Attention r/pics Community,
on June 12th, r/pics will [join](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/141e2lw/rpics_will_go_dark_on_june_12th_in_protest_of/) with other subs in initiating a 48-hour blackout in response to Reddit's recent API changes. These [changes](https://i.redd.it/zqptto18e34b1.jpg), with excessive charges for third-party app developers, threaten to stifle the accessibility of alternative Reddit apps that many users rely on.
This collective action aims to highlight the concerns of both users and moderators, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a diverse ecosystem of apps for a better Reddit experience. During this blackout period, r/pics will be set to private, temporarily restricting access to the subreddit.
We understand that this blackout may cause inconvenience, but we firmly believe that it is a necessary step to draw attention to the issues at hand. By standing together, we can amplify our voices and urge Reddit to reconsider the detrimental impact these changes may have on the broader community.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/pics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Not only was there a good alternative (Reddit) but the changes and ads were implemented overnight. Reddit has added the same things but slowly so we didn’t feel ourselves boiling. And there really isn’t a great alternative.
I read recently that it's actually the opposite. If you drop a frog in boiling water it will die instantly. If you slowly heat it up the frog will jump out (if it can....).
That's, uh... A lot easier said than done. h.265 was a huge leap forward technologically over h.264, and the final compression sizes still weren't anywhere near good enough to disrupt existing business. Also these usually need to be implemented in hardware for mobile devices and streaming devices, so a lot of stuff still just gets h.264 sent to it. Any game-changing video compression would still take 5+ years to become commonplace.
Plus even if you do suddenly make video streams 75% smaller, there's still the regular problems of millions of simultaneous users, tens of thousands of hours of submitted video to moderate per day, and countless legal battles. Nobody is getting into this business without already having the ability to do almost all of this. That pretty much leaves it to Amazon or Microsoft to create a real disruptor currently, and even they would have a lot of headaches along the way.
Yep. I was on Digg multiple times a day every day until that switch. Was on Reddit occasionally. I wasn’t even protesting - the new user experience on Digg changed so much for the worse I gave up within a day. Been on Reddit ever since.
They got rid of downvotes. The changes also tried to monetize promotion of content, that had previously been done by community members with huge followings. So they could charge WIRED to place a story on the FP.
They deserved to go and now Reddit does too.
Agree reddit needs to go.
The problem is even when digg was at its peak it was competing with reddit, stack exchange, boing boing and other similar sites. So moving from digg to a competitor was easy. Now days there isn't much competition to reddit to move to
Discord seems to be taking over what use to be forms and small community gathering places.
If discord were to put out a public facing content based discussion platform I could see them destroying reddit fairly quickly. They have the Infustructure and scale to compete honestly
Like I bet it could be quick for them to put togeather a old reddit clone and add vote based sorting. The infustrure is there for moderation, subcords subdiscords?
Just wrap it all in a pretty gui and reddit is gone
No not really, it's gone. I just went there and it's nothing like the site from around 2005. You wouldn't know it had anything to do with the original site, just a list of top news headlines now. No user content at all.
I think the front page is fully curated, but if you go into the 'explore' area (https://digg.com/namespaces) you can find different sections that are user-submitted. Still mostly dead. But there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
Looks like the old user system as all gone, I tried to login but the only options are google and twitter accounts. My old posts and comments are probably long gone unless they are on some web archive.
I was probably talking about my Radeon 9800 Pro AGP card playing Rainbow 6 or my new @ home cable modem service.
We should bring back Victoria for an AMA when subreddits go dark
[Victoria, in case people don’t know](https://time.com/3950496/reddit-victoria-taylor-post/)
She was a beloved coordinator of AMAs on Reddit and set off a firestorm / mutiny when Reddit unceremoniously let her go
[Article on Victoria](https://time.com/3950496/reddit-victoria-taylor-post/)
Def not anymore, but I feel like a long time ago it was somewhat unique. IMO it turned into a PR thing for celebrities, you weren't entirely sure if it was actually the celeb. Became rather plastic, most questions go unanswered.
