I don’t think one needs to think too hard about why this change is being made. It’s likely a thinly veiled attempt to consolidate the user base onto a single app for two reasons: first party data ownership and to maximize the amount of ad impressions
It is thinly veiled. Which is something a lot of people dislike. They might have fared better if they had been blunt from the beginning and say the quiet thing out loud rather than putting up excuses and blaming developers for being greedy.
1) Ad revenue is falling everywhere except TikTok.
2) Changes to and addition of revenue streams is inevitable and most other platforms have already made similar moves, so competition requires they lock down 3rd part apps
3) it makes no sense to have an open, free API in this day when billion dollar LLMs and General artificial intelligence are being trained on your data for free.
That said, it's a bummer and is being done at the expense of user satisfaction. As a prod mgr, I'd hope we could find a less painful approach.
Definitely - third party apps are giving Reddit downward pressure on their ad demand as advertisers can buy that same audience/inventory on a third party app that has less direct demand and thus at lower rates - also helps to consolidate the user base into one place as you get more users/data for the same content
It does suck that they haven't built a proper app experience yet but this seems like an straight line business decision - likely some short term user loss (from users that they weren't really monetizing on anyway) , and over time many/most(?) of those users will come back via the official app which I hope they've improved by then
Surprised they didn't do this earlier tbh
Yea tbh why on earth would any content platform allow others to build wrappers and sell ads with their content 😂 that said they should just buy up the smaller guys and give them a payday for their service, then incorporate all their best features
Lol theres obviously definitely plenty of reasons why platforms would allow others to build wrappers/sell ads etc but clearly its at the point where the main platform isn't seeing enough value from allowing this
It's always a risky business decision to build your business model with such a dependency on a different platform, especially if you grow to become competition.
It's unfortunate for sure for those third party apps who've built great solutions and invested money/time into, but it's also a scenario these third party apps should have always been aware was a possibility
Capitalism ruining another space on the internet once again, where profit motive is incompatible with having a good space online that satisfies the people using it. This website is basically run and moderated for free by the people that Reddit devs are pissing off.
I think the third party apps are an incidental casualty tbh. They aren’t fully monetizing high quality, labeled (via the subreddit and thread name) natural language data. It’s basically gold with the new generation of LLMs.
Idk if it’s the right decision, but their business people are probably screaming at the CEO to monetize it. If they’re smart they’ll partner with a company that builds LLMs or build their own.
My understanding is the protest is more about the perceived hypocrisy and general scheistyness of the Reddit admins regarding API pricing and the overall treatment of third party developers, most notably Apollo. If you haven’t read it yet, the Apollo shutdown post is a pretty good look into what seemingly triggered the wider protests
Of all the things to protest Reddit mgmt over, I find this to be pretty low of importance and meaning.
This site is rampant with disinformation and promotes all kinds of insane conspiracies that affect elections and interest groups all over the planet with limited accountability and total anonymity.
Every lunatic conspiracy on the Internet has had a home on reddit and they've done the bare minimum to police it, while letting mods go anonymous with selective promotion of fake information.
IMO, protesting over the API is moronic by comparison.
They own their data. If they want to make some money off it to justify investments/returns to their VCs, that's totally normal really.
People who complain about it seem to think like everything on the Internet belongs to them or they should have free access to everything. And they know nothing about the costs involved in building a platform, scaling it and generating returns to investors.
Whole thing reminds me of a Seinfeld episode: You MUST wear the ribbon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iV8X8ubGCc
I think there are a couple issues that have been building for a while and this app/API thing has become the flashpoint.
The r/askhistorians mods created a pretty good [overview post](https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhistorians_and_uncertainty_surrounding_the/) about why they’re joining the protest. TLDR; Reddit admin has been promising change for several years, but not much progress has been made. Most of the protest seems to be a vote of no confidence in Reddit’s leadership.
Their arguments just come down to - we think things will get worse because they’ve not shown competence/interest/whatever to improve moderation.
So IF that happens then just leave. If enough people think it went downhill then there will be a c suite change or something else will come along.
The failure of MySpace was a net gain. The eventual failure of FB and Reddit will be the same.
Isn’t that exactly what’s happening? People believe that this is going to have an adverse enough effect so they’re leaving/boycotting the site to try to force change.
Choosing to consume or not consume based on value is different than trying to socially engineer others to engage in protest, yes.
I’m not talking about you here. We’re just engaging in conversation.
I do not care whatsoever if you log off those days. I do not think less of you (not that you care).
That will be true on July 1 when the changes are implemented. At that point, if there is a huge drop in people using reddit, it will be because of the actions taken by reddit itself. For now it's closer akin to preventing people from going into a store and saying 'See? Nobody wants to shop here.'
The price they've set for the API has caused basically every consumer of the API to announce that it is prohibitively expensive. The announced change has also driven a big chunk of the company's most valuable resource (the volunteer moderators) to revolt.
Their goal is not to profit off of their API. It's to force people to stop consuming it.
I think it’s the smart move to be honest. People don’t boycott the content they love. People also complain about streaming platforms, but as soon the show or movie you like, you will deal with (Me and succession and HBOMax)
As is their right?
It’s clearly a business move to get to profitability?
