Major Reddit Communities Will Go Dark To Protest Threat To Third-Party Apps - Sl...

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• it would work. Reddit can't survive without the big forums after all. They drive 99% of the traffic and ad revenue. Reddit could take the mod's power away, but then they lose the mods, and they probably can't survive without all that free labor.
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    They could. The bigger ones seem to be the ones less modded anyways.
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        Says the anonymous coward.

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          They couldnt be more transparent in their message.
          
          Big conspiracy against the party of prejudice, how dare they stifle my messages of misogyny and hate.

        • Re: If they went dark until demands were met

          Yes he should definitely post nonymously himself to you so you can harass or stalk him, right? He told you why he posted AC and you just agreed with it.

          "Show us your face so we can get you fired" is peak twitter, said to anyone smart enough to wear a mask while holding a sign you hate.

    • Huh?

      Are you using a different reddit than me? The big forums I hit seem to be extremely well moderated. Small ones don't really need mods, the trolls don't bother with them since trolls are after eyeballs. The mid sized ones sometimes have a bit of trouble though. They're just big enough to attract trolls but not enough to attract lots of unpaid mods.
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          Murder me next? I hope you like a challenge.

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          I always mod up rsilvergun when I see him and I have points. He’s a great poster.

    • Re:

      If they were actually that loosely modded, they would be packed with spam.

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    Seems to me all they'd have to do is take away that power to make it go dark and the whole issue goes away - which they would do, ultimately, if the effects are as dire as you state.
    • reddit has thousands of unpaid mods. It's the only reason they're profitable. All they do is host the site and make sure it doesn't get hacked. The day to day work of making a forum usable is done by unpaid volunteers that Reddit can't survive without.
      
      Reddit isn't a social media site, it's a free message board host.

      • Re:

        Reddit isn't a social media site, it's a free message board host.

        Interesting distinction. Does reddit own the namespace? Let's say the current mod of r/videos decides to nuke it. Can reddit kick them out and re-open it for some other mod willing to do it? Or hire somebody to do it? Or does whoever originally claimed the name r/videos own it?

        This came up on Twitter with NPR decided to leave and Twitter said, OK, but we're going to make the handle available.

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          There are no restrictions on what reddit can do to r/videos. I don't see what that has to do with the distinction that the parent made between a social media site and a message board.

          • The distinction

            is that reddit is much, much more dependent on mods than Facebook.
            
            A social media site makes it's money from social connections. You're not on Facebook to discuss hobbies with strangers or get questions answered, you're there to connect with friends and family. FB might have some of the other stuff, but it's not their bread & butter.
            
            A message board is a very different thing than social media. There's not a lot of point to being anonymous on Facebook, but over on reddit (or here on/.) it lets you

        • Yes and no

          Yes they own the site, so yes they could take over r/video. But then they'd lose their users in a revolt. Margins are thin in the ad business (and make no mistake, Reddit is in the ad business). If even 1/4th, hell 1/8th their users jumped ship it would probably sink them.
          
          I can make a website tomorrow with user id NPR if I want. Doesn't mean I matter in the slightest. The currency online is eyeballs paid for with advertiser dollars. When you sell users you can only get away with so much.

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      Reddit communities aren't owned by reddit. They are created and destroyed by people. Taking away the ability to control your subreddit takes away the entire point of Reddit itself. It would be like Wordpress taking away your ability to create a website.

      • Re:

        There’s the real point and the PR point. If people knew the real point of reddit a lot of them wouldn’t go there.

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    It wouldn't work so long as they are all announcing that they will stop after 48 hours.

    If it matters so much for reddit, they'll just shrug and say "see you on Wednesday then".

    They are pretending that 48 hours of being private is a huge sacrifice and they can't stand to inflict that on their communities for more than that. It won't make a dent in Reddit opinion.

    In this case, the more likely scenario would be a drop in visitor count inducing them to back off a bit. On the flip side, they may declare the visi

    • This isn't about working though

      not directly. It's about awareness. It'll make millions of users aware of the issue. It's a different tactic.

