Reddit Fight 'Enters News Phase', as Moderators Vow to Pressure Advertisers, CNN Reports (cnn.com) 158
Reddit "appears to be laying the groundwork for ejecting forum moderators committed to continuing the protests," CNN reported Friday afternoon, "a move that could force open some communities that currently remain closed to the public.
"In response, some moderators have vowed to put pressure on Reddit's advertisers and investors." As of Friday morning, nearly 5,000 subreddits were still set to private and inaccessible to the public, reflecting a modest decrease from earlier in the week but still including groups such as r/funny, which claims more than 40 million subscribers, and r/aww and r/music, each with more than 30 million members. But Reddit has portrayed the blacked-out communities as a small slice of its wider platform. Some 100,000 forums remain open, the company said in a blog post, including 80% of its 5,000 most actively engaged subreddits...
Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman told NBC News the company will soon allow forum users to overrule moderators by voting them out of their positions, a change that may enable communities that do not wish to remain private to reopen. In addition, one company administrator said Thursday, Reddit may soon view communities that remain private as an indicator that the moderators of those communities no longer wish to moderate. That would constitute a form of inactivity for which the moderators can be removed, the company said. "If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users," the administrator said, adding that Reddit may intervene even if most moderators on a team wish to remain closed and only a single moderator wants to reopen...
Omar, a moderator of a subreddit participating in this week's blackout, told CNN Friday that many subreddits have participated in the blackouts based on member polls that indicate strong support for the protests... Content moderation on Reddit stands to worsen if the company continues with its plan, Omar said, warning that the coming changes will deter developers from creating and maintaining tools that Reddit communities rely on to detect and eliminate spam, hate speech or even child sexual abuse material. "That's both harmful for users and advertisers," Omar said, adding that supporters of the protests have been contacting advertisers to explain how the platform's coming changes may hurt brands. Already, Omar said, the blackout has made it harder for companies to target ads to interest groups; video game companies, for example, can no longer target ads to gaming-focused subreddits that have taken themselves private...
Huffman has also said that the protests have had little impact on the company financially.
NBC News adds: In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk's aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted "a handful of times" with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform. Huffman said he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
"In response, some moderators have vowed to put pressure on Reddit's advertisers and investors." As of Friday morning, nearly 5,000 subreddits were still set to private and inaccessible to the public, reflecting a modest decrease from earlier in the week but still including groups such as r/funny, which claims more than 40 million subscribers, and r/aww and r/music, each with more than 30 million members. But Reddit has portrayed the blacked-out communities as a small slice of its wider platform. Some 100,000 forums remain open, the company said in a blog post, including 80% of its 5,000 most actively engaged subreddits...
Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman told NBC News the company will soon allow forum users to overrule moderators by voting them out of their positions, a change that may enable communities that do not wish to remain private to reopen. In addition, one company administrator said Thursday, Reddit may soon view communities that remain private as an indicator that the moderators of those communities no longer wish to moderate. That would constitute a form of inactivity for which the moderators can be removed, the company said. "If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users," the administrator said, adding that Reddit may intervene even if most moderators on a team wish to remain closed and only a single moderator wants to reopen...
Omar, a moderator of a subreddit participating in this week's blackout, told CNN Friday that many subreddits have participated in the blackouts based on member polls that indicate strong support for the protests... Content moderation on Reddit stands to worsen if the company continues with its plan, Omar said, warning that the coming changes will deter developers from creating and maintaining tools that Reddit communities rely on to detect and eliminate spam, hate speech or even child sexual abuse material. "That's both harmful for users and advertisers," Omar said, adding that supporters of the protests have been contacting advertisers to explain how the platform's coming changes may hurt brands. Already, Omar said, the blackout has made it harder for companies to target ads to interest groups; video game companies, for example, can no longer target ads to gaming-focused subreddits that have taken themselves private...
Huffman has also said that the protests have had little impact on the company financially.