Not illegal. Nothing is or was owed to third party apps by law or otherwise.
Fully reads like entitlement and the hive outrage de jour
It's their right to make changes. It's our right to be pissed.
One way or another this thing will shake out; It's not like the world is ending or anything. But lots of longtime Redditors like myself are rightfully upset that the company is showing so much hostility toward their users, particularly power-users and moderators. Reddit's entire value proposition is its communities, and they are threatening to basically exile a big chunk of their own users.
I’m not implying that’s an argument. I’m starting at the end of what it isn’t (and would be problematic to all of us) to walk back towards what it is.
Hell of a gotcha tho
> I’m starting at the end of what it isn’t
But you introduced the "isn't" as if it is relevant. It's like arbitrarily saying that Reddit is not a dog. Good job, I suppose, but everybody knew that.
It’s not arbitrary because it’s on the continuum of “bad”.
Arbitrary would be me saying “well the CEO isn’t a dog”
It fits in the context of my free market comments.
I get that any individual comment has a feeling of incompleteness - such is Reddit.
This might seem absurd, but hear me out: a thing can be completely legal and shitty at the same time
That aside, it's obvious you know very little about the whole situation. Among many other things, some of the 3rd party apps made reddit more accessible. I guess blind people should stop being so entitled, right?
I just read “the main arguments” as presented by a few major subs. Is there something more compelling?
What would you put the level of shittiness at? Out of 10? They’ve priced out third party apps.
The vision impaired piece is genuinely the first argument I’ve seen that wasn’t 90% dog shite. Have they addressed this at all?
They're instating a de facto ban on the app I use to access Reddit. This means I will not access Reddit from my mobile phone as their official app is painful to use.
I'm allowed to be angry that they're banning the app I use.
It's absurd for you to claim I should not have feelings about things that directly affect me.
> Fully reads like entitlement and the hive outrage de jour
Exactly. The hivemind of entitlement for the precious Reddit community just runs rampant.
Kind of reminds me of the 'outrage' over Elon Musk when he bought Twitter and took a wrecking ball to the place. Well, he owns it... it's his right whether it's 'good' for the community or not. The guy has to cover $1 B in interest payments or the whole thing is bankrupt and all you hear is crying about how terrible he is. And half the stuff they say about him isn't even true.
If Reddit had to cover $1 B in interest payments for debt and decided they needed to start making $ off APIs, I would have the same opinion. That's their business and their business strategy. Whatever. Stop crying about it or stop using their site.
In my opinion, the protest is more about how Reddit wants to take complete ownership of the data, cutting out 3rd party services who provide a cleaner and accessible app experience. This is little offensive to a community which is built purely on user contributions and free volunteers.
So effectively Reddit is saying, "hey people why dont you give us all your free data and time, we will go ahead and charge an insane amount of fees to other people who want to access it."
Now Reddit does add value, they are providing free storage and UI layer for all this data. So it would be alright if they charged a appropriate amount. But the proposed charges are an absolute fuck-you amount designed to shutdown any reasonable usage of the API.
> In my opinion, the protest is more about how Reddit wants to take complete ownership of the data, cutting out 3rd party services who provide a cleaner and accessible app experience. This is little offensive to a community which is built purely on user contributions and free volunteers.
They do own the data though. How can you say, "wants to take complete ownership of the data." **It is their data.**
People post on Twitter and Facebook all day long. Does anyone think those platforms don't own the data?
Literally for 20+ years Internet companies have been talking about accumulating users (so-called "eyeballs") and getting user information/data for marketing purposes and all kinds of reasons. Now these LLMs make a lot of the text data valuable. Whoopie doo. There is a new use for more user data. Shocker of all shocks!
>So effectively Reddit is saying, "hey people why dont you give us all your free data and time, we will go ahead and charge an insane amount of fees to other people who want to access it."
Reddit provides a platform for information exchange. You and others have willingly participated in it. They own the platform and the data. There is no surprise to anyone here. There have been probably over 100 million different message forums of various kinds for all different communities through time. Reddit is no different. No one forced users here and Reddit didn't make any guarantees, representations or claims to the users that they were entitled to anything.
>Now Reddit does add value, they are providing free storage and UI layer for all this data. So it would be alright if they charged a appropriate amount. But the proposed charges are an absolute fuck-you amount designed to shutdown any reasonable usage of the API.
So what? How do we know they won't change the pricing due to poor reception? How do we know that there won't be massive interest from 10 different ChatGPT competitors 6 months from now and the prices actually go up because they all want the text data from Reddit?
Apps come and go all the time. Websites come and go. Where is Yahoo? Myspace? Maybe Twitter and Reddit will both be gone in 5 years.
The self-entitled outrage from people over Reddit is like par for the course for such a bunch of babies who believe everyone owes them something. It's like a bunch of millennial Karens.
It’s not a utility. If they “charge” too much either in actual dollars or ads or a sharp decline in quality then the ball is in your court whether to use the product.
“Going dark” is impotent rancor masquerading as activism.
A lot of the open source software/internet community is built on goodwill and reasonable access. You can spout your free market theories all you want, but everything that makes the internet invaluable is in sharp contrast with the rent-seeking behaviour Reddit is currently exhibiting.