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        Meh, awareness won't matter here. Either they are directly affected (their preferred apps no longer work) and they will inherently care (app developers have been mentioning it loudly so they already know). Or they aren't impacted and will say "oh well, two days without this reddit over an issue I don't care about". If all their favorite reddits were down for a couple of weeks they might get a bit irritated, but two days is nothing.

        • If the users make enough noise

          you be it'll matter. Wizards of The Coast tried basically the same thing (closing an open ecosystem) and it blew up in their face when the community noticed.
          
          Consolidation and a lack of anti-trust law enforcement have taken away a *lot* of consumer power, virtually all of it for necessities, but for luxuries there's still leverage. Especially for something with a low barrier to entry like tabletop like games and web forums.

    • 48 hours of severe decline of ad impressions is something they will notice. And there's nothing to say that they can't extend it beyond 48 hours if Reddit is going to be dicks about it.

      We're talking about volunteer efforts here, for the most part. Thousands of hours, collectively, of volunteer content posting and moderating. Fuck around too much with volunteers, and they stop volunteering to do work for you in short order. See: the decline of this once-great site that relies upon volunteer content creation.

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    those aren't the "big forums" though

    Nice analytics sites out there that tell what the hugest subreddits are, by posts, comments, growth, upvotes.... but I'm not going to bury them with slashdot tourist.

    These video ones don't appear at all in top 10 of each of any category. I'd expect reddit to say "don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out" , they may be top bandwidth hogs but that's it

    • You haven't been able to bury a site

      with/. tourists in 10 years:).
      
      They're big enough to raise awareness of the issue though. When they go dark a *lot* of people who didn't know about the issue will know now.

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    By "survive" do you mean its revenue exceeds its expenses, or do you mean continue to draw investment?

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    They can just remove the mods and set the forums public again. Problem solved. Finding new mods probably won't be too big a deal, there are plenty of people who will cheerfully work for free so they can have that sweet, sweet power over others that already drives plenty of mod teams.

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    Or even better, get submitters to post content to Lemmy [lemmy.ml] (or other instance, as this one is reporting load problems from the influx of new users already), or some other free site while dark. It would be good to not have all ones eggs in one basket.

  • Re:

    Some of them are. The mods of/r/Videos, e.g., have stated that they'll be extending the period if there's no movement. It's just one sub, but a biggie (26M subs)

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  Exactly how is "Going dark" "still using the platform"?

  It's literally refusing to use the platform for a day, with the obvious implication that if Reddit follows through, they'll be not using the platform for a hell of a lot longer. It's literally "Your site isn't so important that we can't live without it. And if you don't believe us, here's some action to prove the case."

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  This form of protest has actually had a material and positive effect on Reddit in the past... which sounds exactly like the opposite of Facebook.

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  Let's send the redditards "thoughts and prayers" for their efforts.

• Re:

  People aren't too stupid to use a browser, but some of them prefer an app to remove many annoyances deliberately put in to monetize better. Having driven away most users years ago who prefer privacy, effective ad blocking, and freedom of speech to convenience Reddit is now turning up the heat just a notch to see how many frogs jump out. At this point I'm just wishing the train wreck would happen faster. If Reddit dies tomorrow it will be far too late.

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    uBlock origin works to remove the ads well enough.

    • It's beyond just ad removal, the UI design is just subpar overall.

      I think people see the monetization goal and jump to assuming that is the root of the problems UI wise, even if they can't see why that would be connected. In truth, their UI design just isn't very good.

      • Re: Bunch of assholes

        Https://old.reddit.com isn't too bad

        • Not too bad if used on a desktop where you have a pointing device other than a finger.

          On mobile, there does not exist a respectable reddit designed UI, but some of the third parties do a decent job.

          If reddit's mobile app or web UI for mobile were vaguely decent, the third party apps would probably evaporate.

