“These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free” – Steve Huffman, [https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview](Source: The Verge)
Let’s be frank: Reddit absolutely has the right to charge for their API. But the consequences of them charging for the API is that moderators are choosing to no longer use the platform. And they will have to ask themselves whether they will make more money from charging for the API than they will lose from people not using the product.
Here’s a good metaphor:
Imagine a convention center [Reddit] with an infinite number of conference rooms for conventions. There are big rooms for big conventions (r/aww) small rooms for small conventions (r/poker) and very small rooms for very small conventions (r/LeonardNimoyIsSecretlyBansky).
The convention center had this business plan: They would let anyone set up a convention at their convention center, for free. Because it’s free, lots of people would hold conventions there, and they could sell advertising on the walls and in the rooms. Heck, it was even a great idea, as companies could target specific conventions that they wanted to advertise to.
Now, the thing about this plan was that it was such a good idea that it quickly ran into some problems. Convention organizers [mods] had problems with people coming into their conventions to try to sabotage it, make trouble, provoke people. Additionally, the convention center itself was okay, but didn’t have a lot of access for the disabled.
The convention center, however, gave the organizers a set of tools [the API] which they could use to provide security, management, etc. They weren’t perfect, and left a lot to be desired, but by using those tools, the organizers could keep their conventions more or less chugging along without it turning into a full-time job. (Though maybe it was still a part-time job!) They could build out ramps for wheelchairs, braille stations for the blind, and improve the user experience: maps so that people wouldn’t get lost, summaries for late developers, reminders for important events, etc.
Now, not everyone used those tools for selfless reasons. A few big companies [Microsoft/OpenGPT & other AI companies] used those tools that made the convention center easy to access, and they went around and learned a lot about the conventioneers and they used that information to make money.
Cut to today, and the convention center isn’t making as much money as they hoped they would. They want to find another source of revenue since advertising isn’t enough.
So they said: Hey, we give away the tools that big companies use to make money. We should charge those big companies to use those tools, or we can take them away.
And what they did was charge everybody who had been relying on those tools. Not just the big companies (who I don’t think anyone would mind if they paid a fee) but also the convention organizers and the people who made handicapped ramps. And they charged them all the same rate.
Well, since the convention organizers can no longer organize their conventions without those tools, and they can’t afford the price that the convention center was charging for the tools, then they did what was reasonable: they shut down their conventions [the blackout].
Which presents a problem for Reddit, because if there are less convention organizers, there are less conventions, which means less convention goers, which means that they sell less advertising on the walls.
Up until this point, this is simply a miscalculation on the part of the convention center. The convention center has options - they could say: “You need to run a convention to get the tools for free, and only then you can use it on YOUR convention.” Or: “Everyone can use the tools for free - enough to organize a convention or two, but if you use it a whole lot, like you’re a big company gathering conventoneer data, you have to pay for it.”
There were ways to make this work out okay.
But instead, what the convention center decided to do was stick with the original idea to charge for the tools at the original price. When they did that, they decreased the value of the convention center, because now, not everyone could operate a convention there.
This is just business. When price goes up, demand goes down. And maybe some bean counter at the convention center figures they can make more profit by charging more for the API than the revenue they lose from advertising.
But it’s extremely callous, and downright idiotic in any industry to demand that people buy and continue to use your product at the price you set, when they don’t want to.
Full stop.
Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).
I’ll be honest. I don’t like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.
Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.
Right now, I need to buy a car, I can’t find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for ‘cars’ in all federated communities returns:
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriberLeave aside for a moment that “Fuck Cars” has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different “Fuck Cars” communities, and three different “Cars” communities. It’s great that you have subscriber numbers, but there’s no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit’s CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.
Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of “lemmyhub.com”
We’d all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we’d all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it’d use blockchain, I don’t know. Point is, it’s centralized and easy to find information. It would work “just like Reddit” where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.
If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the “default” community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.
Here’s the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you’re doing that, you’re making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around “what’s free speech/what’s hate speech?” “what’s acceptable to view/what’s not?”, you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.
Reddit wasn’t perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit’s authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent – right up until the point that it wasn’t.
So I don’t think Lemmy can technologically make it’s way out of the situation.
I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it’s not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.
Because I’ll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there’s really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there’s nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.
Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.
But I’ve been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I’m not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that’s an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I’m driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I’m grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley