- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Title says it all. If you think Reddit’s been trending down lately, just wait.
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What Reddit fails to understand with their decades of industry experience and 2k employees is that without their users, they don’t have a product. Moderators work for free. Creators work for free. These people didn’t do it for Reddit. They did it for you and me.
And then like three developers in their spare time ate their lunch.
And yet, with all that supposed experience they still fail to maintain a decent platform.
There’s a reason nobody uses their official app.
It’s worse than that, when this all started I had a look at their Wikipedia entry. They have 2000 employees across 5 locations. What in the ever loving Christ are they all doing if that app is the best they can do?
Most of them are either admins (read: global moderators to enforce site wide policy) and “community builders” that spam subreddits with reposts and junk to boost activity. Some of that spam was malicious bots of course, but a lot was also from reddit themselves. That’s why the site appears as active as it is with so many content creators leaving.
Their development team is probably very small.
Jesus it sounds like they took a look at /r/subredditsimulator and thought, “hey let’s make the whole site like that”.
I mean what do you think they were doing for all those years? I still remember when r/subredditsimulator would frequently pop up on the front page because of some of the ridiculous and funny things the AI language models would post. But eventually over time as they learned to mimic typical user posts, it got to a point where it was a clone of every other sub on the site and everyone sort of forgot about it. So I honestly would not doubt for a second that they’ve spread them out to numerous subs and are using them as content creators to try and keep subs appearing active.
This sounds really dumb, but the “activity” is primarily what draws new users and keeps existing ones. The primary complaint/desire of new Lemmy users is more/sustained activity on the platform. That’s also what keeps people using Twitter and other SM platforms.
For a company approaching an IPO, increasing amd sustaining activity from real users is maybe the second most important thing to do, second only to showing a clear route to monetization. It doesnt surprise me their team may be mostly admin and “community builders”, but it does surprise me that they’d risk loosing major contributors and moderators without a clear replacement.
Most people use their official app
Most people probably just interact with it through the browser via google searches.
Nah, nearly 90% of mobile users interact with Reddit via the official app (most people use Reddit on mobile devices).
Damn, it’s so strange knowing that it’s so bad and yet people use it. Goes to show just how important the content is even with such terrible UX.
most people don’t even bother trying it, from the few that I’ve seen that do converted real quick.
Where did you get either of those statistics?
These numbers have been thrown around since the beginning of the protest. I don’t believe Reddit actually publishes that data (someone can come and correct me if wrong).
I think what happened is someone did the math on downloads for all the 3PA (or maybe just just major ones) and compared it to active users.
Fact is, no one knows just how many users used 3PA vs the official app except for reddit. Me thinks because the data doesn’t look good for them, otherwise why not back up all that boasting with numbers.
Insightful question. After all, 34.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
That’s bullshit. It’s actually 82.31%
I too am curious. It would also be insightful to see where the real OC comes from, I would think most casual users browsing and occasionally commenting would be on the official app. Where the users who contribute popular, useful content are likely on a 3rd party app and/or pc
I’d guess account age correlates pretty strongly with 3PA usage as well - the older the account, the more likely to use a 3PA, since that’s all that existed for mobile browsing back when Reddit was new.
There was a post on r/dataisbeautiful that pulled the estimated values from the app stores. The author noted the massive grains of salt we should take with those figures, and that they couldn’t get reliable data from desktop browser use.
I’m not bothering to get the link for two reasons. 1) the aforementioned reasons to be skeptical anyways, and 2) fuck giving reddit some ad revenue.
I meant any browser including phones.
Your point stands, but just wanted to point out that the lemmy devs have been working full time on this for the last 3 years, funded by https://nlnet.nl/
I had no idea about that foundation - it seems like they’ve done a lot of great work. Thanks for sharing!
I think they do understand this, to a point. That’s why they keep threatening their mods instead of outright removing them.
Except they have outright removed a bunch. All but two of the r/TIHI mods were purged, as an example.
Their reopening efforts aren’t looking so hot…
r/tihi as of [Sat Jul 8 19:30:18 ~EDT 2023~] looks like its back to pre protest affairs
It looks like it’s back, but are they really? One of the posts from the last 12 hours is “Thanks, I hate the new Sonic” with a still from the movie before they reworked it. I smell a repost bot in action to make it look like there’s more traffic…
He was a Co creator.
I think you accidentally responded to the wrong comment. I assume you meant to respond to the comment below asking whether spez was with Reddit since the beginning.
Yeah, I did
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for spez being an open raging asshole.
