative, and I’m glad I switched over. Hopefully we see a lot more users move over as subreddits go dark.
what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can’t piece together a good and accessible experience for their users…
No matter how many developers you get, you’re never going to have a good product if the guy calling the shots won’t allow it. I’m confident that the developers working on Reddit probably know damn well that their product is trash and there’s nothing they can do about it because their job isn’t “make a good site” its “do what your boss tells you to do”
I’ve been a developer for awhile and you would be surprised how many companies can’t get out of their own way to improve their products.
This is so true it hurts.
That’s absolutely right, I’m not a developer, I’m a UX/UI designer. I recently had a contract where the contractor slaughtered my initial design to the point where I almost started to hate it, but I was bound by contract to finish it.
If reddit wants, their developer can absolutely build a top notch app.
Man that whole situation really sucks. Reddit was by far my most visited site before they decided to light the house on fire. On mobile I always used Boost because the official app is terrible and (at least the last time I looked at it) would drain my battery like it was nothing even when the app was closed. RIP. At least we’ve got Lemmy. I just wish these 3rd party apps would take their users to the fediverse instead of shutting down entirely. As a developer it really sucks when you have to shut down a project you’ve put so much work into.
Sharing this because it should be shared
This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo’s woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.
Ditto. I saw that, I deleted all my posts/comments and then my 11+ year old account.
Remember to check that it stayed deleted. My account rolled back my deletions. Possibly due to “stability”
Wait what! Things have gotten this bad!? Like, this actually happened? I’m guessing there was no follow up question.
I mean, it’s either a dumb corporate strategy to discredit or psychopathic behaviour, or, sadly, both.
Also something weird, when I saw this combo, iamthatis was the first reply. Now it’s way down there, despite the upvotes and gilds.
I really don’t like putting on the tin foil hat, but since spez admitted in the past that he changed other users comments, I’m calling it, this guy is still messing around with things behind the scenes
I just don’t get how a site based on freely produced content thst employs volunteer mods can actually monetise.
That part just gets me. The site has nothing without the users and the users have nothing without the mods.
The thing is, they have operating costs. I’m sure it’s a boatload of money as well, given the size and scope of Reddit. Almost all startups run at a loss. And then continue to do so long past when they’re a “startup”. The money they “make” is from rounds of investors who believe they will find a way to make money in the future. Eventually investors get restless and demand that they find a way to monetize so they can recoup. Without those investors money, the site will come crashing as soon as they miss some critical payments for stuff that keep the site up. I’m absolutely sure that’s what we’re seeing. I think either way, its time has come.
Pinch the users to try to keep it alive for a little bit more. Don’t pinch the users and it dies in a grinding halt when they miss some key payments.
They can always work together with platform developers to make profits. Yet they’re killing the very platform that bring traffics to the site. I can only see greediness here.
So realistically, what would a sustainable business model be for something like Reddit?
Something like lemmy or a fediverse platform is going to rely on donations and community support. In the case of mastodon, for example, it’s been shown to work well enough for sustainable operations. For those willing to work on something worthwhile for lower salary, it is potentially a great gig. In a commercial context though, it’s basically a subscription based business model.
If we’re to recover from this ad driven data tracking economy, subscriptions seem like a healthy thing for businesses to adopt.
Reddit may have already signed their deals with the devil. But generally, the point of the fediverse is to escape this corporate manipulation of our basic communications in the internet, and it’s still interesting to ask what profitable but sustainable operations can look like.
I think that federation will help Lemmy a ton–there will be a lot of small, cheap servers rather than a single extremely expensive one!
Possibly. I’m not sure how true it is that the fediverse necessarily leads to more efficient computing needs per user. I’d bet it’s the opposite.
But, as you perhaps allude to, there are other factors. For those who only want niche smaller communities, they can enjoy a more stripped down experience without needing speedy and beefy servers. Similarly, the platforms here are probably slimmer and not bloated with features that are trying to engage and monetise.