NBC News adds: In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk's aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted "a handful of times" with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform. Huffman said he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
This isn't exactly new (Score:3)
Reddit has always had a semi-automated process for allowing new moderators to take over forums where the prior moderators have abandoned it. I once used it to take over a subreddit that no longer had a moderator, and it took roughly three weeks for them to confirm that prior moderators were no longer around to respond.
The only real change here is the circumstances of why the subreddit was abandoned, and the size of the subreddits in question. Personally, I have zero interest in trying to moderate a subreddit the size of /r/aww. I can only imagine the kind of spam and trash that people try to post there.
Re:This isn't exactly new (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is pretty much the killer here.
Large subreddits, just like large boards, usually grow organic. Not always slowly, but built on a base of trusted people, people you could trust because when they joined your crew, there wasn't really any incentive, neither for spammers nor astroturfers, to become part of your moderation team. And you usually have time to onboard them slowly, one by one, because you don't need 20+ new mods NOW. You could have them join, and you could examine them, shake them down, observe what they do and weed out the occasional bad apple.
Now ponder for a moment how this is supposed to work for a sub that has millions of eyeballs that a lot of people want to monetize or worse and you not only need a full new mod staff but actually a new head mod, too.
Forget the idea. Just forget it.
Re:This isn't exactly new (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I have zero interest in trying to moderate a subreddit the size of /r/aww. I can only imagine the kind of spam and trash that people try to post there.
Now if only there were a set of tools which would make your moderation life easier. Maybe if they used some kind of open API...
Re:This isn't exactly new (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies also have a process for firing employees who don't show up for work. But it's still loathsome behavior to fire striking employees and hire scabs.
Not to mention, the people they'd be firing are working for free, doing what you point out as an unenviable job, and generally in a way the subreddit users approve of. Using a process meant to replace moderators who've failed the community to instead replace moderators who are actively fighting for those communities is something new.
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Are you suggesting that there's a 6 month hiring process to go through to become a moderator on a subreddit, along with training and investment by the company?
Swapping out volunteer moderators is not the same as firing employees. The latter is several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.
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It's bizarre to me that you're suggesting that I'm looking at this from the company's perspective, as if that's all that exists. My point was that this behavior on Reddit's part is execrable.
That said, it is also shortsighted. Because arguably yes, there is a lengthy process, if you want the communities to continue to be moderated to the same standard that they are at present. As another commenter pointed out, the mod teams have grown slowly with their subreddits, carefully vetting people over time. Red
Re: This isn't exactly new (Score:3, Insightful)
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Meanwhile, the quality of employees that are still willing to work for you continues to decrease until you go out of business, because you're a moron.
Re:This isn't exactly new (Score:5, Interesting)
I’m one of the moderators or r/Canning — we polled our users, and an overwhelming majority (89%) responded they wanted to go private, with the bulk wanting it to be indefinitely.
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been actively moderating — I get roughly 5 requests for access each day, which I personally respond to.
So I’ll be interested to see if Reddit tries to force us to be public again. Our community voted in favour of this blackout, and we haven’t abandoned moderating (even if the workload is extremely light). If they do so, it will be without the current moderation team in place — and as r/Canning strives to feature scientifically safe and validated canning techniques, they’re not going to be able to just drop-in random new mods and keep up the same high quality. Improper home canning can kill people, and proper moderation requires domain-specific knowledge and experience t keep things safe for everyone.
Yaz
Tanking Reddit like Elon tanked Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Huffman said he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
So Huffman is planning to destroy 2/3 of the value of Reddit, make it less reliable, and let Nazis infest the platform again?
I wonder what Reddit's current shareholders think of that idea?
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Lol. Yea, only he doesn't have Tesla shares to dump to cover massive losses with.
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Somehow, doing incredibly stupid things with foreseeable negative outcomes is to be lauded... If you're wealthy or powerful enough.
It's crazy. As a species, we're a bunch of clowns.