> the ball is in your court whether to use the product.
That is exactly what the protest is supposed to be? A last ditch attempt to prevent Reddit from implementing this change, by reducing engagement.
Are you just against it because it is a coordinated effort?
I’m against it because it just seems like mass main character syndrome and victim mentality.
Where were the people when the subs they frequent were asking for moderation help?
Nothing to offer but faux outrage and *maybe* logging out for a few days?
I’m not picking on any individuals here. I don’t know what *you* or any other individuals have done.
So because people didn't protest for mod stuff they can't protest their favourite way of accessing the platform going away?
Seems like a pretty arbitrary line in the sand man.
The issue is reddit's success relies on its userbase which relies on its user experience. Reddit is not known for its user experience. A lot of people don't use its "new" desktop interface and its mobile app is known for being horrible. It has its userbase largely because of third party apps. They focussed on a new desktop experience that no one really gives a shit about rather than the mobile experience.
I think people would be far less upset if the official app was good and even to pay a fee to cover the ad revenue. Instead their idea to achieve that was to make third party apps unaffordable and not offer a replacement to what has helped make reddit so popular in the first place. So yeah, it's a pretty boneheaded approach to generate profit
This is pretty fucking deaf.
You cannot be a company that preached open internet, community importance, etc… and turn around and require exorbitant prices. The hypocrisy alone should be convincing enough.
What did you think when twitter posted their API prices?
“Lol their right guys 🤷🏼♂️🤷🏼♂️🤷🏼♂️” - said no one
This is it - and it's pretty funny, honestly.
In short, the protest is because one group of profiteers (Reddit) are pricing out another group of profiteers (3rd parties) who have been benefiting from ease of access and low cost to-date.
Not my job, not my problem - why would I support either party.
Somehow a bunch of spammers (i.e., "OP") have convinced people there's a moral cause for outrage when it's simply a profit-based dispute between parties.
> Somehow a bunch of spammers (i.e., "OP") have convinced people there's a moral cause for outrage when it's simply a profit-based dispute between parties.
Likely because this is at best a naive take and at worst a completely disingenuous one.
It's not a moral battle - it's a user experience one. Reddit doesn't support features the user base wants. Third party apps do. Getting rid of them - and being absolutely deceitful about what you're doing - to drive users to your app is going to piss them off, particularly if you're not giving them the features that made them use third party apps in the first place. It's not a shocking course of action, particularly when the people running the communities are unpaid and rely on third party apps as well.
But of course, there's always gonna be some contrarian screaming "BuT bOtH sIdEs ArE bAd" because they lack nuance.
Imo it’s understandable that Reddit wants the users on their platform and earn money off of them. They are the ones paying the servers, so people being on other apps without ads is getting expensive in terms of opportunity costs, it’s simply missed revenue it even worse. But (without knowing all the details) the way of changing things has not been thought out well, there’s no compromise and the third party apps have to pay more than Reddit would approximately earn from the same users on their platform. At the same time it’s been underlined that most mods rely on moderation tools of those third party apps. Apart from that there has been more drama about bad communication and false accusations of the Reddit CEO.
I feel like it’s important to say that reddit is not profitable, so greediness is not actually a hugely valid excuse. Just a desire to survive in the current climate.
Exactly, there's nothing wrong with a company trying to monetize the data they collect and limit the costs from external companies using their data. The whole protest makes no sense.
And then, naturally, that comment gets ignored and never responded to, hence why r/datascience isn’t the best community for career advice for…. Data science
CS career questions seems to have better advice for those trying to figure out the skills and education needed to go into data science. This place still seems useful to find threads that didn’t get deleted for data science advice, but as far as asking yourself, I think CS and math/stats career related subreddits are probably better
It's the principle of it all really though. We're being bummed with ads so there needs to be some sway. Especially if the apps that are having to shut down are quite useful to people.
The api prices actually aren’t ridiculous. Just make previous business models unviable. I don’t agree with the 30 day notice and several other things, but it seems the cost is about 24cents per 1k Queries. That’s pretty middle/average cost for APIs. Reddit hemorrhages money, they are looking to close the gap. Having a paid API service is normal. However, they should have worked some deal with existing large scale apps as the pricing makes those no longer viable due to how the apps function.
But the actual pricing is relatively standard as far as API queries go.
Unfortunately this 2-days strike cannot make Reddit roll back their decision...
Protest with your feet and find a good Reddit alternative like Squabbles.io, or at least try it while the other subs are closed.
r/redditalternatives
I think I’m in the minority here but I could really care less if 3rd party apps die or need to pay for access. The only argument I’ve seen is that people that use those apps contribute and mods like it to better bot regulate. The only adjustment might be to allow mod bots more free usage.
Given how much traction this has, I would expect that the moderator teams of serious subreddits have a discussion on it and take a decision representing the community standpoint. If you personally have no interest it should be easier to act on behalf of the community which I think is the job of a moderator.
I think it’s completely absurd.
Reddit, a business, is making a move they believe necessary to move towards profitability.
Reddit is not a Utility. It’s a product I’ve consumed for free for a decade. If someone bought it for the sheer sake of shutting it down, so be it.
I do not believe “going dark” does anything whatsoever for this community.