The major factor, IMO, is ownership. Admins literally own their servers. And should have a much closer and codependent relationship with the users in their servers, except in the case of large instances which become different beasts. Additionally, users have much more choice and mobility on the fediverse. All of which means admins/moderators and users have more at stake in their relationship. More ownership over their platform/instance. And therefore actually have a reason to donate and contribute and help out.
This whole situation feels like a short term revenue grab. I bet shareholders are trying to inflate the numbers in order to cash out in the IPO.
I know that there’s https://reddark.untone.uk/ for tracking which subreddits are dark or planning to go dark but is there a website that shows the amount of dark subreddits over time as a graph? I think that’d be quite interesting to see.
Looks like the Chinese “investor” is the Communist Party. The actions Reddit is taking are pretty much how they take down all the companies and citizens they target.
Looks like the Chinese “investor” is the Communist Party.
can we get a citation on this–preferably before asserting it as fact, please? i’d like it if, on this site, we didn’t just say things (especially if they sound in line with our priors) but actually substantiate them.
Not fact. It’s my opinion based on the actions I see, and the fact things started to go down hill after the investors gave money. One of the big ones was Chinese.
We’ve seen how things go down when China is involved - loans to poor nations, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the disputed islands with Japan, Tibet, the Urghurs.
We’ve seen the various iterations of the “oops how did that key logger get in there?” discoveries (Lenovo, i’m looking at you), corporate espionage, Huawei telecommunications infrastructure being used to tap communicatons, etc…
Strict control of pretty much everything is the pattern, in which disinformation is easily dispensed and difficult to identify.
I swear tankies and liberals are basically the same. Tankies blame the CIA for every single bad thing that has ever happened while liberals blame the CCP and the Russian government. SOMETIMES BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE JUST GREEDY AND SOMETIMES AMERICANS ARE JUST SHITTY, there doesn’t need to be a secret cabal behind everything
SOMETIMES BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE JUST GREEDY AND SOMETIMES AMERICANS ARE JUST SHITTY, there doesn’t need to be a secret cabal behind everything
while i’ll wait for the source i asked for and gladly correct this if i’m presuming incorrectly, i’d bet the odds are high that “CCP” is just being used as a shorthand/stand-in for a company like TenCent, because that happens a lot in discussions about China and it’s really goofy.
There’s no need to hypothesize about a shadowy government conspiracy when the situation is adequately explained by simple desperation for money. Spez outright said that Reddit is losing money and has always been losing money, and that he needs to make it stop losing money, presumably because Reddit’s investors are tired of giving him money and want to see some return on their investment.
In the interest of fairness, isn’t the difference between TenCent and the Chinese government basically just paperwork? I’ve always heard (anecdotally) that they work extremely close with the CCP.
In the interest of fairness, isn’t the difference between TenCent and the Chinese government basically just paperwork? I’ve always heard (anecdotally) that they work extremely close with the CCP.
i don’t know if i’d go that far? with Tencent specifically it is inarguable they have worked with the Chinese government on some things and that’s not nothing. but Tencent is still an independent company, and governments and corporations/their shareholders frequently don’t have the same interests at heart, so it’s hard to say where to draw the line here.
i think my position would be: i don’t think it’s useful to assert everything they do is intended to advance what China wants, especially in the absence of anything indicating that. i also don’t know how useful it is to assume they’re just a front for China–certainly i don’t think that the people most vocal about this consistently apply that concern to other countries like Saudi Arabia who use companies to advance their state interests all the time.
conversely, i think it’s ridiculous to confidently assert Tencent have never, or don’t ever, get influenced by interests China has, or that Chinese state officials aren’t capable at least theoretically of using the company to advance state interests. that stuff happens here, where ostensibly our system exists to prevent that kind of collaboration (this is basically what the “military-industrial complex” is, for example).