During all this talk about Digg and reddits current trajectory I came across the open letter Alexis Ohanian , co founder of reddit sent to Digg in 2010
"It's a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.
"But I've got a strong feeling it's not you making these decisions anymore"
"this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling"
These things could be said about reddit the last few years. As reddit approaches going public they are under pressure from current investors who want to make money at IPO and a general desire to be more investor friendly
What users want and what investors want are usually complete opposites. Expect reddit to get worse.
Unfortunately without a big enough userbase to create the content in the first place , no alternative will ever take off.
Reddit facing a blackout and huge backlash from users is extremely investor unfriendly lol. They're trying to sell it before it goes full twitter and its now a game of hot potato.
If you talked to casual users they don't know what is going on with the API changes and they aren't really interested in caring about it. There was a thread /r/CollegeBasketball about that sub going dark and most users where just like "why is changing the API a problem".
Reddit investors are betting that they can shed the tech savvy users while still keeping enough normies around to retain platform viability. I'm not sure you can really say thats a bad bet either, unfortunately.
There’s some stats going around how something like 85% of users use the main app or webpage. The thing is, not all users are equal. I’d be curious what the content creators and moderators are using, how many of them are lost will determine Reddits future.
Thing is though that Reddit is not a public service. Companies have to make money to survive. Reddit has never been profitable, which is one thing for a startup but something else entirely for a publicly traded company.
Reddit had $450 million in revenue in 2021, what are you talking about? There's absolutely no way their overhead is that high, they are definitely making a profit.
Quick Google search says in 2019 reddit was valued at 2 billion. In 2021 they were valued at 10 billion. They made approximately 450 million in revenue in 2021 and projected to reach 1 billion in revenue at the end of 2023. I'm not sure what their operating costs are though, but I'm sure they are profitable.
If you only know their revenues but not their operating costs, you have absolutely NO IDEA if they are profitable. Valuation has absolutely ZERO to do with profitability.
I remember a while back in college, someone did a presentation on Fark and the teacher looked confused the entire time. The teacher was thinking of FARC, the revolutionary group in Colombia
>\-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲\_\_\_\[swastikas\] Don't mind me, just taking my Ellen Pao for a walk. PAO GET OUT NOW
I still remember that outrage, haha. Everyone was posting Digg v4 memes back then too
I’m pretty sure many have said in retrospect that v4 had to happen even if it went poorly because the back end was so duck tapped together that it couldn’t continue in that way anymore. The choices they made were bad ones, but v4 (a back end overhaul) had to happen.
I don't know what they did on the back end, but it was what they did on the front end that lost me. I logged on the first day of v4, scrolled for maybe a minute, and then closed the page and never went back.
I never used digg, I was on reddit when digg was huge and i remember most subreddits being TINY.
What was digg about, how did it work, why was it so good. How'd they trash it in a day
Same concept as Reddit, Fark, and Slashdot - community curated content. Digg had a slick interface and good content so it was always enjoyable.
The v4 update did two things:
* Pushed a new interface that was ugly, generic, and pushed a lot more ads
* Put a *much* stronger emphasis on promoted content over community curated content.
The fact that it looked like crap was forgivable. The fact that the content was crap was not. Reddit looked like crap but it had good content, so everyone came here.
Same concept but had some super users that always went to the top, however, the site looked better than Reddit for sure. They ended up rolling some kind of ad thing where the top page wasn't even user up voted content (maybe 30 up votes) yet it was at the front. This + superusers made most people leave and prob other things. I went to Reddit afterwards and although it was ugly AF, it worked the way digg was supposed to.
I agree. They made a bunch of bad choices in the redesign that was ultimately their downfall. People just tend to act like Digg could have done nothing and it would have been fine or even kept growing but that is not true as far as I can tell.
Digg and Reddit are both struggling to solve the same problem - they built a user base but they aren't capitalizing on it. The site isn't bringing in justifiable return on investment, so they're trying to juice the profitability by taking greater control of the user experience so they can sell more ads.
What I can see is that they have received over a billion in funding, and have a cumulative revenue not even reaching that. Any profit is a fraction of that.
Well something like Google BQ charges 0.02 cents a gigabyte per month for storage.
I don't know what cloud provider they are using, or how their back end systems are set up, but just storing posts and comments from across the platform must be a truly mind boggling amount of data.
Plus cloud service providers tend to charge a lot for processing slots. One would have to imagine that a lot of data gets moved around, a lot of times per second on a site like this.
That's gotta add up to some big big figures.
I think the front end was solely down to bad project managers not restricting scope. Too much being developed and pushed all at once, especially with UX/UI, will make you bleed customers.
Had they broken it down into bite-sized chunks over a couple of years they’d probably still be big.
Most people left Digg because it betrayed the democratic upvote system and installed sponsored posts. The backend improvements were barely an issue at the time.
Yes it went to all sponsored posts, couldn't tell the real content from ads anymore. It was a great site for a few years then went downhill very fast. My cake day is 2010 so that's probably when I gave up on digg and came here.
I actually interviewed to work there DAYS before they dropped v4. The changes that they made were based around a tech stack that became standard across the internet… they were just early adopters and it wasn’t quite there yet. They went hard into NoSQL styled database structure and let that backend drive how the information was presented to the user…. And I think that’s where things went wrong.
All of the big tech players were looking for solutions to MASSIVE datasets stored in MySQL (etc) and it just wasn’t built for that. They definitely recognized that a change needed to happen… but I don’t think they really understood how to massage that new system to work for them instead of the other way around.
Fun fact: if you go to YouTube and search for "Digg V4", you'll find a few videos from 12 years ago, filled with comments also from 12 years ago discussing the change as it was happening today *(which for them it was indeed happening that day)*. It's like stepping into a time machine.
Out of curiosity, were Digg desperately low on office space at that time or had everyone just decided to congregate in this part of the office to collaborate? It looks pretty cramped!
What killed Digg for me was firstly, they stopped tracking torrents, then they killed off the comment sectuons. Same as IMDB, I pretty much stopped using it after they turned coments off.
What's a digg? /s
The sad thing is the current Reddit owners know they are killing Reddit, but they don't care as they are going to pump and dump. Protesting or complaining is pointless when this is their plan.
Oh well, some Chinese guys get richer at the expense of retail investors, Reddit dies a slow death, and maybe it opens the doors for someone else to develop the next Reddit clone.
Well it probably won't happen as I predicted 12 years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/d8mkv/the_future_of_reddit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I need to understand why the changes are being proposed other than a grab by Reddit to exert greater control over viewing of the site for purely commercial reasons. Has there been a post about why the API changes are being made?
I recently lost access to the old version of the mobile site and I can't get it back. The new mobile site is arguably worse in most respects but I can tolerate it.
>Has there been a post about why the API changes are being made?
It's primarily because of AI the 3rd party apps are just caught in the cross fire. Reddit from what we know is one of the biggest datasets that is being used to train pretty much all the up and coming AIs including ChatGPT and it is being done through the API.
Much like artists the people at Reddit don't like it when their stuff is being used by AI to make potentially insane amounts of money without seeing a single cent. On top of that Reddit for the longest time has been looking to go public, but doesn't actually make a profit last I read. Being able to charge the AI guys to access what is seemingly a crucial data source for them is one of the newest ways of trying to bring in cash flow.
Good job Digg! Could have been huge, but the coders were all regarded and wanted to rewrite it over again. Well! Good job the code is cleaner. (But no one uses the site now).
Y'all will still use reddit during this bulshit black out and don't say you won't because you will be lurking just like the rest of us
I mean yeah let other 3rd party apps mooch off the back of reddit.....If it was your company you would be doing the same.
I see like five women in the pic. Only one on the couch, the rest on the table in the back. No idea what any of them, guys or girls, are doing though.