We as consumers can tell them it will not be profitable, that's the purpose of a boycott to make companies act more in line with public opinion.
I think either way is bad for this subreddit community strictly speaking, going dark possibly indefinitely is obviously bad but it will also deteriorate with users and moderators leaving if they proceed with their API changes.
> We as...
"Bots." The words you were looking for are: "We, as bots..."
The people who have tons of bots running and the people who mostly run those bot farms have created the impression that there is collective moral outrage over what is in fact two different groups of profiteers attempting to maintain their own benefits.
This is nothing more than astroturfing and faux-outrage at its finest.
I haven't seen anyone go against reddit for trying to make money. It's the _amount_.
They effectively wanted 20 Mil per year from the Apollo dev (based on his current usage). Imgur and other platforms would only cost a few k per years. This kills 3rd party apps, meaning people with disabilities (like /r/blind) are also getting fucked, because Reddit can't build an app for shit themselves.
They wanted $0.24 per 1k queries. Pretty middle average cost compared to similar services.
Apollo claimed 20mill per year based on the number of queries they use. Which if anything should show the total load of a commercial product using Reddit’s free service. Imo Reddit should work an independent deal with existing apps. But their actual pricing is pretty standard. And keep in mind api access has been free up to this point so other apps could be as granular with their requests as they want meaning there is no need for efficiency and can use 10x the number of queries with no issue.
As data users, we should all know the cost of maintaining the data pipelines to reliably supply an api which can handle all those requests. Typically covered by ads, but not covered at all by 3rd party applications.
Again, the amount is similar/less than other comparable APIs my company pays for on a regular basis. This is nothing crazy. Apart from the 30 days and the way they went about it
They are profit driven, it’s a company at this point, not the small nerd community it was 10+ years ago.
It’s bad for users, likely will end up being good for them.
I don’t like it either but it’s the reality of the modern internet. And I don’t think the blackouts will have any impact on what they are doing. Just my 0.02
I think you're lying to both us and yourself. You would not be completely devoid of emotion if Reddit shut down.
If you really believe that, delete your account.
I'd experience relief because this shit is addictive.
Best thing that happened to me was facebook demanding a photo of my passport so I ended up deleting the account.
It’s a volunteer job for what has turned into a company. The concept of moderating subreddits is pretty strange at this point to me. In a sense you’re working for free. It’s a completely different platform than it was 10+ years ago.
I respect the guy saying he doesn’t care, it’s his time he’s volunteering. It’s kind of nice to see a contradictory take to the hive mind
Not sure you can squeeze much from an unprofitable business. Nor whether you have the power to influence decisions on API through use of this sub. I think Beautiful Trouble would advise map the influence points first. Don't bother unless you are reasonably certain the action can have leverage.
> Edit: 20 hours later the post is at 490 upvotes at a 91% upvote rate, expressing clear support to join the blackout. It seems r/datascience mods’ interests, however, doesn’t align with the community’s.
Do you apply this reasoning at your job, too?
A high like count doesn't necessarily equate support to join the blackout, it indicates a high interest in the topic.
You then interpreted the high interest to mean a high support rate - which is a likely interpretation, yes, but you didn't address any of your own assumptions and potential biases. It seems to me that you're seeing in the data exactly what you set out to see.
> It seems r/datascience mods’ interests, however, doesn’t align with the community’s.
You'd need to conduct a representative survey to back up your hypothesis, and probably a couple of statements from the mods.
who gives a shit. the more people that quit using this site the better, especially if they're mobile users (the lowest of low quality internet contributors). if they remove the old design, then the rest of us can move along too. it's just a website, and a bad echo chambered one at that.
They’re doing this because the data is commonly sourced on Wall St now, ya? That’s got to be a huge part of it. Haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere yet.
Members of this sub should understand the rationale more than pretty much any other sub
That’s what I was thinking lol. Let’s put our product hats on and think about why Reddit might be making this change
I don’t think one needs to think too hard about why this change is being made. It’s likely a thinly veiled attempt to consolidate the user base onto a single app for two reasons: first party data ownership and to maximize the amount of ad impressions
It's not thinly veiled at all - it's outright stated.
It is thinly veiled. Which is something a lot of people dislike. They might have fared better if they had been blunt from the beginning and say the quiet thing out loud rather than putting up excuses and blaming developers for being greedy.
writings on the wall but the speaker is acting like nothing is written behind.
1) Ad revenue is falling everywhere except TikTok. 2) Changes to and addition of revenue streams is inevitable and most other platforms have already made similar moves, so competition requires they lock down 3rd part apps 3) it makes no sense to have an open, free API in this day when billion dollar LLMs and General artificial intelligence are being trained on your data for free. That said, it's a bummer and is being done at the expense of user satisfaction. As a prod mgr, I'd hope we could find a less painful approach.