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            I use old.reddit.com in desktop mode on my phone.

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          That is the only way I can stand to use Reddit on a desktop, and Reddit Is Fun when on my phone.

          If they keep old.Reddit then I may just use that in the browser on my phone instead of an app.

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    They just lost 41% of their valuation according to Fidelity. Reddit is on shaky ground.

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      Reddit = dumpster fire

• Reddit has been gutting that, too. And I'm not talking about the shitty redesign, I'm talking about forcing users to use the app if they try to access parts of the site with a mobile browser. Been doing that for a couple of years now. They really are going balls deep in pushing their little dumpster fire.

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  • The irony is they purchased a pretty well liked 3rd party app (Alien Blue) to base their official app off of and then proceeded to change and gut most of what people liked about it.

    It's a pretty clear cut case of letting the priorities of your advertisers override the preferences of your users. Instead of just creating a user friendly experience that would draw people into using the app and figuring out how to fit ads into that experience and actually competing with the 3rd party apps they've been trying to direct users into an advertiser friendly platform at the expense of user experience.

    It's a case (in my opinion) of not simply being happy with making most of the money and doing everything in an attempt to make all of the money.

    • That's the problem with online advertising

      it doesn't work. So far the only thing that does are influencers, aka sales people. But run of the mill ads online, especially ones that aren't video, just don't work. You can get a little branding, and political adverts work because most elections are close and there's so much money on the line in politics, but if you want people to buy your product the only adverts that work consistently are TV ads.

  • They stopped that

    I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's part of the lead up to this. But for whatever reason they no longer force you to log into the app to read comments. I think you still need to log in to see NSFW forums, not sure, but they don't seem to be forcing the app at the moment.

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    They don't force it technically. They display a popup asking if you want to continue in the app or browser. Like half of the f-ing broken modern internet which is borderline unusable on a phone these days.

    • Re:

      Depending on the subreddit (if it's NSFW, "quarantined", or a few other qualifiers, e.g.), it won't let you continue without the app.

• On mobile, they nag and nag hard to stop using the browser, in some cases outright saying "nope, only through our mobile app".

  But even on desktop, "too stupid to use a web browser" implies that the target web developer *nailed* their UI exactly the way the user wants. One big easy example is 'old vs new' reddit. I just checked and new reddit on my sceen maximized caps the core content at 28% of my screen width, and with old reddit, it gets up to 50% (not *great* but far better than 28%). Similar story on vertical spacing. One might counter "but well it makes sense given you want to support mobile", however even then they fail due to things like "collapse this level of thread" having a minuscule hit box. Folks preferring old reddit are at the mercy of Reddit bothering to keep it going, and even then probably settling for something 'good enough' when you have a mouse pointer to deal with the inadequacies.

  On mobile, well, as mentioned before they nag you the hell to their app, making their mobile web experience deliberately crap. But regardless of app or web site, the touch experience is atrocious. Third party apps sprang up because people hated the poor UI design for mobile.

  Note that once upon a time it was not a forgone conclusion that the hosting of a conversation dictated the UI of interacting with the conversation. Newsreaders got to handle UI separate of content concerns. Reddit, through pretty atrocious Web design in conjunction with a surprisingly viable API resurrected that sensibility.

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    Then switch to desktop mode. Nag gone.

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      You seemed to have skipped over the part where the desktop UI still sucks if you have a touchscreen, and that the third-party app uis are better than the desktop browser ui anyway.

      But if people care so much, then stop using reddit when the changes get implemented. That seems to be a pretty valid course of action.

      • Re:

        I have no issues with it. Better than trying old.reddit on my phone.

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      Replace unable to read due to nag with unable to read due to 1 pixel font size and a UI layout which assumes you have a 32" monitor.

      Yep you really solved the issue there.

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    If old.reddit stops working I won't use reddit anymore. New reddit is an abomination because of its very narrow content div in the middle of the screen . And also because on new reddit I can see about 3-5 posts without scrolling whereas on old reddit I can see ~20 without scrolling.

