AMAs Are the Latest Casualty In Reddit's API War (arstechnica.com) 179
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable. On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable.
The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse. On Saturday, the r/IAmA moderators announced that they will no longer perform these duties:
- Active solicitation of celebrities or high-profile figures to do AMAs.
- Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high-profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).
- Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
- Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
- Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
- Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
- Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts
The subreddit, which has 22.5 million subscribers as of this writing, will still exist, but its moderators contend that most of what makes it special will be undermined. "Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention," the moderators said. The mods will also continue to do bare minimum tasks like keeping spam out and rule enforcement, they said. Like many other Reddit moderators Ars has spoken to, some will step away from their duties, and they'll reportedly be replaced "as needed."
The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse. On Saturday, the r/IAmA moderators announced that they will no longer perform these duties:
- Active solicitation of celebrities or high-profile figures to do AMAs.
- Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high-profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).
- Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
- Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
- Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
- Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
- Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts
The subreddit, which has 22.5 million subscribers as of this writing, will still exist, but its moderators contend that most of what makes it special will be undermined. "Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention," the moderators said. The mods will also continue to do bare minimum tasks like keeping spam out and rule enforcement, they said. Like many other Reddit moderators Ars has spoken to, some will step away from their duties, and they'll reportedly be replaced "as needed."
sh*t is rolling down hill (Score:5, Insightful)
the reddit company needs to understand that i pay for quality content. if what AMA is doing turns into a trend, there won’t be much reason for my reddit annual subscription renewal in november.
hey reddit company, i’m not impressed. get your shit together.
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Wait, people actually paid for that shit site?
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+1 informative
Re: sh*t is rolling down hill (Score:2, Informative)
It used to be good. I paid for subscriptions until maybe 7 years back when it went authoritarian left. I got tired of shadow bans and being banned from subs I never even visited, simply for posting in proscribed subs. Apparently against Reddit guidelines, but okay for the right people to use such tools. I ended my subscription and left a bit afterwards.
Re: sh*t is rolling down hill (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you consider identity politics (e.g. feminism, critical theory) to be ideologically left-wing?
Re: sh*t is rolling down hill (Score:4)
Identity politics is manipulated by both sides, outraged Christians, anti-lgbtq, guns, and MAGA.
Re: sh*t is rolling down hill (Score:4, Insightful)
Identity politics is manipulated by both sides, outraged Christians, anti-lgbtq, guns, and MAGA.
That's only looking like one side there, buddy.
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Would you consider identity politics (e.g. feminism, critical theory) to be ideologically left-wing?
Nope, it's part of the socially-focused branch of Classic Liberalism, nowadays called Social-Liberalism most everywhere around the world (and merely Liberalism in US), which split from the economically-focused branch of Classic Liberalism, nowadays called Liberalism most everywhere (and Libertarianism in the US), in the late 19th century.
Social-Liberalism cares a lot about matters of oppression and the like, from a perspective of legal equality of all citizens. It was the original home of what nowadays is c
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You are either a moron or a liar. Mao and all the Marxist fuckers put State above family.
Yes, they do. This doesn't mean being anti-family, it means that families are seen as means to the expansion of State power. So it was extremely usual for Marxist States to be intensely pro-family when they thought it was useful. Proofs:
* Family in the Soviet Union - Family Code of 1936 and Family Edict of 1944 [wikipedia.org]
* Socialist Republic of Romania - Human rights issues [wikipedia.org]
* Family planning policies of China - Mao Zedong era [wikipedia.org]
And yes, those change over time as they see fit. Read above and below the anchors I linked to.
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Yes, they do. This doesn't mean being anti-family, it means that families are seen as means to the expansion of State power.
The traditional Marxist view on (bourgeoisie) families is that they maintain capitalism and the ruling class. In the case of today's neo-Marxism, this is quite expanded (see Theory) and the "bourgeoisie" seems to be anyone that disagrees with whichever variation of Critical Theory is being presented.