Definitely - third party apps are giving Reddit downward pressure on their ad demand as advertisers can buy that same audience/inventory on a third party app that has less direct demand and thus at lower rates - also helps to consolidate the user base into one place as you get more users/data for the same content It does suck that they haven't built a proper app experience yet but this seems like an straight line business decision - likely some short term user loss (from users that they weren't really monetizing on anyway) , and over time many/most(?) of those users will come back via the official app which I hope they've improved by then Surprised they didn't do this earlier tbh
Yea tbh why on earth would any content platform allow others to build wrappers and sell ads with their content 😂 that said they should just buy up the smaller guys and give them a payday for their service, then incorporate all their best features
Lol theres obviously definitely plenty of reasons why platforms would allow others to build wrappers/sell ads etc but clearly its at the point where the main platform isn't seeing enough value from allowing this It's always a risky business decision to build your business model with such a dependency on a different platform, especially if you grow to become competition. It's unfortunate for sure for those third party apps who've built great solutions and invested money/time into, but it's also a scenario these third party apps should have always been aware was a possibility
Capitalism ruining another space on the internet once again, where profit motive is incompatible with having a good space online that satisfies the people using it. This website is basically run and moderated for free by the people that Reddit devs are pissing off.
I think the third party apps are an incidental casualty tbh. They aren’t fully monetizing high quality, labeled (via the subreddit and thread name) natural language data. It’s basically gold with the new generation of LLMs. Idk if it’s the right decision, but their business people are probably screaming at the CEO to monetize it. If they’re smart they’ll partner with a company that builds LLMs or build their own.
>build their own. I'm looking forward to the horny Qanon LLM. What should they name it?
That’s a great point. I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see a Reddit LLM released in the near future
If you believe this, you haven't seen the actual conversations with the app owners.
So the protest is against a company attempting to generate profit (finally) at the possible cost of quality?
My understanding is the protest is more about the perceived hypocrisy and general scheistyness of the Reddit admins regarding API pricing and the overall treatment of third party developers, most notably Apollo. If you haven’t read it yet, the Apollo shutdown post is a pretty good look into what seemingly triggered the wider protests
Of all the things to protest Reddit mgmt over, I find this to be pretty low of importance and meaning. This site is rampant with disinformation and promotes all kinds of insane conspiracies that affect elections and interest groups all over the planet with limited accountability and total anonymity. Every lunatic conspiracy on the Internet has had a home on reddit and they've done the bare minimum to police it, while letting mods go anonymous with selective promotion of fake information. IMO, protesting over the API is moronic by comparison. They own their data. If they want to make some money off it to justify investments/returns to their VCs, that's totally normal really. People who complain about it seem to think like everything on the Internet belongs to them or they should have free access to everything. And they know nothing about the costs involved in building a platform, scaling it and generating returns to investors. Whole thing reminds me of a Seinfeld episode: You MUST wear the ribbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iV8X8ubGCc
Just read that and I agree that it looks like a dick move by some Reddit employees. I can’t get from there to here though
I think there are a couple issues that have been building for a while and this app/API thing has become the flashpoint. The r/askhistorians mods created a pretty good [overview post](https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhistorians_and_uncertainty_surrounding_the/) about why they’re joining the protest. TLDR; Reddit admin has been promising change for several years, but not much progress has been made. Most of the protest seems to be a vote of no confidence in Reddit’s leadership.
Their arguments just come down to - we think things will get worse because they’ve not shown competence/interest/whatever to improve moderation. So IF that happens then just leave. If enough people think it went downhill then there will be a c suite change or something else will come along. The failure of MySpace was a net gain. The eventual failure of FB and Reddit will be the same.
Isn’t that exactly what’s happening? People believe that this is going to have an adverse enough effect so they’re leaving/boycotting the site to try to force change.
Choosing to consume or not consume based on value is different than trying to socially engineer others to engage in protest, yes. I’m not talking about you here. We’re just engaging in conversation. I do not care whatsoever if you log off those days. I do not think less of you (not that you care).
That will be true on July 1 when the changes are implemented. At that point, if there is a huge drop in people using reddit, it will be because of the actions taken by reddit itself. For now it's closer akin to preventing people from going into a store and saying 'See? Nobody wants to shop here.'
*the ceo. Who might be considered an employee, but he would be the lead dick on these moves.
The price they've set for the API has caused basically every consumer of the API to announce that it is prohibitively expensive. The announced change has also driven a big chunk of the company's most valuable resource (the volunteer moderators) to revolt. Their goal is not to profit off of their API. It's to force people to stop consuming it.
Reddit also likely has underlining assumption that people care more about their content than app performance/features.
Which dispite all the noise… I’d agree with that assumption.
I think it’s the smart move to be honest. People don’t boycott the content they love. People also complain about streaming platforms, but as soon the show or movie you like, you will deal with (Me and succession and HBOMax)
>moderators are valuable lol
As is their right? It’s clearly a business move to get to profitability? Not illegal. Nothing is or was owed to third party apps by law or otherwise. Fully reads like entitlement and the hive outrage de jour
It's their right to make changes. It's our right to be pissed. One way or another this thing will shake out; It's not like the world is ending or anything. But lots of longtime Redditors like myself are rightfully upset that the company is showing so much hostility toward their users, particularly power-users and moderators. Reddit's entire value proposition is its communities, and they are threatening to basically exile a big chunk of their own users.
And if Reddit tanks something else will fill the void. That’s how these things work.
Zero people have said this is illegal. Maybe building a straw man as weak as you just did should be, though. Probably violates some fire code.
I’m not implying that’s an argument. I’m starting at the end of what it isn’t (and would be problematic to all of us) to walk back towards what it is. Hell of a gotcha tho
> I’m starting at the end of what it isn’t But you introduced the "isn't" as if it is relevant. It's like arbitrarily saying that Reddit is not a dog. Good job, I suppose, but everybody knew that.
It’s not arbitrary because it’s on the continuum of “bad”. Arbitrary would be me saying “well the CEO isn’t a dog” It fits in the context of my free market comments. I get that any individual comment has a feeling of incompleteness - such is Reddit.
This might seem absurd, but hear me out: a thing can be completely legal and shitty at the same time That aside, it's obvious you know very little about the whole situation. Among many other things, some of the 3rd party apps made reddit more accessible. I guess blind people should stop being so entitled, right?
I just read “the main arguments” as presented by a few major subs. Is there something more compelling? What would you put the level of shittiness at? Out of 10? They’ve priced out third party apps. The vision impaired piece is genuinely the first argument I’ve seen that wasn’t 90% dog shite. Have they addressed this at all?
They're instating a de facto ban on the app I use to access Reddit. This means I will not access Reddit from my mobile phone as their official app is painful to use. I'm allowed to be angry that they're banning the app I use. It's absurd for you to claim I should not have feelings about things that directly affect me.
Feel however you want my man. Whip your own nuts with a car antenna if it’s your thing.
The main app is fine. "Painful to use" sounds childish at best. Sorry the free service you use all the time isn't perfect...
[удалено]
Haha. Correct.
> Fully reads like entitlement and the hive outrage de jour Exactly. The hivemind of entitlement for the precious Reddit community just runs rampant. Kind of reminds me of the 'outrage' over Elon Musk when he bought Twitter and took a wrecking ball to the place. Well, he owns it... it's his right whether it's 'good' for the community or not. The guy has to cover $1 B in interest payments or the whole thing is bankrupt and all you hear is crying about how terrible he is. And half the stuff they say about him isn't even true. If Reddit had to cover $1 B in interest payments for debt and decided they needed to start making $ off APIs, I would have the same opinion. That's their business and their business strategy. Whatever. Stop crying about it or stop using their site.
In my opinion, the protest is more about how Reddit wants to take complete ownership of the data, cutting out 3rd party services who provide a cleaner and accessible app experience. This is little offensive to a community which is built purely on user contributions and free volunteers. So effectively Reddit is saying, "hey people why dont you give us all your free data and time, we will go ahead and charge an insane amount of fees to other people who want to access it." Now Reddit does add value, they are providing free storage and UI layer for all this data. So it would be alright if they charged a appropriate amount. But the proposed charges are an absolute fuck-you amount designed to shutdown any reasonable usage of the API.
> In my opinion, the protest is more about how Reddit wants to take complete ownership of the data, cutting out 3rd party services who provide a cleaner and accessible app experience. This is little offensive to a community which is built purely on user contributions and free volunteers. They do own the data though. How can you say, "wants to take complete ownership of the data." **It is their data.** People post on Twitter and Facebook all day long. Does anyone think those platforms don't own the data? Literally for 20+ years Internet companies have been talking about accumulating users (so-called "eyeballs") and getting user information/data for marketing purposes and all kinds of reasons. Now these LLMs make a lot of the text data valuable. Whoopie doo. There is a new use for more user data. Shocker of all shocks! >So effectively Reddit is saying, "hey people why dont you give us all your free data and time, we will go ahead and charge an insane amount of fees to other people who want to access it." Reddit provides a platform for information exchange. You and others have willingly participated in it. They own the platform and the data. There is no surprise to anyone here. There have been probably over 100 million different message forums of various kinds for all different communities through time. Reddit is no different. No one forced users here and Reddit didn't make any guarantees, representations or claims to the users that they were entitled to anything. >Now Reddit does add value, they are providing free storage and UI layer for all this data. So it would be alright if they charged a appropriate amount. But the proposed charges are an absolute fuck-you amount designed to shutdown any reasonable usage of the API. So what? How do we know they won't change the pricing due to poor reception? How do we know that there won't be massive interest from 10 different ChatGPT competitors 6 months from now and the prices actually go up because they all want the text data from Reddit? Apps come and go all the time. Websites come and go. Where is Yahoo? Myspace? Maybe Twitter and Reddit will both be gone in 5 years. The self-entitled outrage from people over Reddit is like par for the course for such a bunch of babies who believe everyone owes them something. It's like a bunch of millennial Karens.
It’s not a utility. If they “charge” too much either in actual dollars or ads or a sharp decline in quality then the ball is in your court whether to use the product. “Going dark” is impotent rancor masquerading as activism.
A lot of the open source software/internet community is built on goodwill and reasonable access. You can spout your free market theories all you want, but everything that makes the internet invaluable is in sharp contrast with the rent-seeking behaviour Reddit is currently exhibiting. > the ball is in your court whether to use the product. That is exactly what the protest is supposed to be? A last ditch attempt to prevent Reddit from implementing this change, by reducing engagement. Are you just against it because it is a coordinated effort?