My concern is that communities on Lemmy are fractured by instance. You CAN read or subscribe to communities on any instance, but communities with the same topics (or even the same names!) on different instances are in no way connected. For example, there can be a community called “Books” on every instance, but if you subscribe to one you will NOT see posts in any of the other Books communities on other instances. You’d have to go out, specifically find each one of them, and subscribe to them separately.
Not to mention communities with different names, but that cover the same essential topic. For example, I’m subscribed to the “Literature” community here. It’s nice. But it’s entirely disconnected from any of the “Books” communities on other instances. I’m not sure how that sort of fracturing could be addressed. I understand that there’s a plan to eventually allow “MultiReddit” style aggregating, allowing users to group a number of communities into a single reading group, but that would only apply to what that individual user would read. No one else would have the benefit of seeing all the posts from those communities in a single group unless they individually recreated that collection.
What might work would be to bake in a set of standard all-instance communities which would automatically merge the content from all instances for those topics for all users. But I’m not sure that would work, since not all instances have to federate with all other instances.
I don’t think of that as a negative. It’s a different structure than Reddit.
Each instance would be a community in the cultural sense. All of the Lemmy communities within that instance would be a place for primarily the same instance users to gather. Each instance having its own cultural identity. Decentralized.
I agree. On reddit, there are a bazillion different “gaming” subreddits that are only named different because that’s the only way to have different communities around the same topic: r/gaming, r/games, r/truegaming, r/patientgamers, r/girlgamers, r/transgamers, r/gaymers, and so on.
Each of those communities has a different feel and different moderation and different priorities, and no way no how would I want r/gaming posts mixed in if I’m trying to browse r/transgamers, for example.
Similarly, I’m mostly sticking to Lemmy instances that disable the downvote button, because it makes for friendly places I think, and lowers the barrier to posting for socially anxious users.
I like the idea of there being a way for users, or for similar groups of instances that agree to it (like if beehaw and an instance with similar rules/community feel wanted to collaborate a bit), to set up a multi-lemmy ‘all’ community thing that shows posts across similar communities, but it should still be optional.
Wow, RedReader somehow managed to get spared due to its accessibility features. Was not on my bingo card at all. I guess somehow I can still manage to use Reddit completely ad free, but who knows for how long. Even better, the RedReader dev might have plans to integrate Lemmy into it.
I don’t know how RedReader will survive without monetisation, either since the conditions are they are “non-commercial”. It’s such bullshit and just a ploy to further profit off free labour.
RedReader has never been monetized. They don’t have servers to support and distribute for free on f-droid and the play store. It’s a small open source project and an influx of users won’t change costs for them. The app acts purely as a reddit client for each user and doesn’t need a go between server. They accept donations through Patreon and you can find the link on their GitHub repo.
In the case that reddit eventually cuts off their api access too, they’re planning on adding support for Lemmy, HackerNews, Tildes and RSS in a future refactor but that’s probably not any time soon.
The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/
In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:
I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I’m fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.
[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]
No way Reddit is going to be able to replace so many mods on so many subs that deal with so many millions of users. They can try, but that doesn’t mean it will work.
Yes I was totally blown away when I saw how large that sub is. It’s incredible to see Reddit losing people with that much experience of managing and growing massive communities, but the board’s focus right is only on selling existing content to AI bros so they probably don’t care that much at the moment.
That’s why it’s important for normal users who leave the site to delete their comments and submission too.
Or for the paranoid, edit then delete 😀
It’s simply disappointing to see the disaster for the AMA. Saddens me to see Reddit go down like this. At least we got the Lemmy-proxy being a community project. Would love to still use Infinity as my main “reddit” browsing app, after all.
I’ve seen some discussion that there may be a way to spoof the reddit API and basically plug existing third party reddit apps into Lemmy instead!
Yeah, a Lemmy proxy is in the works. Should be able to convert Lemmy instances into a reddit-compatible format for clients.