From the horse's mouth in the Communist Manifesto:
https://www.marxists.org/archi... [marxists.org]
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
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From the horse's mouth in the Communist Manifesto:
Yes, but Marxists are, if anything, adaptable. They tried this in the 1920s, it didn't work, and so they threw it away. Check the first link I provided, this is described in the sections just above the anchored.
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Ripping apart families to send the children to state education camps and indoctrinating children with struggle sessions is anti-family.
You talk as if this were something exclusively done by Marxists in particular, or left-wingers in general. Rather, conservative authorities have done plenty of it themselves, with the explicit goal of saving those children souls. Three examples: to Native-American children by American conservatives [wikipedia.org], to Australian Aboriginal children by Australian conservatives [wikipedia.org], to Jewish children by Catholic conservatives [wikipedia.org]. Plus, evidently, cases of Islamic conservatives towards children of non-Muslims.
This isn't whataboutis
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Edit: "as if conservatism itself doesn't do it. It does." --> "as if conservatism itself doesn't do it, when it does, are either misinformed or dishonest."
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Reddit, is by any measure, extremely far left.
I don't know what those "measures" are, but when I enter Reddit I don't see widespread defenses of the nationalization of all corporations and making them worker owned, managed and operated, nor do I see calls for the planification of the economy, or demands for the expropriation of the wealth of the rich and powerful. So, what exactly is of "left", much less "far left", even less "extremely far left", in it?
Americans have a weird idea of what "left" means...
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We're in America, so we use American terms for left and right here, not European ones.
That's a weird notion. By it, only the US has a right-wing, and the rest of the world is entirely left. Though it plays straight into American exceptionalism, so in a way it's fitting. ;-)
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I didn't know that contemporary Africa and Tsarist Russia was such a fertile ground of "traditional, conservative societies".
No, they were and are progressives, their entire gist is to keep challenging and changing customs, mores and traditions, not to conserve those customs, mores and traditions. Right?
to mumble incoherently
Heh, says the person whose entire argument, if we can charitably call it that much, consists of "you're wrong because you are wrong".
I'm curious: can you provide a definition, in your own words, of what is a "woman"?
Certainly. A woman is anyone whose brain's physiology and metabolism falls within the area of one of the two maxima in the binomial distribution of human sexual dimorphism, the other maxima and surro
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Re:sh*t is rolling down hill (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the problem. You aren't paying. Nor were the sub creators/mods.
No?
They created the content that Reddit was selling. For free.
And they work to add significant value to the site. For free.
Those mooching freeloaders are the only reason Reddit is valued in the billions.
I would say they are paying,
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They created the content that Reddit was selling. For free.
No reddit is selling YOU (your eyeballs specifically). EVERY website is selling YOU. Even Slashdot has ads. The pointless drivel you post is meaningless to them. As long as you log in and look at an ad, that's all any website cares about.
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Comments are NOT content. That's called socializing. Youtube videos are content. Hand drawn art is content. Music is content. Those things take effort and time to produce. My comments here and your response are NOT content.
You can pay for reddit (Score:2)
You can pay for a reddit premium subscription. It gives you some benefits, like having comments posted since you last viewed highlighted and some other usability improvements. I doubt many people pay for it, but apparently the GP did.
They don't care (Score:2)
The only way to win this was for the entire site to do a strike. Similar to what the D&D players did when WoTC tried to lock down their platform.
There wasn't enough solidarity. For example, folks on r/aww got tired of the John Oliver posting and went back to cute pictures of animals. Lots of other sites followed. Once that happened reddit's stri
So much drama (Score:2, Flamebait)
For an internet forum. The mind boggles.
A classic cautionary tale (Score:5, Insightful)
Years from now, Reddit's demise (as well as Twitter's) will be taught in classes as an example of how to completely screw things up on social media.
But this is much worse for Reddit than Twitter. Reddit really had a lot more to lose. Twitter has always been a cesspool.
But the most content-dense social media site, along with the most content-void social media site, both failing at the same time, is a sight to behold.
Re: A classic cautionary tale (Score:4, Interesting)
Reddits best description that has stuck with me is âoeReddit feeds are full of shit i care about from strangers while facebook and twitter are people i know discussing shit i dont care aboutâ
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Did you know that you can also get to know people who talk about stuff you care about?
They're usually found outside of the internet, or on the internet outside of social media - which is neither social nor a media, ironically.
I think Twitter is probably dead (Score:3, Interesting)
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I've never personally cared much about Twitter so I had to ask my partner why he still uses it. His answer was that the people (celebs and various people who are fans of said celebs) he follows are still on it. As much as I'd like to imagine Musk flushing Twitter down the toilet, I think this is one floater of a turd that isn't going down easy.
Reddit, on the other hand, just seems like an easily replaceable web forum. In fact, I kind of preferred the days when everything was on phpBB or similar on its ow
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Reddit, on the other hand, just seems like an easily replaceable web forum.
A lot of subreddits, especially the larger ones, are easily replaceable sure, but there are a whole bunch of much more niche subreddits I use that simply don't seem to have good replacements. Yeah there are forums that touch on the same topics, but they're not current the way these subreddits are and other social media platforms might be current, but they're so awash with low effort discussion and clickbait I find it exhausting to find any quality discussion.
Don't get me wrong there are plenty of subreddi
You don't see a lot of celebs (Score:2)
And it might. As older voters die the younger ones don't have cable TV. Those think tanks and politicians will want to reach those voters and they have a *lot* of cash. If Twitter could hold on that long it could basically be the new Fox News, raking in millions from dodgy adverts for Catheter Cowboys and (fake) gol
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Twitter is not dying. I am not a fan of Musk's character either, but it's folly to thinkj Twitter will suffer demise. Unlike reddit, twitter has tremendous inertia. Twitter has no path to failure.
Re:A classic cautionary tale (Score:4, Insightful)
And anyway, it's not like Digg is gone, it's not like Myspace is gone. It's possible for a social network to "fail" and yet continue to coast on inertia.
Re:A classic cautionary tale (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter is not dying. I am not a fan of Musk's character either, but it's folly to thinkj Twitter will suffer demise. Unlike reddit, twitter has tremendous inertia. Twitter has no path to failure.
Musk just moved TweetDeck behind a paywall [marketwatch.com], or for those who have a blue checkmark. How many tens of millions of people did he just alienate?
Musk now prevents people without Twitter accounts [theverge.com] from even viewing on the platform. How many hundreds of millions did he just alienate?
This is on top of not paying his bills, including the arbitration bills [reuters.com] for all the lawsuits against the company when he fired people after he took over.
Let's not forget the $250 million lawsuit [cnn.com] from music companies for allowing and enabling rampant copyright violations.
Then of course are all the advertisers who have either stopped advertising or significantly scaled back expenditures.
There's a reason that $44 billion Musk paid for the company may now be worth only one third that amount, and at the rate Musk is going, even that will be too high.
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It always seemed that way to me anyway when I opened a Twitter link in an incognito browser window. And even if it is a significant difference, alienating people who don't have an account is a non-issue: who is there who doesn't already have a Twitter account but was considering opening one?
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Non-registered users are message and ad targets too. Or rather they where. Now they are gone and everybody that wants to communicate to a general audience will need to find another platform to do it.
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Instagram I can still see pictures given a link. Twitter I see nothing.
You are right though, all that account requiring is about profiling people and everybody wants to sell you services that they control.
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And even if it is a significant difference, alienating people who don't have an account is a non-issue: who is there who doesn't already have a Twitter account but was considering opening one?
Is your point that Twitter never has to worry about new users/growth? You do understand how that spells doom for any company that they never worry about new business? Twitter is not like Coca-Cola where they have already saturated the market and making large amounts of profit.
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Not really, more that that ship has sailed. It may not be making huge amounts of profit, but I think it has saturated its market and anyone who doesn't have an account is probably already sufficiently alienated by the previous shenanigans that they're steering well clear.
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Musk now prevents people without Twitter accounts [theverge.com] from even viewing on the platform. How many hundreds of millions did he just alienate?
Me, for one. I occasionally did read stuff, but I never had any desire to post anything. Classical "We are so important that people cannot live without us!" delusion. Well, watch me. Or rather never see me again.
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So, I'm good, because it's kind of a side trip and twitter's lame. I never posted either.
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Twitter no longer has a media relations department. The company responded to an email request for comment with an automatic reply containing a poop emoji.
LOL
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Musk made an offer that was obviously more than it was worth. Twitter execs knew he was an idiot and valued their product, so they didn't want to sell. But then the stock market tanked while his offer was still standing, so they changed their minds and accepted his offer. Musk tried to get out because the change in the stock market made his small overpay into a giant overpay, but he had no legal grounds to back out.
I don't see how Twitter survives unless Musk admits defeat and sells it for like a quarter of
Re:A classic cautionary tale (Score:4, Interesting)
What about other new platforms? (Score:2)
The real test will be when Bluesky goes to open signups. Mastodon and Post have kinda stalled
What makes Bluesky any different than Hive?
Honestly Hive looked like it had even better chances than Bluesky, which we know nothing much about... have not heard about Hive in a while, but I see all the same people that went off to Hive asking (on Twitter) for Bluesky invites.
Has Bluesky got a better chance than Threads? Based on Instagram that would seem to have a more likley path to success, since at least it star
Re:What about other new platforms? (Score:4, Informative)
What makes Bluesky any different than Hive?
To be quite honest, I don't know really. Couple theories I have though
1. It has some Twitter cache being related to a project Dorsey started before the buyout to make a more de-centralized Twitter protocol.
2. It's got a similar interface, competitive feature set to Twitter and some financial backing. People who do use it seem to agree it works much like Twitter.
3. The name is better than all the others
4. It's just got "the juice" it seems like. The exclusivity currently helps drive up hype, people are talking about it and if a few key users start to drift over to it then that can really snowball.
5. Twitter is legit getting somewhat worse. The bluecheck's 80% of the time have a political angle and overall it's starting to feel a bit weary. It's not one big thing but lot's of little things wear people down and that leads to...
6. They're coming in at a better time. The others blew their wads as it were right when Twitter got bought. Now that people are back on Twitter but getting cranky, this is a shiny new toy that will get 100% of the attention at launch when the others had to split mindshare.
Social media isn't about the tech, Mastodons got really neat tech but nobody cares, it's about the social aspect and I see a lot of reporters and the real "poster class" wanting to move over to it, more than the others.
Could be wrong, I give it a 50/50 when they go open signups but if Twitter can survive that it's around for good.
The Dorsey Factor (Score:2)
It has some Twitter cache being related to a project Dorsey started before the buyout to make a more de-centralized Twitter protocol.
I realize a lot of people think it has a better chance because of Dorsey being involved but... to me this makes me even more dubious of it's chances.
Dorsey had the fire, and the venture capital, to make Twitter work back in the day.
Dorsey may have some desire now but it sure doens't seem like he has the same drive now as back then. And the venture capital space for growing t
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Years from now, Reddit's demise (as well as Twitter's) will be taught in classes as an example of how to completely screw things up on social media.
Most internet juggernauts eventually run out of steam. MySpace, Digg, Altavista, Yahoo!, AOL, Vine, and probably quite a few others I'm forgetting.
Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook are just taking longer than usual.
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Most internet juggernauts eventually run out of steam. MySpace, Digg, Altavista, Yahoo!, AOL, Vine, and probably quite a few others I'm forgetting.
Don't forget CompuServe, GeoCities, and Second Life.
Re:A classic cautionary tale (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm surprised. I remember for a while some companies and agencies were talking about using it as a virtual meeting place, before home video conferencing became common. I assumed Second Life went the way of Neopets. Some die-hard users but the majority of casual users moved on.
Good to know.
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SL is a haven for furries, and their numbers seem to be increasing.
It's toxic for anyone else because of the prevalence of genital salesmen
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Second Life was never that big, it was mostly just hype. Now the hype is gone and its settled into a niche product.
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Reddit's demise (as well as Twitter's) will be taught in classes
I know it's been a while since I was a student, but... they teach things in classes now?
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I seriously doubt it. The loss of a few features is unlikely to create a demise. For that you'd need to see mass user exodus (which by all accounts isn't happening either on Reddit or Twitter) as well as meaningless content fill by bots / spam (which is happening only on Twitter).
Reddit really had a lot more to lose. Twitter has always been a cesspool.
Whether a user considers something a cesspool or not has nothing to do with if it has something to lose. Twitter for the shitshow it is has many more daily active users and thus far more to lose than Reddit.
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>Twitter for the shitshow it is has many more daily active users and thus far more to lose than Reddit.
Twitter became 'a thing' because celebrities and news organisations started using it to reach their audiences.
Only a fraction of those audiences are willing to create accounts to read tweets, so it would seem Elon's latest idea is likely to be even more effective than all his previous ones at damaging Twitter's value. Though I really did expect the news outlets to start dropping Twitter when he started
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Yes. There is a newer thing called "evidence based management" were they teach exactly things like that. Most "managers" on the top layer have huge egos and no actual understanding of things.
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And years from now companies will be doing the same things and making the same "mistakes", because the apparently the economic system that controls them demands it. Rinse and repeat.
Re:A classic cautionary tale (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like forever ago but it's been a mere 7 years since a guy was able to Tweet his way to having authority over about 4000 nuclear weapons.
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Oh and tweeting classified satellite photos too.
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Or predicting hurricane paths because "I know more than the scientists."
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No, the alternarive was a corrupt old woman who didn't even bother campaigning because "it was Her turn" that had a long record of crushing her husband's "bimbo eruptions", several of which were violent rapes.
Was that the woman you were telking about or did you mean that woman from the Green Party who also ran?
Mod down the publicly known truth as usual, slashdot idiot mods because it's not refutable.
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Well kind of... (Score:5, Funny)
Will much of anything be taught about social media, in years to come?
Oh yes, however the downside is 90% of it will be history fabricated by AI.
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Is this another thing matt groening predicted? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk0esR2s_P8
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Let subscribers use their subscription with apps to use the API for personal use for free, this should blatantly obviously have been done from the start ... there is no excuse this wasn't done, there is no excuse this isn't being done now. The CEO should be fired for cause for letting this drag on.
Also piss of Altman and every AI startup. Add a reasonable use policy to both a website footer and the API and say outright "we don't consider copying our content to train AI models fair use, even if it happened b
slashdot AMA (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember when slashdot used to have AMAs. References: https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org] and https://slashdot.org/story/07/... [slashdot.org]
Why don't they do another one. Get some celebrity, maybe Elon Musk or something. He is actually slashdotter after all. Anyway, failing that they could get someone with equivalent high IQ but more of a universally humanitarian humanistic type than one with selective empathy. Well I am talking about myself. Feel free to ask me anything.
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He is actually slashdotter after all.
If Elon is a Slashdotter that means he's only here for the comments. Stories about him may be positive, but all comments under those stories paint a different picture. I think he has enough common sense to not do an AMA on Slashdot.
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Well, he sometimes says good things about the comments though. Reference: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s... [twitter.com]
Re:slashdot AMA (Score:4, Informative)
Well, he sometimes says good things about the comments though. Reference: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s... [twitter.com]
Your linked seems to be paywalled or something.
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> "Slashdot has some of the best comments" - @elonmusk
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Well, he sometimes says good things about the comments though. Reference: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s... [twitter.com]
Ironically all I see is "Something went wrong. Try reloading".
Your link is almost poetic in that it represents Elon perfectly. Did he say something positive about Slashdot? a) who knows, and b) no one thinks it's relevant because unless he said it today and right now his view may have changed given how unhinged he is.
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What have you done that might be interesting to other slashdotters?
I made the above post
What's the story behind your username?
There is none or I have forgotten.
Why are you using slashdot?
habit
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Good or bad is dependent on what it's relative to. The habit is good in that it's better than doing something worse, but it's bad in the sense that it's worse than doing something better.
Why were they doing this in the first place? (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical moderation can take a bit of effort, but what was going on for AMAs sounds like properly serious work. I am actually surprised that this was previously done by just generic mods. I always assumed r/ama was run by actual Reddit staff.
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Doing British understatement?
That "bit of effort" on the forum I used to run involved one four mile walk to cope with a Situation and one set of calls to 911 over the member with a history of being hospitalized for depression who wrote "I won't be here tomorrow".
All respect to the AMA mods.
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>yeah itd be such a grind talking to celebs.
Sort of. The people who tend to actively work for opportunities to interact with celebrities are generally not the people celebrities are comfortable working with.
On the other hand, people who don't lose their shit because they're talking to someone famous? They also tend not to be the people who want to work for free to do so.
Then there's the third problem - having apparently found a few people who aren't 'fans' but are still willing to do the work for free,
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You'll keep getting ignored as long as you maintain your entirely one-sided view of the issue.
Also, your grammar is atrocious, you post like an AC.
Bittersweet (Score:2)
Why would they do these things for free anyways? I don't even opt into "open betas" because I don't want to test someone else's software for free. I know there's a remnant of community left in some corners of the Internet that Big Tech is desperately trying to consume. It's bittersweet to see these otherwise generous people finally realizing they're actively being milked for profit and opting out.
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Why would they do these things for free anyways? I don't even opt into "open betas" because I don't want to test someone else's software for free. ...snip...
This sounds either cynical or selfish. If the promissed software addresses a need I have, or is even just interesting, taking it for a spin and giving feed back is a win-win for everybody, and may well lead to learning something. Not doing something just because someone else may benefit from it without paying you is worse than stupid.
A Protest, Not A Technical Isssue (Score:2)
It is a protest of that policy, by the mods. Instead of shutting the subreddit down, they are going with malicious compliance by not putting the extensive and free work in to make sure IAMA authors are authentic.
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TBH it really went down hill after Reddit fired the person they had on staff to help manage it (and passed that work onto the unpaid mods). Just like any venue, having someone to manage and moderate interviews is extremely important
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Capitalism getting it (not) right - thanks VCs! (Score:2)
Reddit seems in part explainable by the fact that the VC system is not really all that sensible in many cases. Companies are being funded towards growth, growth, growth with an eye on eventual monetization later - for the VC. Unsustainable monetization, that is, like an IPO or straight selling the company to a an individual (remember, companies are people too) while it is still overvalued. No sensible thought is given early enough to financial sustainability, and the "customers" are often trained to expect
The sky is not falling on Reddit (Score:3)
Sometimes you have to remember you're living in an echo chamber. Hardly anyone noticed these protests, outside of circles like /. and certain Reddit subs. If you look at it dispassionately (which isn't easy when you're an aggrieved echo chamber agitant), you'll see..
1. The protests are over a silly topic. Yes, Reddit is now charging (too much) for API access for third party clients. Something that Nextdoor and Discord don't even ALLOW. YOU haven't been paying for Reddit. The client devs haven't either. And Reddit has been in the Red.
2. Nobody else noticed. Okay, some communities went dark. It did seem bizarrely self-entitled and arrogant that mods believed the subs belonged to them, and that they could wall off a chunk of their space on Reddit's servers to protest... Reddit... and predictably it didn't work. But the vast majority of Reddit users use either a browser or the official mobile app... not because the mobile app is any good but because they push it so hard when you open a Reddit link on a mobile. So they're all unaffected except by those mods trying to take Reddit's ball and go home.
