The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
For me, no matter what Reddit is dead. Lemmy is enough for my time wasting and has enough content that I have not missed it one bit. I feel like the communities are smaller, less toxic, and I want to contribute more here. They could completely reverse their decision and I will not return and I hope there are enough like me to make a difference. It just amazes me a site that exists to link to other content on the web and store text comments about said content isn’t profitable.
Lemmy is also ad free. Love that.
The whole internet can be ad free if you want it to be… even from your phone.
I’m always astounded at how few people use ad blockers. Fuck the entire ad-based system, it is cancer.
Any instance or community can include paid content, but the numbers are still a bit low for that now.
Thing is, if there was in instance or community doing ads, I now can simly block, mute or defederate them. With reddit I had to use an adblocker, scriptblocker and the reddit enhancement suite to be adfree. And I could not be sure it’d stay that way.
reminding me I need to manage to archive my data off reddit. XD And ready the kill script on June 30ths to delete my posts.
I do fee so much better now that reddit is dead to me. I check lemmy few times a week.
Right now it looks like it’s a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article’s title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren’t clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
Or it becomes mostly unmoderated, near a major election, at the same time as twitter turns into disinfo central.
I burned my account to the ground and sent them a GDPR request.
Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
Why isn’t Lemmy viable?
It’s not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won’t spend the time to figure it out.
Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
- After going through the list of servers, I had to pick one of them. As someone who went through that whole situation with XMPP, I know that this alone is enough to make most people turn away.
- Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
- Since the page told me that if I didn’t hear anything back after 24h, I could consider my application rejected, I wrote another account application at feddit.de after waiting for about 48h.
- The feddit.de account was approved, but I only noticed by my login working a few days later. I didn’t get any notification. That’s what I’m using right now.
- After more than a week, I got an email that my beehaw application was accepted.
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
I disagree that there are not enough people here. Beehaw is busy enough for act as a reddit replacement imo. The federation setup is complex, but given how many bugs and technical issues it has right now, it’s probably for the best - only people with patience and a lot of interest in Lemmy should be joining right now.
I’d just like to say sorry for the experience you’ve had with Beehaw, we’re trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it’s been a really hard time… We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there’s about 2k left)
Maybe change the wording on the site to say one week to assume rejection, not 24h.
Or you can just figure that out from the fact they are swamped? This constant need for instant satisfaction is unreasonable to expect from others.
Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
Bro this is a skill issue
Not everyone is a writer.
You misinterpreted what the application form is for. I have accounts on 3 instances (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org and lemmy.one) and for each of them my application message was “came from reddit.” It’s just a way for them to reduce abusive signups; even with that, 2/3 of those instances don’t even require email verification. It literally takes 10 seconds to sign up and somehow you spent 86400 of them.
To reiterate what I said in the last paragraph;
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
This article has so many inaccuracies… I haven’t talked with a single person that thinks Reddit shouldn’t charge for api access. And the final comment about being legally obligated to pursue profit is just factually incorrect. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
You can find plenty of other sources just like that one saying the same thing. I’m pretty sick of this myth, because it gives all these companies a bogeyman to hide behind.
This point struck me too:
Reddit is under no obligation to make its API free. But, it seems, the company has overreached in enforcing the new policy. If its target is the largest AI firms, then it should focus on curbing their parasitic proclivities and not going after beloved and useful software its users and moderators depend on.
This is my feeling. I understand that it could cost something. But the eye-watering rates for the small fish and the speed of the extortion is the issue.
Think of it as killing two birds with one stone: they monetize users by getting AI firms to pay for all the valuable content redditors have posted over the years, and they kill off app competitors who are giving redditors alternatives to the mobile app.
That’s really all it’s about.
AI firms will just scrape anyway.
Which, somewhat hilariously, will be more resource intensive than the API. It’s a part of the reason why companies have APIs, to dissuade scraping.
I’m curious why this is classified as “losing battle”… seems pretty successful so far to me.
Dude runs one of the world’s most popular websites and he can’t turn a profit with 20 years of free content and free labor.
You tell me who’s the fucking loser…
Only if you define mods winning as ‘things go back to what they were’.
The CEO is only ‘winning’ in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.
His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His ‘victory’ will be pyrrhic at beast.
Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they’re locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).
We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it’s not ours. The space isn’t in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.
Well, what’s happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they’ll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.
Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don’t need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.
Huffman will still have most of Reddit’s chickens, and that’s why he thinks it’s worth it. But the hens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who’ll produce nothing for him other than noise.
Mods are losing… but so is he.
In what way? Reddit’s outlook was a lot brighter before this thing started. Maybe they’re not losing as fast as one would like but they are losing.
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. In the long term we’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
Those are just users numbers, which didn’t dip all that much even during the blackout. The doomscrollers will keep coming until it sucks.
Reddit still has hundreds of millions of active users per month. They may have lost some people, but this many eyeballs has a huge potential for profit.
No longer being viable as a business would be “lost”, not “losing”, if you ask me. We’ll see how many volunteer mods they can shed without the platform becoming shit.
Battle’s not over until the third party apps go offline. That’s when the real damage is bound to start.
Fuck u/spez
(That was missing from this post.)
They did say he’s “the Kmart version of Elon Musk” which I thought was quite funny.
It’s his site. He will always win. Fuck him and greedy capitalists fucks like him.
PS: Enjoy Lemmy
Wasn’t lemmy created by tankies? Avoided it for kbin (I’m aware of the federation) due to this.
And Reddit has been backed by Tencent - CCP supporters by default - and Peter Thiel - a white supremacists and actual, literal fascist.
The politics of the people behind for-profit endeavours that the public has no actual control over regardless of stake seemingly never comes up. The politics of people behind things that challenge for-profit endeavours and gives control of things back to the public is often under the microscope.
We don’t know ernest’s politics. What if it came out tomorrow that he was an anarchist? Or that he was also a Leninist? Or was a white supremacist? Or that he liked Nickelback?
Or that he liked Nickelback?
I’ll see past many things, but Nickelback?
Not even once.