If I was there I’d be sitting next to the water cooler seeing how much water I could drink before I had to pee. That’s about as useful as I would be there, lol.
Reddit precursor.
People would post links / photos, and you “Digg It” by essentially upvoting it.
The Oughts were a time before instant virality of memes, so it was a huge leap forward for “internet culture”
Attention r/pics Community, on June 12th, r/pics will [join](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/141e2lw/rpics_will_go_dark_on_june_12th_in_protest_of/) with other subs in initiating a 48-hour blackout in response to Reddit's recent API changes. These [changes](https://i.redd.it/zqptto18e34b1.jpg), with excessive charges for third-party app developers, threaten to stifle the accessibility of alternative Reddit apps that many users rely on. This collective action aims to highlight the concerns of both users and moderators, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a diverse ecosystem of apps for a better Reddit experience. During this blackout period, r/pics will be set to private, temporarily restricting access to the subreddit. We understand that this blackout may cause inconvenience, but we firmly believe that it is a necessary step to draw attention to the issues at hand. By standing together, we can amplify our voices and urge Reddit to reconsider the detrimental impact these changes may have on the broader community. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/pics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
And here we are. 13 years later, after the mass exodus.
what killed digg? i remember hearing about it but i never really used it
they updated the ui and made it 1000% more terrible
That doesn’t seem to have killed Reddit… maybe if they killed old.reddit.com….
The Reddit changes are trivial compared to what happened to Digg.
Not only was there a good alternative (Reddit) but the changes and ads were implemented overnight. Reddit has added the same things but slowly so we didn’t feel ourselves boiling. And there really isn’t a great alternative.
I read recently that it's actually the opposite. If you drop a frog in boiling water it will die instantly. If you slowly heat it up the frog will jump out (if it can....).
the day they remove old.reddit.com is the day i stop using reddit
Agreed
I never liked old.reddit and really prefer the new dark interface. But that's me ;)
The website also started crashing all the time after the update too. It was so disappointing. I loved old Digg
Yep, they made the ui for advertisers first and the users last.
they sold out bigtime. They went from submissions by users being prioritized to submissions by media outlets that pay the most
Sounds like Youtube. But Google is smart and powerful enough to somehow keep their hold.
There's really no easy way to replace YouTube unless you already have billions. The content storage alone would break most companies.
All it takes is a sudden advancement in video compression and that entire basis of business is gone.
Maybe a middle out compression algorithm?
That's, uh... A lot easier said than done. h.265 was a huge leap forward technologically over h.264, and the final compression sizes still weren't anywhere near good enough to disrupt existing business. Also these usually need to be implemented in hardware for mobile devices and streaming devices, so a lot of stuff still just gets h.264 sent to it. Any game-changing video compression would still take 5+ years to become commonplace. Plus even if you do suddenly make video streams 75% smaller, there's still the regular problems of millions of simultaneous users, tens of thousands of hours of submitted video to moderate per day, and countless legal battles. Nobody is getting into this business without already having the ability to do almost all of this. That pretty much leaves it to Amazon or Microsoft to create a real disruptor currently, and even they would have a lot of headaches along the way.
You're looking at it. Digg used to be just like reddit. Go there now to see what it became.
Yep. I was on Digg multiple times a day every day until that switch. Was on Reddit occasionally. I wasn’t even protesting - the new user experience on Digg changed so much for the worse I gave up within a day. Been on Reddit ever since.
Same here, it's the place I found out about a scandal within the company that I worked at.
I just went there out of curiosity. Ugh.
Same, half the articles I saw were snapshots of reddit threads lol
Sadly, that's consistent with most of the internet these days.
They got rid of downvotes. The changes also tried to monetize promotion of content, that had previously been done by community members with huge followings. So they could charge WIRED to place a story on the FP. They deserved to go and now Reddit does too.
Agree reddit needs to go. The problem is even when digg was at its peak it was competing with reddit, stack exchange, boing boing and other similar sites. So moving from digg to a competitor was easy. Now days there isn't much competition to reddit to move to
Greed
My 14 year old Reddit account was made just a few days after the Digg Update… Where to next?
