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Reddit Joins Twitter In Squeezing Devs With Unreasonable Fees
- Thread starter Macallik86
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Here's the CEO's full memo
Can't tell me in today's time he pressed send thinking nothing's gonna leak. So he must an idiot. Between Elon and this guy lying on the Apollo app developer saying he blackmailed Reddit now adding fuel to this forest fire running his mouth, you don't actually need tact, resourcefulness, or really any skill at all to be CEO of these large businesses
Can't tell me in today's time he pressed send thinking nothing's gonna leak. So he must an idiot. Between Elon and this guy lying on the Apollo app developer saying he blackmailed Reddit now adding fuel to this forest fire running his mouth, you don't actually need tact, resourcefulness, or really any skill at all to be CEO of these large businesses
That's the thing. He didn't say anything crazy per say, but any statement short of bowing down will be seen as antagonistic. By telling his staff that things are peachy, he is unintentionally telling the protesters to step their game up. A lot of 2-day blackouts are going to turn into indefinite blackouts as a result.
tactical mistake on his part. push comes to shove even if he forced some subreddits open again, he can't do all of them and mod them successfully. reddit relies on unpaid mod's maintaining subreddits that they have a passion for. the people who create content on these subs could move on permanently if they find another online community to spend their time on.
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GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
I don’t understand the intricacies of how third party apps work with Reddit etc so pls excuse my ignorance. Assuming the third party apps are there to make money, it sounds like what’s really happening is that they don’t like the pricing, right?
At the end of the day Reddit probably realizes most of its users are thoroughly addicted.
At the end of the day Reddit probably realizes most of its users are thoroughly addicted.
Yeah the pricing would equate to like a couple million a year for them. I doubt they make that much revenue. This isn't about the third party apps though. OpenAI and others trained their LLM models through the reddit API for free essentially. Reddit realizes how big of a f up this is and wants in on that AI money
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Damnnn…makes sense.
I saw an article that said one of the apps has 50K paying users ($10/year) but that they have 1.5 million daily users and a total of appx 5 million app downloads. I wonder how much ad revenue those daily numbers bring in. Even the app downloads probably make some money assuming the terms of the download gives it access to browsing data etc.
You might be talking about Apollo. Apollo doesn't run ads. It doesn't collect data either, it was a monthly sub or flat fee for permanent access with the option to pay for extra features. Think I paid around $5 for permanent access when it launched but that was a special launch price
And it's about third party apps just as much as it's about AI companies scraping their boards, they've talked more about apps than AI. Reddit sees the requests Apollo, Narwhal, and others send compared to their app's usage and want that data to sell and the ability to push ads to those people
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
YES that is the one! Based on some of the figures mentioned in the piece it seems like Reddit is basically washing its hands of these apps as opposed to wanting to negotiate.
Reddit CEO slams protesters, says he'll change site rules
Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.
www.nbcnews.com
Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, saying he'll change rules that favor ‘landed gentry’
Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.
Steve Huffman during an interview in San Francisco in 2017. David Paul / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
June 15, 2023, 6:05 PM EDT
By David Ingram
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday that he wants to bring an end to a user-led protest that has made large parts of the influential website inaccessible this week. Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
The protest took down thousands of message boards, known as subreddits, starting Monday, and some communities say they plan to continue the action indefinitely. The action has been led by Reddit’s unpaid, volunteer moderators, who have a high level of control over how their subreddits are run. Participating communities went “private,” making them unviewable even to members. The protesters oppose changes that will most likely cut off their ability to access Reddit through third-party apps, and their action has hobbled much of the site.
Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable.
Reddit’s current policy says moderators may be removed by higher-ranking moderators or by Reddit itself for inactivity or violations of Reddit-wide rules. They may also remove themselves. Many have held their positions for years.
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
Moderators have argued that the high level of control over their communities is well-deserved because of the hours of free labor they’ve put into making and enforcing rules on their subreddits. Any plan to reduce their influence might result in another backlash.
Huffman, who co-founded Reddit 18 years ago this month, said he believes the leaders of the protest may have had popular support when it started Monday but have lost most of it since.
One change that is “really important,” he said, “is making sure that, for example, the protests, now or in the future, are actually representative of their communities. And I think that may have been the case for many at the beginning of this week, but that’s less and less the case as time goes on.”
He said about 80% of Reddit’s top 5,000 communities are back open after what was supposed to have been a two-day content strike Monday and Tuesday. But moderators of some of the biggest subreddits — including the most populous of all, r/funny — have extended their protests by remaining inaccessible in “private” mode.
“Our core concerns still aren’t satisfied,” blackout organizers wrote in a post this week titled “The Fight Continues,” explaining their extension. “Reddit has been silent since it began, and internal memos indicate that they think they can wait us out.”
Huffman said those decisions should, in effect, go to votes of members.
“What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,” he said. “We’ve got some old, legacy decisions on how communities are run that we need to kind of work our way out of.”
He gave no timeline for any changes, saying more subreddits might end their protests voluntarily first. “I think most will get there through their own natural decision-making process, and so we’re letting that play out,” he said.
Huffman said he wasn’t considering changes that would centralize power within Reddit as a company, such as having Reddit’s paid staff take on more of the duties of moderation.
This week’s rebellion is a response to part of Reddit’s plan to succeed as a business. Reddit has for years been among the most popular sites on the internet, with passionate users and a major impact on internet culture, but it hasn’t made anywhere near the profit of services that are otherwise its peers in tech, such as Instagram and YouTube.
i wonder how often users will be allowed to vote out moderators?
will there be moderator term limits?
how will users be sure votes aren't rigged since reddit is no longer open source?
will users be allowed to vote out moderators who are reddit employees?
wonder if he's aware that he's introduced a possible unintended consequence of users no longer creating subreddits at the same rate as before. subreddit creators who end up mods usually spend a lot of time bootstrapping the sub with content to attract more users. now those people can be voted out instead of users just created subs when they didn't like the moderation of the subreddit they were in. a lot of great subreddits got started because users didn't like mod actions or inaction,
will there be moderator term limits?
how will users be sure votes aren't rigged since reddit is no longer open source?
will users be allowed to vote out moderators who are reddit employees?
wonder if he's aware that he's introduced a possible unintended consequence of users no longer creating subreddits at the same rate as before. subreddit creators who end up mods usually spend a lot of time bootstrapping the sub with content to attract more users. now those people can be voted out instead of users just created subs when they didn't like the moderation of the subreddit they were in. a lot of great subreddits got started because users didn't like mod actions or inaction,
As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty
Ars spoke with community mods about where Reddit goes from here.
arstechnica.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20230616163818/https://styles.redditmedia.com/t5_4yrnne/styles/image_widget_bvsh04ztkd4b1.jpg?format=pjpg&v=enabled&s=9d434a974fe9117c22327f7d5d62c5d8640a689a/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24730994/236702_Steve_Huffman_Interview_WJoel.jpg)
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
“The blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community.”
www.theverge.com