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With more and more of these tech billionaires, I notice that they had one lucky break. Nothing else. They aren't in any way visionaries or geniuses, they just were lucky once and ever since, they stumble from one blunder to the next.
Why they are seen as some sort of investment geniuses is beyond me. They know jack shit and just got lucky. That's like asking a lottery jackpot winner for investment tips.
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Please. Elon had TWO - born to wealthy evil parents, then got lucky again on an investment.
That's the real pattern, most of the time. Born wealthy, use connections to turn 'wealthy' into 'obscenely wealthy', then they think they're gods who can do as they please and the world will bend to them.
Unfortunately, they're mostly correct.
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Huff, you might want to wait with this move 'til AFTER the IPO.
Jeesh, when techies have to explain basic economics to CEOs...
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It's funny this whole chain of comments making observations but then never stopping to think why they would be, instead simply passing all of it off as "stupid CEOs"
I think investors have realized that huge valuations of unprofitable companies like Twitter and Reddit were simply wrong in the first place. An IPO for reddit before turning it profitable would have flopped, because, as Twitter has shown, non-paying users are not the same people a
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Well... He's on the right track so far.
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No, I'm sure he learned that from Donald Trump who also managed the same thing. Except Trump possibly has a following so at least his losses are basically funded by other people as well.
At least with Twitter we managed to expose Elon as a clueless billionaire who really doesn't know all that much and really more or less got lucky. We also know he'd rather spend
Twitter's still around. (Score:2)
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It's too late (Score:2)
Re: It's too late (Score:2)
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He also died 10 years ago in 2013 when crypto was barely in its infancy. It's a bit presumptuous to say he would support the joke it has become today.
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But wait, the mods don't even have a ball - it is not their forum - all they have is the hot air.
Ok maybe I care a small bit, but it is only for continued use of the site as a passer-by.
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I have no care in this conflict but it does look to me like the mods taking everything private is what is going against the principles of an open reddit. Charging for an API does not block out use of reddit but mods taking their ball and going home is blocking users from use of reddit.
Well that's the point, it's basically a strike.
The mods are, presumably, doing this with the support of the communities.
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Charging for an API does not block out use of reddit
It does if it costs 110% of the highest earnings per request of the 3rd party devs. BTW, funny story...before the US revolution the British raised taxes. Now those taxes were less than they charged in England. However, they accidently were enough to make most businesses in the colonies unprofitable overnight (due to the cost of shipping goods across the Atlantic in a wooden boat). Fast forward to today where Brits make YouTube videos saying that the US revolution didn't make sense because the colonies p
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it is still repeated in British schools today).
No it most certainly isn't, the American revolution is barely touched on at all in the UK curriculum. Why would we even cover the history of America?
Bottit! (Score:4, Insightful)
Voting out mods?
Reddit will soon be run by whatever country can deploy the most bots.
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Quite a few subs already are, so the difference ain't gonna be that noticeable.
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Reddit will soon be run by whatever country can deploy the most bots.
This may actually be an improvement over the way reddit currently moderates. You create a sub, you are it's king, it's ruler, it's ruthless dictator, and many mods act like it.
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Which will lead to "only accounts with more than [n] karma for posts in this subreddit can vote", and then there will be a workaround for that - probably farms of accounts that make ChatGPT posts and upvote each other for a while.
We could see Reddit servers grinding to a halt trying to keep up with bots 'talking' to each other without any real human eyeballs involved. ...might be glorious!
Reddit forced r/Apple open (Score:5, Interesting)
Reddit wants to lock down the platform so they can sell your user data for mining to marketers and political operatives & think tanks. You can't do that if the API is open, so no matter what it has to be closed.
Reddit is about to turn into Facebook. Let that thought sink in.
Re:Reddit forced r/Apple open (Score:4, Interesting)
Let the shittification begin!
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If you think reddit was good before this, IDK what to say. Reddit has been trash since day 1. Unlike some more sensible sites, they didn't bother with any sort of reasonable moderation, and let people have unlimited up and downvotes and unlimited accounts so it's been ruled by sockpuppet accounts and organized trolling groups since its early days.
