Sorry I'm a bit late to the party, what's up with reddit right now?

People are mad because they want money if you use their platform? Like wtf? Of course they do so.

One comment I read had me screaming internally. "I'm deleting all my stuff, I don't want them to make money with my intellectual property!" Thefuck. They make money with the fact they give you a platform for your irrelevant opinion you asshat.

Tbh, I'm just afraid of all the porn I might be unable to access in the future. Does someone archive all and everything tagged with NSFW please?

They want an unreasonably large amount of money

@iiii It will be near $20 million a year. Fucking crazy.

You're watching porn through Reddit? You do know there are free porn sites out there right?

@Sid2006 there's a ton of Korean porn manhwas and japanese doujins featured on reddit. Would be harder to find some good stuff if there's no one to show it to you

Reddit draws it's value from having a community.

Reddit needs to show that value to investors soon

Reddit users are mass-deleting their stuff in some protest

Up until this point. Everything is -normal-

Reddit is keeping users stuff up despite users mass-deleting. Reddit is asking its users to manually delete every comment if they want a true mass deletion. Reddit STILL leaves the stuff up, as if they just restored from a backup. This happens even if PII is included in the comments a user mass-deleted. This is NOT normal and downright illegal.

@nitnip I imagine that you could just disable the delete comment API or just implement soft deletions in your db

Abandoning the platform is the only way out.

@Sid2006 what the hell, do you have a source for this number?

@iiii alright, fair point. But why aren't people just leaving the platform then?

Also, this doesn't affect the normal user in any way, does it?
IMO, Gitlab is priced unreasonably, too. Why whould I protest instead of just not using it?

@Sid2006 yeah, 95% of fetish videos out there suck ass (pun intended) and I'm not really a video type of guy.
Also, I don't like using porn sites, where I have to fight against 1027292 popups and stuff.
Reddit has a nice "right from the source"-feeling. Hot girls posting hot stuff on their own accounts because they like to do so. Somewhat ethical porn LOL.

@nitnip yeah, you're probably right with the whole investor stuff.
But in the end, it's their product. They pay the infrastructure, where you want to have fun. It's not a country with democracy.
In my opinion it's presumptuous to expect platforms to be a welfare.

The price they’re asking is unreasonable for a site that relies on free moderation labour.

@latisfeire where do you all have these infos from?

I found something about 12k USD for 50m calls, that's below 0.01 USD per call. That's quite low in comparison to other APIs out there.

@nitwhiz it's partially an issue with the cost, but especially an issue with the timing. The devs using the API were given about a month to change from a purely free API to a monthly cost. That might be doable for a month to month subscription kind of a thing, but many users for Apollo are yearly and many for RIF are lifetime one off payments. /r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ has a great breakdown of it, including an estimate of revenue per user that reddit itself is making with advertising versus cost of the API usage. In a previous call they were told no major changes in 2023, then they were told "nope, contract before end of June and charges start first of July on a net 30 billing." And they were told that with about a month to figure it out.

I'm sure a lot of users wouldn't mind an increase in cost, but many being yearly, the dev would have to eat that cost in the interim, which isn't an acceptable solution

the way they did it was off.
They didn't seem to want that 3PA pay the API. the high cost, short time and bad communication looked like they want to kill those apps
There's also a lot of tooling for mods that wouldn't work now
Also accessebility hasn't been properly adressed

That's one of the bigger issue: all the time the community pulled the weight: they build 3PA with accessibility and stuff, they build mod-tools, ... And now reddit calls them leeches and wants to kill API usage without proper alternatives? bad look

Also that "makes money of me" might be reffering the AI issue. Lot of recent chat-stuff has been trained on reddit. Now the CEO feels left out wants a piece of that cake and does the above. But not HE created that dataset, the community did! The company just provided a simple forum

At least thats what I'm seeing from the sidelines

@Jedidja @pyr02k1 Valid points. Thanks for the insights.

I guess I don't really get the motivation behind 3rd party apps and their importance. I'm using the official reddit app and tbh, it's the only app that doesn't look like a website from the 2010's wrapped in cordova and it fully works for me.

I don't understand that whole "Yes I love reddit and I really need to use it!, but I really want to use someones makeshift client to use it. And I'll be mad if I can't!" thing.

And for mod-tools: I may be delusional, but I think most communities are manageable with 100 queries / minute. If not because your subreddit has this much bot traffic, why don't just scale the mod-tools to use multiple client-ids and secrets?

@Jedidja "Now the CEO feels left out wants a piece of that cake.": Can't this statement be applied to 3rd party developers, too? They want a piece of the "reddit platform"-cake in the end of the day. Or maybe I misunderstand that, see paragraph 1 of this comment.

The story is quite complicated. but boils down to this:
Reddit wants to IPO in the near future. So - it needs to increase its value in the short term.
Reddit is not profitable - or so it claims. However, 3rd party apps to access reddit are profitable. The reason they can be profitable - is because they don't pay server costs.... much.
How to solve? demand payment from the 3PA!
The problem: Those apps are used mostly by the reddit moderators, those who moderate reddit? Also content generator Users hate the official app...

So - reddit admins now have to deal with all kind of crap coming from thier Users and Mods. And all kind of stupid stuff - like subreddits going NSFW, mass "export all my data" requests, users deleting thier content, and other shit.
All this have an effect ob the reddit valuation.

Also - spez said he liked what happend at twitter. 🤷‍♂️

@nitwhiz for details you'd have to e.g. check out Selig, the dev of Apollo:
https://reddit.com/user/iamthatis/

he wrote quite a lot of info on the topic.

in his case he did yearly subscriptions of around 10$ ( don't know the exact numbers) with 50000 users. He can't easily bill users with existing subscription rather he has to raise the prize for new ones. And by raise I mean at least doublr the price.
That leaves him with quite some cost in between and makes just refunding the current subs cheaper ($250 000 cheap....) and easier

@nitwhiz the systems are rather different. Reddit is a huge set of forums and and it stores a lot of unique information which is not present anywhere else

@magicMirror imo,reddit going public is the death of reddit. It will devolve into a money driven platform which will use anything to leech money from users

@iiii exactly the problem.

Reddit as a ForProfit public company will go the same way as tumbler, or stumbleupon.
The issue is moderation. The mids are unpaid at the moment, and they are *not* happy.
Reddit will have to start paying the mods. making it unprofitable....

@magicMirror time to spin up your own forums, I guess 🤷‍♂️
The tech and software was there for a very long time

@iiii there are quite some to choose from:
squabbles.io
metatron
kbin
tildes.net
lemmy

lets see how those migrations play out

@Jedidja Lemmy got some popularity boost because of reddit now

@nitwhiz "But in the end, it's their product. They pay the infrastructure, where you want to have fun. It's not a country with democracy. In my opinion it's presumptuous to expect platforms to be a welfare"

You are missing the point. What you wrote there is -CORRECT-, as long as they remain bound by LAW.

However, there are laws in place about privacy. Laws that make such platforms be obligated to provide a way to delete accounts. Reddit is based in California and as such, has to obey the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). Particularly, the part about any user having the option to delete all of their data, or request all their data to be deleted from a website.

Reddit making the mass-deletion harder than it needs to be, and then just rollbacking it is NOT legal.

What I'm saying is completely unrelated to the API changes.

@nitnip yeah, you're absolutely right about deletion. Never doubted that.
We all know that platforms never hard delete stuff these days and that's illegal.

I was talking about the fact that they can make changes, be it featurewise or pricingwise as they wish, as they own it 100% (and more or less everything you post there).