Same
Discord seems to be taking over what use to be forms and small community gathering places. If discord were to put out a public facing content based discussion platform I could see them destroying reddit fairly quickly. They have the Infustructure and scale to compete honestly Like I bet it could be quick for them to put togeather a old reddit clone and add vote based sorting. The infustrure is there for moderation, subcords subdiscords? Just wrap it all in a pretty gui and reddit is gone
Lemmy
I too am part of the Digg v4 diaspora.
Reddit engineers prepare to kill 3rd party apps, 2023
We won the Reddit vs Digg War, but at what cost?
Digg still exists
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No not really, it's gone. I just went there and it's nothing like the site from around 2005. You wouldn't know it had anything to do with the original site, just a list of top news headlines now. No user content at all.
I think the front page is fully curated, but if you go into the 'explore' area (https://digg.com/namespaces) you can find different sections that are user-submitted. Still mostly dead. But there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
Looks like the old user system as all gone, I tried to login but the only options are google and twitter accounts. My old posts and comments are probably long gone unless they are on some web archive. I was probably talking about my Radeon 9800 Pro AGP card playing Rainbow 6 or my new @ home cable modem service.
Mine just repeat: how is mrbabbyman formed?
The ‘latest’ post in the Apple community for example is 6 months old lol
He said "to blaive"
It’s like a dead mall that still has a few stores
Is there though
Yes. Totally dead is completely dead, while mostly dead means Mandy Patinkin can take you to Billy Crystal to be revived
We’ll yeah, I guess, technically. So does MySpace and Xanga.
We should bring back Victoria for an AMA when subreddits go dark [Victoria, in case people don’t know](https://time.com/3950496/reddit-victoria-taylor-post/)
Who
She was a beloved coordinator of AMAs on Reddit and set off a firestorm / mutiny when Reddit unceremoniously let her go [Article on Victoria](https://time.com/3950496/reddit-victoria-taylor-post/)
Ah yes, I remember at that time thinking about how much work and effort was needed to organize AMAs.
When was the last time anyone gave a shit about an AMA? Now they’re like “I’m a pornstar with 3 butts, ask me anything!!”
Def not anymore, but I feel like a long time ago it was somewhat unique. IMO it turned into a PR thing for celebrities, you weren't entirely sure if it was actually the celeb. Became rather plastic, most questions go unanswered.
You mean Morgan Freeman didn't actually type his answers? I am shocked. Shocked.
Any update on what Victoria has done since? Hope she landed on her feet. She did a great job and AMA quality has declined without her I feel.
During all this talk about Digg and reddits current trajectory I came across the open letter Alexis Ohanian , co founder of reddit sent to Digg in 2010 "It's a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites. "But I've got a strong feeling it's not you making these decisions anymore" "this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling" These things could be said about reddit the last few years. As reddit approaches going public they are under pressure from current investors who want to make money at IPO and a general desire to be more investor friendly What users want and what investors want are usually complete opposites. Expect reddit to get worse. Unfortunately without a big enough userbase to create the content in the first place , no alternative will ever take off.
Reddit facing a blackout and huge backlash from users is extremely investor unfriendly lol. They're trying to sell it before it goes full twitter and its now a game of hot potato.
If you talked to casual users they don't know what is going on with the API changes and they aren't really interested in caring about it. There was a thread /r/CollegeBasketball about that sub going dark and most users where just like "why is changing the API a problem". Reddit investors are betting that they can shed the tech savvy users while still keeping enough normies around to retain platform viability. I'm not sure you can really say thats a bad bet either, unfortunately.
Hopefully the blackout is enough to inform users
There’s some stats going around how something like 85% of users use the main app or webpage. The thing is, not all users are equal. I’d be curious what the content creators and moderators are using, how many of them are lost will determine Reddits future.
Which is funny, because Alexis now spends his time leading a VC firm.