It's almost hilarious to watch someone post something factual with evidence, only to see them get downvoted into oblivion. One of my last ones that I remember was
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It's horribly depressing trying to find validation on reddit. It's kind of an evil place at times, tbh
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"hired goons"
They paid people to moderate? Or just dangled a carrot for the disgruntled "you could moderate this! Run it your way!" etc., which is just fine until the swarms of bots get unleashed to shitpost the sub into irrelevance. Then there'll be a completely unexpected bailing by these new moderators who won't have a hope in hell of coping and Huffman will be all "dunno what happened there"...
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Because anyone who wants to buy it (Score:3)
Like Twitter? (Score:3)
he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
You mean Reddit will stop paying its bills like Twitter has [slashdot.org]?
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Not paying rent is illegal? It's a civil matter under contract law. It isn't a crime.
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just leave Reddit (Score:5, Informative)
Decentralize (Score:4, Insightful)
These people want a centralized platform to act like a decentralized protocol.
Everybody would be happier if they just went in that direction - fediverse, bluesky, nntp - whatever.
Re: Decentralize (Score:2)
How do you monetize that? (Score:2)
Step 2: ????
Just "fire" the CEO and find some compromise (Score:3, Insightful)
Reddit premium users being able to keep using apps and the app maker to make a little money from that will likely satisfy most of the mods, just need to get them to listen first. "Firing" the CEO is a good way to get everyone's attention.
This would require a little more infrastructure and development than just charging per API call, even when in a hurry for an IPO, they don't have choice. The current situation is scaring investors far more than lack of income.
The CEO is poison ... get him outta here.
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This is exactly what I am saying too.
$50 per year has to more than cover the ad and API costs of a single Redditor. Put the onus on the users who want to use the apps.
I am also perfectly fine with saying if your app is making money and circumventing ads you probably owe Reddit some money fair is fair but it should be profitable but reasonable.
The fact that they won't just be honest and say "no more API/3rd party apps" is just cowardly.
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Based on what? Who will fire him? It's a private company run by its founder. The current CEO is the kink and reddit is his empire to foster or burn to the ground as he sees fit. He reports to no one.
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LOL. *King obviously. If only Slashdot has a "preview" system.
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Only a 100% owner has the right to run a business into the ground, he's not even the majority shareholder.
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He is employed by the board to do this job. If they don't like the results they can fire him. He is the executive representative of the owners.
You knew that, right?
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It's almost like the the CEO is the top mod.
And we fully support mods being kings of their subs and doing whatever they want because freedum!
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member polls (Score:2)
Yeah, from what I saw, those polls usually only have a very small percentage of the overall subscriber base for that sub. /r/askprogramming's poll have 400 total votes out of a 2million+ subscriber base. This was most likely the result of them not even bothering to sticky the poll thread and only allowed the poll to go on for 2 days. They called that democracy.
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I also question the 'subscriber' numbers, as I don't believe you're ever really removed from the rolls once you're on them, especially if you abandon an account - not an infrequent occurrence among Redditors who might be using alts to avoid being ignored or to circumvent an arbitrary ban.
Unique daily visitors is a better number, and I'm guessing they don't reveal that one because it's a LOT lower.
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I don't even know if you can find those numbers publicly per sub. But even still, I would want to see far more than 400 total votes to confidently proclaim that it was democratic.
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Reddit owns the database, it's not like it has a secured and independently audited access log. If they really wanted to, they'd fake these things without the mods even knowing it was happening.
But in reality, the site visitors are so insignificant they'll just say whatever they want without really worrying if the public in general cares or buys it. If it looks good enough for investors, that's enough.
What?? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Huffman said he saw Musk's handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow."
First of all that explains the asshole behavior, utter disregard for users, and complete brainless decision making.