Did spez create reddit or did they just hire him?
He’s one of the founders of Reddit. The other two being Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian.
Are Swartz and Ohanian still around? Are they all trying to cash in?
I can understand wanting to get retirement money out of your long-term project, but we’re not obliged to stick around and assist in the degradation of a once-great platform.
Swartz unfortunately died in 2013.
Whoa, I didnt know that guy was involved with reddit. He’s the anti-spez.
He’s one of 3 founders iirc
However, they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great, and that’s what actually matters in the coming IPO. They also understand that these actions will hurt the site and that the fallout will come at a notable delay. However, by the time it’s clear the site has only a few months to live, the previous owners have already taken the money and left. At that point, it’s a problem for the new owners. Let them figure out how to fix a sinking ship.
they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great
That would require people to actually pay that API pricing. The apps closing down and AI people scraping the web site instead won’t help them.
Also, AI only really needs to scrape a post once. I don’t think there will be much financial gain from openai or someone else scraping reddit
They don’t even need to scrape it. There is a torrent out there with all the data for the last 10 years or so neatly packaged.
Ahh, but it’s a bit more subtle than that.
The API pricing was a tool to kill the apps, because Reddit is not able to milk ad money from those users. Now that most of the 3rd party apps are dead and most subs are open, users have no choice but to be exposed to adds. That’s where the real money is.
Yeah, but Reddit makes pennies per user from showing them ads, so they’re still losing money.
Rather than laughing all the way to the bank, it’s more of a forced chuckle on the way to the dole office.
They do have a choice though. They can just not use Reddit at all, and/or come here.
Sums up all communities. Doesn’t matter how much money you have, the “social” part always wins.
Reddit now:
What’s your all-time favorite video game?
u/totallynormaluser: “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I don’t have personal preferences or emotions, so I don’t have the ability to have a favorite video game.”
u/AngryBeaverBeaver : OP, why do you even bother posting here when 90% of replies are bots?
OP : I’m sorry, but as an AI language model…
u/AngryBeaverBeaver: Aight imma reporting every bot
Mod: I’m sorry, but as an AI language model…
Reddit will probably appreciate the extra traffic bots will create
Until that IPO happens and investors want an audit of bot activity vs daily active users and then it all goes south from there.
What’s this “from there”? It’s already heading south and they haven’t even had the IPO yet.
Maybe, maybe not. Advertisers are definitely going to want to know how many of their impressions are actual people and how many are bots.
I fear your right, seems the kind of scummy I’ma god-complex type thing spez would do
BotDefense was great. About 10% of mod activity on r/monero was done by it and with great accuracy too!
not a super valuable stat. 10% on a crypto sub isn’t great
As if Reddit isn’t already a shit show now… just wait. It’ll be overrun with bots.
Maybe that’s the plan, charge the bots to talk to each other
Close.
- Make people have to sign up to use Reddit
- Have bots do the work of people by reposting old top posts
- ???
- Profit
It’ll be like watching a bunch of CPU players fight each other in Smash Bros. That’s entertaining, right?
In otherwords they’re speedrunning the capitalism fueled ai takeover
I don’t understand why they are going to keep the service running through October? If you are leaving, why not get it over with - could someone enlighten me?
Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.
As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).
At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.
BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.
If I recall correctly, that 30 day notice was basically cut in half anyway because communication from Reddit’s side was so wishy-washy and opaque.
Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.
Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.
So reddit will juts turn into youtube comments.
I don’t get those. Half of yt comments are “I like how x” where x is the plot of the video.
It already has
With only a week having passed since Reddit implemented new API rules, it’s alarming to see so many notable community members decide that their volunteer efforts and innovations are no longer worth providing.
I mean they’ve been hamstrung, had their tools removed from them. At that point what can they do?
So if I read it correctly, it was purely because they disagree with Reddit, not because they lost access/usage of any tools. More of “fuck doing all this work for these assholes” thing
https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/
Like many anti-abuse projects on Reddit, we’ve done all of this for free while putting up with Reddit’s penchant for springing detrimental changes on developers and moderators (e.g., adding API limits without advance notice and blocking Pushshift) and figuring out workarounds for numerous scalability issues that Reddit never seems to fix. Without Pushshift, the number of malicious bots we were able to ban dropped to 5,517 in May.
The “blocking Pushift” part is what actively makes their work harder by a lot.
As the old saying goes, “Reddit fucked around and now they are starting to find out!”
The amount of spam comments afterwards is going to make your average Reddit thread look like a modern Youtube comment section.
This is good for reddit.
jnj