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    Normally I'm right there with you on that with the exception that the majority of reddit posts (at least the ones I frequent) are loaded with pictures and have short often single sentence text associated with itself. This doesn't lend to easy reading across as page and the vertical format is at least for me far easier to read and follow, especially since most of the posts are about the pictures / videos.

    That said the big issue is the continuous scrolling bullshit making the new reddit crap itself on any bro

• Re:

  Reddit nags you to use the app if you use a web browser on mobile. Its super annoying.

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  The irony being that these 3rd party apps make using Reddit a vastly better experience than a web browser, and you're too stupid to have even looked at them to see what people are on about.

• I don't think anyone is particulary opposed to Reddit covering it's costs on API calls but the issue at hand is that those fees are looking to be out of bounds for the market and almost malicious in nature. The feeling is Reddit is charging exorbinant prices for API access to effectively shut down 3rd party applications without actually "shutting them down", which would be the honest move if they wanted to make it but they know that would drive a lot of loyal users right off the platform so they think they are being sneaky here.

  Since many of these app developers also make apps for other platforms their accusations is those other platforms of similar size charge 5-20x less per bundle of calls than Reddit is asking here.

  A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working [theverge.com]

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  I suspect its more about trying to monetize people using reddit to train language models - https://www.marketwatch.com/st... [marketwatch.com]

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    With the amount of trolling, shitposting, awful grammar, and just straight up disinformation all across reddit, it's an extremely bad idea to train any LLM/AI using reddit content. But I have no doubt some shitheads are doing exactly that and think it's a great idea.

    • Re:

      I'm not sure it's a bad idea. Some people are expecting LLM/AI to mirror human characteristics. Sadly, that includes trolling, shitposting, and all the other nasty things you mentioned. What better place than Reddit to train a would-be netizen in the 2020's?

      OTOH, if you want your (insert name of pseudo-AI here) to be polite and well-behaved, then you should deny it Web access altogether. Oh, wait...

• Re:

  Youtube makes tens of billions a year in profits, covering the cost of operation by like a thousand percent. But, yeah, no, they should show MORE ads.

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  NNTP died for a reason, it became untenable when it grew large enough to attract commercial and political interest, and is much moreso now with generative AI. It's getting hard to see how anonymous communication can retain any value, when you could just push a button to generate any particular viewpoint.

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    NNTP / Usenet plus a filtering service could work, just like the web plus uBlock Origin works.
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  Probably a much higher percentage of people who actively interact with Reddit use apps though.

  I also have to wonder why, if it's only 1%, Reddit cares to begin with. Sounds like it has virtually no effect on their advertising/etc revenues. AdBlock/uBlock Origin has a way bigger impact.

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    Chances are, while only a very very small number of the more than 800 million monthly active users utilize 3rd party apps, they likely browse much more than other. Stands to reason you have to be a fairly heavy user to bother paying for an app to use the site.

    It's still something they have to support. It's not free for them to offer and support the API, especially in terms of making new features available through it.

• Re:

  The impact is a minor inconvenience for the users, we will have to move to the official app (which side bar, steals about everything on your device that isn't nailed down in a similar way to Tic-Tok) and we can no longer use our third party apps that block ads, prevent data scraping or simply better designed with more accessibility features (The in-house app doesn't even try to accommodate Text-2-Speech, high contrast or colorblind modes).

  The other key issue is about moderator tools. This will effectively

• Re:

  my guess is because those few are moderators and think they matter and have enough leverage. time will tell if they do, but i wouldn't bet my lunch money. meanwhile media loves to run these stories.

• Re:

  You're correct about/r/conservative as nearly every topic is for flaired users only.

  I'm being sarcastic here and this sub should really get you angry. https://old.reddit.com/r/NotAD... [reddit.com]

• Re:

  That's referred to as "scraping", but it has the downside of being a maintenance nightmare, by virtue of being likely to be broken by trivial formatting changes on the site in question.