(They don't have to continue moderating. Different topic. But they can't squat on the court while refusing to play ball.)
3. There aren't any good alternatives (yet.) Facebook is pretty much the definition of evil. Nextdoor is dominated by hyper-political local mods and is very closed, as well as disallowing third party apps. Discord isn't nearly as easy or discoverable... I use it all the time but regret it. 4Chan is toxic.
Yes, some people, especially on Reddit and here, are screeching that Reddit has shot itself in the foot and head. What is their accuracy track record? How much business savvy, compared to the folks running Reddit, do they have? Their passion, once for and now against, hasn't had any impact on people who visit Reddit to celebrate OTHER passions - watches, fast cars, nekkid bodies, local events. And in a few weeks, these screechers will, despite their protestations today, be back. Because screechers gonna screech, and there's no better place for an audience than on... Reddit.
Re: (Score:2)
I was annoyed that some of the subs that I used to follow got diverted into protests. It was basically senseless SPAM, and now I don't follow them. Mostly discussion of specific games, which are also actively discussed on Discord.
There is currently a small fraction of reddit posters who think they are being extraordinarily clever by sprinkling fuck and fucking in their subject lines. I assume they believe this will prevent advertising being added to their thread? I'm not sure if that is the effect or exp
Re: (Score:3)
it does make browsing Reddit a lot less appealing, for me.
Given that Reddit is comprised of user generated content, that would seem to prove their point, that the users being pissed means the quality of the platform takes a dive.
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the users being pissed
It proves something, but I must have missed out on the poll taken to determine that all users want the site turned into a collection of shit-posts.
I don't use any third party apps and don't really give a damn about the API. The little time I have to spare is better used for other things than reading about a small bunch of people having a tanty and intentionally trying to make the service bad for everyone else.
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We'll see. The IPO was planned for this year, if it doesn't happen it will likely be because of the CEO's needless clusterfuck.
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1. The protests are over a silly topic. Yes, Reddit is now charging (too much) for API access for third party clients. Something that Nextdoor and Discord don't even ALLOW. YOU haven't been paying for Reddit. The client devs haven't either. And Reddit has been in the Red.
Note that despite the deadline having passed, the third party apps are still working. On the platforms you cited, why should I care about the policies of a different platform are? Reddit features are not the same as other platforms, and the userbase isn't the same. With respect to reddit's financial situation, all we have is speculation.
2. Nobody else noticed.
This seems to be a silly statement. Some people noticed, some people did, and to those that care, it's a big deal to them, and the fact there exists a population for who
business model (Score:2)
You have a problem when your business model relies on people doing things for free, then you think you can force them to obey your edicts.
terminology (Score:2)
There is a technical name for this. It is 'The Bud Light / Target Disease" aka the Shoot Yourself in the Foot virus and the Disney bacterium. The symptoms are: stupid business decisions not taking into account consumer perceptions, and also falling stock prices.
Good news everyone! We plan to make money by driving our customers away! The board of directors is going on vacation for eight weeks they earned from their wise oversight.
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I sure hate it when one of the best posts is last.
Re:reddit is retarded (Score:5, Funny)
Of course! It's incredibly offensive to mentally challenged people to compare them to internet trolls.
Re: Do these people not have lives? (Score:3)
(Shrug) Tolerating intolerance turns out to be maladaptive. If you want to be a hard-right Trumper gasbag, go do it someplace else besides unrelated subreddits.
Seems simple enough.
Re: (Score:2)
More like Karl Popper [medium.com].
Re: How are subreddits affected by this change? (Score:2)
Nobody was objecting to paying for the API. Reddit had been foreshadowing it for months and third party devs thought the idea was entirely reasonable.
Reddit then released the pricing structure and told devs they had thirty days to implement the required changes. That pricing structure was ludicrous to the point of being a clear indication that third party apps were no longer welcome in the ecosystem.