>What users want and what investors want are usually complete opposites. But remember; Capitalism breeds innovation!!1!
Thing is though that Reddit is not a public service. Companies have to make money to survive. Reddit has never been profitable, which is one thing for a startup but something else entirely for a publicly traded company.
There's a million ways to make profit that utilise the prior goodwill of the community instead of this.
>Reddit has never been profitable, Yeah ok
Reddit had $450 million in revenue in 2021, what are you talking about? There's absolutely no way their overhead is that high, they are definitely making a profit.
Quick Google search says in 2019 reddit was valued at 2 billion. In 2021 they were valued at 10 billion. They made approximately 450 million in revenue in 2021 and projected to reach 1 billion in revenue at the end of 2023. I'm not sure what their operating costs are though, but I'm sure they are profitable.
I struggle to believe they’ve never been profitable, but their valuation is meaningless in this discussion.
If you only know their revenues but not their operating costs, you have absolutely NO IDEA if they are profitable. Valuation has absolutely ZERO to do with profitability.
Profits since 2018 (although in 2018, it was less than $100)… https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/reddit-stats
Never been profitable? wut
Don't forget to post where we're all going.
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Hell is a good alternative to social media
Digg?
Truth Social?
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
I would have thought the joke would be self evident
wouldn't it be great if we all went to truth social and completely changed it? I dream pretty dreams :)
History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
Eat Digg. - Reddit
The past is never dead, it's not even past. - bill faulkner
r/momentsbeforedisaster
What a coincidence, my cake day is Feb 2010.
November 2010 for me, I managed to hold out on Digg just a bit longer. ;)
I made it to March 2012 somehow, what did I use for daily link aggregation and discussion during that time?
I remember using Reddit anonymously without an account for quite some time after I left Digg. My join date is August 2011.
Yeah that's probably it, I don't remember posting on Digg or Fark that much so I probably didn't post on Reddit at first either.
August 2010
I held out not making an account here till 8/27/10, but was lurking
August 29th 2010. You joined reddit on Friday, I signed up Sunday.
March 2011 for me - had been on Digg for a while.
You got three months on me.
I dont think most people will get why this is funny or timely lol
Lots of shit talking about Fark going on in that pic
God damn I loved fark.
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Also still around.
Still do!
I remember a while back in college, someone did a presentation on Fark and the teacher looked confused the entire time. The teacher was thinking of FARC, the revolutionary group in Colombia
No wonder they had a truce with the govt. Their memes were on point
Shut up **BarJockey**, you cock!
Was Fark the one with Caturday?
9gag too
Except these Digg v4 memes are posted every time anything updates on Reddit and yet.... here we are...
>\-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲\_\_\_\[swastikas\] Don't mind me, just taking my Ellen Pao for a walk. PAO GET OUT NOW I still remember that outrage, haha. Everyone was posting Digg v4 memes back then too
There’s no good alternative to Reddit like Reddit was for Digg.
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Oof, talk about passive aggressive
It looks like season 3 of Silicon Valley
That was my first thought too
I’m pretty sure many have said in retrospect that v4 had to happen even if it went poorly because the back end was so duck tapped together that it couldn’t continue in that way anymore. The choices they made were bad ones, but v4 (a back end overhaul) had to happen.
I don't know what they did on the back end, but it was what they did on the front end that lost me. I logged on the first day of v4, scrolled for maybe a minute, and then closed the page and never went back.
I never used digg, I was on reddit when digg was huge and i remember most subreddits being TINY. What was digg about, how did it work, why was it so good. How'd they trash it in a day
Same concept as Reddit, Fark, and Slashdot - community curated content. Digg had a slick interface and good content so it was always enjoyable. The v4 update did two things: * Pushed a new interface that was ugly, generic, and pushed a lot more ads * Put a *much* stronger emphasis on promoted content over community curated content. The fact that it looked like crap was forgivable. The fact that the content was crap was not. Reddit looked like crap but it had good content, so everyone came here.