Second of all, that statement should be an alarm bell for every advertiser and user in that platform. Almost everyone out of the pool, aside from the pedos and neo-nazis of course. They should feel right at home with the wing nut conspiracy theorists and other assorted prison fodder. Enjoy being the other nazi bar in town.
Reddit should eliminate current moderators (Score:2)
These people moderate forums for free, and are acting like it's some huge task of equal importance to protecting national security. The childish whines of threatening to cry to advertisers is so absolutely hilarious in it's level of retarded-ness and desperation in clinging on to some miniscule power trip . The whole reason to need a moderator is because the forum creator/owner/admin is not able to stay online 24/7 enforcing whatever arbitrary rules they just so happen to make up at whatever opportune time.
Re:Quit complaining, folks! (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not about the "point" of business, it's about the priorities of business.
This idea that businesses exist to make money, above all else at the expense of everything else is an oversimplification and really only a mindset of the recent world. It used to be the case the philosophy of business was to take care of the needs of it's customers, it's employees and it';s communities and after that came the shareholders, they got what was left. This is considered the "golden age of capitalism" where there was a rising middle class.
Along come the 1980's, Reagan deregulation and tax cuts and the corporate styling of stock value above all else popularized by Jack Welch decimating the great American GE (and look at where that got them in the long term).
Reddit got poopular because it (mostly) made it's platform a friendly place for it's users. With no users Reddit makes no money. I can think of at least 4 different ways Reddit could increase revenue but still compromise with the needs of it's user base.
No, the more I read about this story the more it sounds like a classic case of a company wanting "all the money" and not ahppy with just "most of the money".
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it's employees and it';s communities and after that came the shareholders, they got what was left
That's just as big of an oversimplification as what you're accusing the OP of. The reality is there has *NEVER* been a priority structure with what business does and doesn't take care of, and if there ever was the ability to make money was never behind any other. There's a specific word for that, and that is known as a charity.
Depending on the type of business all the groups you list have always been interconnected to varying degrees. In some businesses a focus is on the customer as it causes all other to f
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Sure there was, the term "welfare capitalism" [wikipedia.org] was popularized to describe the eras where companies became places where employees would stake their careers down upon and the companies would prioritize employee benefits and long term cooperation.
Now I am certainly not going to say these companies were losing money or put these things above making sure revenue was meeting expenditures but it was a philosophy of if you took care of emplyees, custoemrs and communities that was the mark of a successful company an
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Reddit got poopular...
Best typo I've seen all year!
Re:Quit complaining, folks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Businesses do exist to make money above all else. And the usual way to do so is to provide a product of good enough quality at a price low enough that customers continue to buy it.
For a classical product (ie, producing widgets) the profit is volume*(price - unit cost). For a service like Reddit it's more complex as you have two kinds of customers: users whom you entice with a good service vs not too intrusive advertising, who in turn produce ad views, which you sell to the other set of customers: advertisers, who want quality views for a not too high price. But in both cases it's a quality-vs-price curve.
Trying to overmonetize means lowering quality while simultaneously increasing the price. Basic economy can tell you this leads to strongly decreased volume, and this is exactly what is happening: users are threatening to leave. As the per-user revenue will hardly increase, the profit is about to tank.
In other words, the businesscritters wanted to "improve monetization" to boost short-term stock price, but while doing so completely failed economy 101.
Ie, they are bad at the overarching goal, ie making money.
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When was this magical era of nice mega corporations who put investors last?
Can you name a decade or two and some company names? And maybe some examples of them putting profit after the community?
The reality is the earlier era of corporations was all about robber barons stripping the country to the bone, fucking everyone over legally in ways that are now illegal and even sending soldiers to shoot union strikers on occasion. And much more commonly they'd send men with club to just beat them into the pavemen
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Post war GE, Kodak, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Ford, it was called Welfare Capitalism [wikipedia.org]
Why do you think people call the mid-american century "the good ol' days" where you could have a good job, buy a house, raise a family on a blue collar salary. It's a bit idealized in hindsight but those things were true back then partly because of a difference in corporate philosophy.
It wasn't purely altruistic, they were trying to get ahead of unions and socialism but it was more common nonetheless.
GE had a policy of "h
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Did your dad retire at IBM? How long did he work there? Sounds like your dad was a career employee who was able to raise a family and successful children from his job.
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Yes, but those advertisers want to buy the eyeballs of the users, not the servers of Reddit.
You only get eyeballs if you give them what they want.
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And yet the third-party Reddit viewing apps show the ads along with the content, which means Reddit is still getting paid for those eyeballs.
The idea that these things are somehow sapping advertising money away from Reddit is more than a little nuts.
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The third party apps do not show reddit ads, as reddit doesn’t serve them out via the API. I use them to escape advertising.
That said, if you divide reddit’s total revenues by the number of active accounts, it comes in at something like $0.25/user/month. I’d happily pay B $1/mo to continue to use Apollo and not be assaulted by advertisers.
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Running email systems isn't all that easy when you're talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of users. Even tens of thousands of users is a pita.
SMTP is an ancient fucked up protocol, clients all behave differently with various edge cases and how they handle attachments, spam, spam, spam, viruses, spam, and having a large number of users always sucks for any service.
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Can you show me on this doll where the evil socialist touched you?
You are interchangeably stupid. (Score:2)
You are interchangeably stupid.
Yes clearly the insult of a born english speaker!
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here live in their tech bubble and have never run a business.
Oh and tell us about your business experience! I’m sure we’ll all be impressed.
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They certainly make money from advertising. But they could have had end users as bona fide customers as well, if only they had tried.
$5/month for API access and advertising
$10/month for API access and no advertising
No need to charge the makers of client applications. Charge the end user directly and let them use their client of choice.
Re: Quit complaining, folks! (Score:2)
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"My name is Marthis and I'm a selfish Reddit using moron. I want content and I want it now. Please let me suck Steve Huffman's dick. I'll kill all the protesters for you if I can just suck your dick!"
That is how you sound.
Re:Quit complaining, folks! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a business that only exists because of a vast amount of unpaid volunteers and commenters.
Reddit thinks way too highly of itself for what it provides. It's infrastructure, like an ISP. It only has value because it serves people's need to communicate, not because it itself actually does something. Reddit in general embraced this idea and is about as lazy as they can possibly be. It does its best to never control anything until it makes the news in a negative manner, and over time it's provided less and less (eg, firing of Victoria, ending of Secret Santa).
Reddit has over time tended closer and closer to just being a faceless infrastructure provider.
And that's perfectly fine, but then the leadership should accept their place -- to serve the needs of their users.
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>It's infrastructure, like an ISP. No it isn't.
Reddit doesn't provide the front end user experience to most of its users. It doesn't provide moderator tools. It mainly provides an API and backend hosting of content made by others. What content is shown is made by others. In fact, Reddit themselves just interacts with advertisers and provides that API. That's pretty close to an ISP. Far closer than any other "social media" company, some of which actually are ISPs in addition to many other things. Reddit isn't FB or Alphabet, not even close.
Re:Quit complaining, folks! (Score:4)
If it's a business it needs to pay at least minimum wage to everyone working for them.
Oh, they shouldn't have to do that? Ohhhhh, so they're only a business as far as making money goes, not paying money?
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They do make a minimum wage for people working on them. You don't seem to understand what a subreddit or a moderator is. It's no different to you jumping on github downloading phpbb and going nuts, except that someone else has setup the infrastructure and software for you.
Even the massive subs that are in a blackout were not started or created by reddit, but purely off the interests of individuals. Now sure it's unethical to boot people out, but hey that's the choice you make when you build your popular thi
Re: Quit complaining, folks! (Score:2)
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How well do you think Reddit would work if literally all the mods across the entire platform would stop moderating and no one else stepped up to the plate?
Reddit is a business that relies almost desperately on volunteer work in order to function. In some countries that's illegal.
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Well, care... I don't give a fuck about Reddit, but I have to say, I love to watch the fallout.
The thing is, it costs ME nothing to start a new sub. It would cost Reddit half a fortune to employ people to moderate it and create meaningful content in it. But hey, let's see how "the market sorts this out", what do you say?
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Moderating is different than content creation. None of this will impact the average user creating content.
Reddit can afford to fire the top 2% of louder mods, replace them with paid staff or more likely other new mods, and the other 98% will get the message.
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The thing is, whether meaningful content gets created also depends on sensible moderation, because few people who do contribute something of value will do so when their contributions are drowned out in a sea of trolling and spam.
Also, replacing existing mods with paid mods will very likely not even work, because what reddit boards are is echo chambers. And that is reflected in the moderation of them. You'll find that every subreddit has its very own set of rules that determine whether you will post there. T
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Bit of a strawman, who is saying Reddit dones't have the right to change their policies, this is about people not liking those policies, much the same when conservatives were mad about "censorship"
The whole thing with big tech companies is in fact irony as we have been living in a conservative friendly mindset for the last 50 years where corporations were the backbone of America and could do no wrong. Does no one remember the 30 years of neo-conservative philsophy? That's why it was funny when conservativ
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As someone from North Africa, it looks to me like it stopped being about sides and became about "My side" long ago. Remember when Trump got banned from Twitter? Everyone on the left was yelling how it was a private platform, and twitter could do whatever it wanted and if you don't like it you should make your own, then proceeded to gloat whenever that right wing twitter-clone died...
And then Musk bought twitter, unbanned Trump, and suddenly both sides switched their arguments immediately.
Same with all the c
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Who on the left was saying there should be some government interference to keep Trump banned off Twitter? Just because people on "the left" don't like the action Twitter is a far cry from wanting to regulate it into law.
In fact it's the conservatives who are the most vocal about repealing Section 230 which is by outcome one of the most anti-free-speech takes you could have.
The idea that "no one is fighting corporations" is just cynicism. While yes both parties are pretty pro business the idea that this is
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Section 230 states sites hosting content are not liable for the speech users put on it, within the bounds of the existing laws. You can't threaten people with violence, etc.
But thats just it, either platforms have the ability to moderate whats on their platforms or they don't. If we start codifying "allowable speech" versus non-allowed well, thats going to have a massive chilling effect, espeically trying to regulate around something as nebulous, contentious and fluid as political opinion. If a user get
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Can you name another world leader who has been banned?
What is this supposed to mean? When you're the President you get to break everyones rules without consequence? Why do you hate what America stands for? Also he had already lost the election, it was literally days before he was about to be a regular joe again.
orange headed guy gets banned for every day trolling?
He was able to skirt the rules up until there was an assault on the US capital on the day we certify our elections. Not a good look. He got away with everything until then. Again, does he have free reign to do whatever, or is he still just a man like
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The US seems very corporation-friendly because no one is fighting corporations, neither left nor right. Everyone is fighting everyone and the corps are the only ones winning.
Amen to that brother. Corporations have "divide and conquer" down to a science, and they're also very good at throwing incumbent causes under the bus when fresher, rosier ones come along. And let's not forget hedging their bets, the way IBM, Ford, GM, Dow Chemical, and others did with the Nazis in WWII.
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Theres a huuuuuge difference between "you don't have the right to do this" and "i don't like how you are doing this". It's the farthest thing from splitting hairs.
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Anonymous people don't have intellectual property but I'm amused that you think they're stealing from you.
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rsilvergun: redditor for 7 years: 1 post karma: 5 comment karma
Quonset: redditor for 16 years: 1 post karma: 0 comment karma
opportunist: redditor for 15 years: 1 post karma: 0 comment karma
drinkypoo: redditor for 11 years: 1 post karma: 0 comment karma
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Because he charges too much for the api he's alt-right?
Ok.
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