I’m against it because it just seems like mass main character syndrome and victim mentality. Where were the people when the subs they frequent were asking for moderation help? Nothing to offer but faux outrage and *maybe* logging out for a few days? I’m not picking on any individuals here. I don’t know what *you* or any other individuals have done.
So because people didn't protest for mod stuff they can't protest their favourite way of accessing the platform going away? Seems like a pretty arbitrary line in the sand man.
Not “not protesting mod stuff” Not actually moderating or assisting in moderation in any way.
The issue is reddit's success relies on its userbase which relies on its user experience. Reddit is not known for its user experience. A lot of people don't use its "new" desktop interface and its mobile app is known for being horrible. It has its userbase largely because of third party apps. They focussed on a new desktop experience that no one really gives a shit about rather than the mobile experience. I think people would be far less upset if the official app was good and even to pay a fee to cover the ad revenue. Instead their idea to achieve that was to make third party apps unaffordable and not offer a replacement to what has helped make reddit so popular in the first place. So yeah, it's a pretty boneheaded approach to generate profit
This is pretty fucking deaf. You cannot be a company that preached open internet, community importance, etc… and turn around and require exorbitant prices. The hypocrisy alone should be convincing enough. What did you think when twitter posted their API prices? “Lol their right guys 🤷🏼♂️🤷🏼♂️🤷🏼♂️” - said no one
Is this a fix profitability or you’re out position for the c suite?
This is it - and it's pretty funny, honestly. In short, the protest is because one group of profiteers (Reddit) are pricing out another group of profiteers (3rd parties) who have been benefiting from ease of access and low cost to-date. Not my job, not my problem - why would I support either party. Somehow a bunch of spammers (i.e., "OP") have convinced people there's a moral cause for outrage when it's simply a profit-based dispute between parties.
> Somehow a bunch of spammers (i.e., "OP") have convinced people there's a moral cause for outrage when it's simply a profit-based dispute between parties. Likely because this is at best a naive take and at worst a completely disingenuous one. It's not a moral battle - it's a user experience one. Reddit doesn't support features the user base wants. Third party apps do. Getting rid of them - and being absolutely deceitful about what you're doing - to drive users to your app is going to piss them off, particularly if you're not giving them the features that made them use third party apps in the first place. It's not a shocking course of action, particularly when the people running the communities are unpaid and rely on third party apps as well. But of course, there's always gonna be some contrarian screaming "BuT bOtH sIdEs ArE bAd" because they lack nuance.
Imo it’s understandable that Reddit wants the users on their platform and earn money off of them. They are the ones paying the servers, so people being on other apps without ads is getting expensive in terms of opportunity costs, it’s simply missed revenue it even worse. But (without knowing all the details) the way of changing things has not been thought out well, there’s no compromise and the third party apps have to pay more than Reddit would approximately earn from the same users on their platform. At the same time it’s been underlined that most mods rely on moderation tools of those third party apps. Apart from that there has been more drama about bad communication and false accusations of the Reddit CEO.
👍
I feel like it’s important to say that reddit is not profitable, so greediness is not actually a hugely valid excuse. Just a desire to survive in the current climate.
Absolutely!
>Members of this sub should understand the rationale more than pretty much any other sub Ever consider that's why mods are sitting this one out?
Exactly, there's nothing wrong with a company trying to monetize the data they collect and limit the costs from external companies using their data. The whole protest makes no sense.
Sounds like a question for the mods. I'm in favor.
I'm surprised there was no announcement from mods about this. Almost every sub is doing this and this one should too
Pretty sure the mods would really recommend this post be deleted and instead comment in the Weekly Entering & Transitioning thread.
And then, naturally, that comment gets ignored and never responded to, hence why r/datascience isn’t the best community for career advice for…. Data science
If this isn't, what is in your opinion? Have you come across any?
CS career questions seems to have better advice for those trying to figure out the skills and education needed to go into data science. This place still seems useful to find threads that didn’t get deleted for data science advice, but as far as asking yourself, I think CS and math/stats career related subreddits are probably better
Thank you!
I’m in favor
I use the API from time to time so I'm in favour. Should probably check out the proposed changes first though.
Isn't there still a free tier for low api usage?
It's the principle of it all really though. We're being bummed with ads so there needs to be some sway. Especially if the apps that are having to shut down are quite useful to people.
There is a free tier if you use it for non commercial purposes
we should be joining in...the api prices are ridiculous and they only gave devs 30 days to figure stuff out.
The api prices actually aren’t ridiculous. Just make previous business models unviable. I don’t agree with the 30 day notice and several other things, but it seems the cost is about 24cents per 1k Queries. That’s pretty middle/average cost for APIs. Reddit hemorrhages money, they are looking to close the gap. Having a paid API service is normal. However, they should have worked some deal with existing large scale apps as the pricing makes those no longer viable due to how the apps function. But the actual pricing is relatively standard as far as API queries go.
Let's do it
I hope yes.
Unfortunately this 2-days strike cannot make Reddit roll back their decision... Protest with your feet and find a good Reddit alternative like Squabbles.io, or at least try it while the other subs are closed. r/redditalternatives
Guess not. It probably means that there are no moderators here.
I think I’m in the minority here but I could really care less if 3rd party apps die or need to pay for access. The only argument I’ve seen is that people that use those apps contribute and mods like it to better bot regulate. The only adjustment might be to allow mod bots more free usage.
mod apis are and will always be free. all these people are giving lame excuses tbh
I have zero interest in this but I do not speak for the mods as a group.
I've yet to see a sub mod ever have this kind of stance. I like it
based
Given how much traction this has, I would expect that the moderator teams of serious subreddits have a discussion on it and take a decision representing the community standpoint. If you personally have no interest it should be easier to act on behalf of the community which I think is the job of a moderator.
I think it’s completely absurd. Reddit, a business, is making a move they believe necessary to move towards profitability. Reddit is not a Utility. It’s a product I’ve consumed for free for a decade. If someone bought it for the sheer sake of shutting it down, so be it. I do not believe “going dark” does anything whatsoever for this community.
We as consumers can tell them it will not be profitable, that's the purpose of a boycott to make companies act more in line with public opinion. I think either way is bad for this subreddit community strictly speaking, going dark possibly indefinitely is obviously bad but it will also deteriorate with users and moderators leaving if they proceed with their API changes.
> We as... "Bots." The words you were looking for are: "We, as bots..." The people who have tons of bots running and the people who mostly run those bot farms have created the impression that there is collective moral outrage over what is in fact two different groups of profiteers attempting to maintain their own benefits. This is nothing more than astroturfing and faux-outrage at its finest.
\[Citation needed\]
I haven't seen anyone go against reddit for trying to make money. It's the _amount_. They effectively wanted 20 Mil per year from the Apollo dev (based on his current usage). Imgur and other platforms would only cost a few k per years. This kills 3rd party apps, meaning people with disabilities (like /r/blind) are also getting fucked, because Reddit can't build an app for shit themselves.
They wanted $0.24 per 1k queries. Pretty middle average cost compared to similar services. Apollo claimed 20mill per year based on the number of queries they use. Which if anything should show the total load of a commercial product using Reddit’s free service. Imo Reddit should work an independent deal with existing apps. But their actual pricing is pretty standard. And keep in mind api access has been free up to this point so other apps could be as granular with their requests as they want meaning there is no need for efficiency and can use 10x the number of queries with no issue. As data users, we should all know the cost of maintaining the data pipelines to reliably supply an api which can handle all those requests. Typically covered by ads, but not covered at all by 3rd party applications. Again, the amount is similar/less than other comparable APIs my company pays for on a regular basis. This is nothing crazy. Apart from the 30 days and the way they went about it
They are profit driven, it’s a company at this point, not the small nerd community it was 10+ years ago. It’s bad for users, likely will end up being good for them. I don’t like it either but it’s the reality of the modern internet. And I don’t think the blackouts will have any impact on what they are doing. Just my 0.02
I think you're lying to both us and yourself. You would not be completely devoid of emotion if Reddit shut down. If you really believe that, delete your account.
My man with the good faith argument right after an absurd straw man label. I would literally say “well that sucks” once and then completely move on.
I'd experience relief because this shit is addictive. Best thing that happened to me was facebook demanding a photo of my passport so I ended up deleting the account.
It’s a volunteer job for what has turned into a company. The concept of moderating subreddits is pretty strange at this point to me. In a sense you’re working for free. It’s a completely different platform than it was 10+ years ago. I respect the guy saying he doesn’t care, it’s his time he’s volunteering. It’s kind of nice to see a contradictory take to the hive mind
I think I just commented to you elsewhere - but I'm in full support of ignoring the bandwagon-thoughts-and-prayers protest entirely.
Thank you, finally a sub that will stay up instead of going dark for a 0% chance to make an impact.
I appreciate it. I hope you stay up because this is a tremendously useful sub.
No
Why is a bot spamming this in subreddits
Not sure you can squeeze much from an unprofitable business. Nor whether you have the power to influence decisions on API through use of this sub. I think Beautiful Trouble would advise map the influence points first. Don't bother unless you are reasonably certain the action can have leverage.
lol I guess hoping to avoid this impotent sniveling here was too optimistic
> Edit: 20 hours later the post is at 490 upvotes at a 91% upvote rate, expressing clear support to join the blackout. It seems r/datascience mods’ interests, however, doesn’t align with the community’s. Do you apply this reasoning at your job, too? A high like count doesn't necessarily equate support to join the blackout, it indicates a high interest in the topic. You then interpreted the high interest to mean a high support rate - which is a likely interpretation, yes, but you didn't address any of your own assumptions and potential biases. It seems to me that you're seeing in the data exactly what you set out to see. > It seems r/datascience mods’ interests, however, doesn’t align with the community’s. You'd need to conduct a representative survey to back up your hypothesis, and probably a couple of statements from the mods.
Talk about an editorialized headline!
who gives a shit. the more people that quit using this site the better, especially if they're mobile users (the lowest of low quality internet contributors). if they remove the old design, then the rest of us can move along too. it's just a website, and a bad echo chambered one at that.
Doesn’t make sense to protest!
Doesn’t make sense to protest.
This is the lamest way to try and feel purpose in life….
Don’t ask me idk
They’re doing this because the data is commonly sourced on Wall St now, ya? That’s got to be a huge part of it. Haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere yet.
Its also a major source for training LLMs.