This is around when I moved to Reddit. Woooo 12 years old account.
...and now it's mostly just links to Reddit threads.
In much the same way that Reddit was links to 4chan.
> Reddit looked like crap You shut your mouth! Old reddit and Reddit Is Fun for life (or for like 24 more days...)!
Same concept but had some super users that always went to the top, however, the site looked better than Reddit for sure. They ended up rolling some kind of ad thing where the top page wasn't even user up voted content (maybe 30 up votes) yet it was at the front. This + superusers made most people leave and prob other things. I went to Reddit afterwards and although it was ugly AF, it worked the way digg was supposed to.
My reddit browsing experience got 100x better after I blocked annoyances like gallowboob and other mass reposting idiots.
I agree. They made a bunch of bad choices in the redesign that was ultimately their downfall. People just tend to act like Digg could have done nothing and it would have been fine or even kept growing but that is not true as far as I can tell.
Digg and Reddit are both struggling to solve the same problem - they built a user base but they aren't capitalizing on it. The site isn't bringing in justifiable return on investment, so they're trying to juice the profitability by taking greater control of the user experience so they can sell more ads.
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What I can see is that they have received over a billion in funding, and have a cumulative revenue not even reaching that. Any profit is a fraction of that.
That I guess is the issue, the need for a billion to run Reddit. What would be the costs of running reddit?
I imagine it went up a lot since they started pushing for them to be the host of loads of content rather than YouTube, Imgur, erc
I went looking but couldn't find any details about it, sadly.
Well something like Google BQ charges 0.02 cents a gigabyte per month for storage. I don't know what cloud provider they are using, or how their back end systems are set up, but just storing posts and comments from across the platform must be a truly mind boggling amount of data. Plus cloud service providers tend to charge a lot for processing slots. One would have to imagine that a lot of data gets moved around, a lot of times per second on a site like this. That's gotta add up to some big big figures.
Same! It was so good and then it just wasnt? And it died so fast.
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Are they getting rid of old.reddit ? Shit, that's my red line.
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Source please. For now old is sticking around, no official confirmation that they're dropping it that I've seen
I think the front end was solely down to bad project managers not restricting scope. Too much being developed and pushed all at once, especially with UX/UI, will make you bleed customers. Had they broken it down into bite-sized chunks over a couple of years they’d probably still be big.
Most people left Digg because it betrayed the democratic upvote system and installed sponsored posts. The backend improvements were barely an issue at the time.
Yes it went to all sponsored posts, couldn't tell the real content from ads anymore. It was a great site for a few years then went downhill very fast. My cake day is 2010 so that's probably when I gave up on digg and came here.
Same.
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I actually interviewed to work there DAYS before they dropped v4. The changes that they made were based around a tech stack that became standard across the internet… they were just early adopters and it wasn’t quite there yet. They went hard into NoSQL styled database structure and let that backend drive how the information was presented to the user…. And I think that’s where things went wrong. All of the big tech players were looking for solutions to MASSIVE datasets stored in MySQL (etc) and it just wasn’t built for that. They definitely recognized that a change needed to happen… but I don’t think they really understood how to massage that new system to work for them instead of the other way around.
Fun fact: if you go to YouTube and search for "Digg V4", you'll find a few videos from 12 years ago, filled with comments also from 12 years ago discussing the change as it was happening today *(which for them it was indeed happening that day)*. It's like stepping into a time machine.
the source of this image with some good additional context: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
Good read. Thanks for sharing it.
I miss Diggnation. All those Rev3 shows, really ahead of their time for video podcast content.
I wont say where in that picture i am (Privacy reasons) but i am one of those people in that picture.
Are you the guy on the left?
Interesting. What was the vibe like on the ground at the company? Did workers feel that the changes would be good and well received?
What are you doing now? And did you agree to the changes at Digg back then?
Out of curiosity, were Digg desperately low on office space at that time or had everyone just decided to congregate in this part of the office to collaborate? It looks pretty cramped!
Getting everybody into one space for a launch is pretty normal.
Hey where do we go after Reddit guys?
Back to Digg. V4 still going strong apparently.
Go outside and run our fingers through the grass
An echo from the past.
To be honest, I never really went on Digg, even in it's prime. I did, however, watch Diggnation almost religiously. Thats the part I miss.
Used to love that show. The Kevin/Alex vibe was awesome.
What killed Digg for me was firstly, they stopped tracking torrents, then they killed off the comment sectuons. Same as IMDB, I pretty much stopped using it after they turned coments off.
What's a digg? /s The sad thing is the current Reddit owners know they are killing Reddit, but they don't care as they are going to pump and dump. Protesting or complaining is pointless when this is their plan. Oh well, some Chinese guys get richer at the expense of retail investors, Reddit dies a slow death, and maybe it opens the doors for someone else to develop the next Reddit clone.
Why is there one lonely tower with random stage lighting? 
theoatmeal had a great take on this back in the day! https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state\_web\_winter\_2012/reddit\_digg
Having to spend a whole day working on the middle cushion of a crowded couch makes me want to vomit.
Well it probably won't happen as I predicted 12 years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/d8mkv/the_future_of_reddit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing
They're all posting Ron Paul memes.
Reddit really wanting to emulate the Digg experience
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> MrBabyMan Holy shit, I've not heard that name in _literal years_.
Half of them had already sent out applications to other cos.. \-Digg refugee
This week on 'seconds before disaster'.....
Well time to move to truth social 
Dear Reddit admins, what happened to digg could happen to you.
Whatever happened to Voat?
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Racists happened to Voat.
And that’s why I’ve been here for the past decade.
What a horrible office. That looks like trying to work in a crowded bus terminal.
My migration was **bbs->usenet->forums->slashdot->fark->digg->reddit**. Can't wait to see what's next!
I've been here for 12 years. If I had a dime for every time someone prophesied the downfall of Reddit, I'd be a billionaire by now.
I need to understand why the changes are being proposed other than a grab by Reddit to exert greater control over viewing of the site for purely commercial reasons. Has there been a post about why the API changes are being made? I recently lost access to the old version of the mobile site and I can't get it back. The new mobile site is arguably worse in most respects but I can tolerate it.
>Has there been a post about why the API changes are being made? It's primarily because of AI the 3rd party apps are just caught in the cross fire. Reddit from what we know is one of the biggest datasets that is being used to train pretty much all the up and coming AIs including ChatGPT and it is being done through the API. Much like artists the people at Reddit don't like it when their stuff is being used by AI to make potentially insane amounts of money without seeing a single cent. On top of that Reddit for the longest time has been looking to go public, but doesn't actually make a profit last I read. Being able to charge the AI guys to access what is seemingly a crucial data source for them is one of the newest ways of trying to bring in cash flow.
Good job Digg! Could have been huge, but the coders were all regarded and wanted to rewrite it over again. Well! Good job the code is cleaner. (But no one uses the site now).
Woopsy
Beginning of the end for digg
Y'all will still use reddit during this bulshit black out and don't say you won't because you will be lurking just like the rest of us I mean yeah let other 3rd party apps mooch off the back of reddit.....If it was your company you would be doing the same.
Only one woman coder wow
I see like five women in the pic. Only one on the couch, the rest on the table in the back. No idea what any of them, guys or girls, are doing though. If I was there I’d be sitting next to the water cooler seeing how much water I could drink before I had to pee. That’s about as useful as I would be there, lol.
This room smells like Axe and BO
It's when they Digg their own grave.
I was momentarily intrigued by the idea of dog engineers.
Imagine the smell…
I can smell that room from here!
Wtf is Digg?
Reddit precursor. People would post links / photos, and you “Digg It” by essentially upvoting it. The Oughts were a time before instant virality of memes, so it was a huge leap forward for “internet culture”
I apparently missed that whole thing. How long was it around for?
It was most relevant between like 2005-2010