Reddit Ramps Up Its Threats To Protesting Mods, As Ad Buyers Leave

Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.

I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.

It’s worth mentioning the article said prior to the blackout ads saw ~14,500 clicks so they’re currently down 40-50%

The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.

That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo's perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don't seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).

Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut "unnecessary expenses".

I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.

I mod a small/mid size sub that is still blacked out. Should I leave it private or just let it get overrun with spam?

It's too late for you, but I'd suggest anybody who wants to delete their account consider first editing all of their comments to overwrite the data, there are lots of reports of deleted comments being restored, I've not heard of reverted edits though. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

I was a mod, deleted my 14 year old account after having rewritten all my comments and posts

Proof that people will gladly support a good product.

I was a paying premium member with ads enabled until recently.

Dude, I paid for Reddit Premium or Gold or whatever the fuck it's called for 5+ years just to support. I wish I could claw it all back.

We even used to run "thanks for not using adblock" ads in rotation, when there were no other ads to run. I had a picture of a squirrel that was in rotation there

11 year account...makes it pretty easy to imagine. It was a very different site back then.

Personally the redditbusiness page marketing to advertisers reads like wishful thinking or something straight from /r/boringdystopia.

"Look there's places where people come to discuss flashlight options and other users/google results trust them! Pay us money to look like you're part of that! It's not creepy to try and co-opt at all!"

I'm not surprised that their interface isn't great, they haven't paid for developers to do anything other than try to look more like twitter/facebook in a long time.

Too many people ad block everything on Reddit in any decent category that you might want to target.

The real way to do it is an army of paid shills making posts and comments by a third party.

I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they're in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn't surprise me.

Ads? No, I would not accept ads. What I would have accepted was a subscription payment. Hell, I went so far as to purchase Apollo lifetime ultimate.

I am more than willing to support things I use. I am not willing to deal with ads though. Especially when they sneak in like they are posts, and take up entire scroll widths.

Yeah and it's not like you wouldn't understand that Reddit would 2-tier its API so that paying Reddit users can get served ad-less experiences while non-paying need to see ads for your app to use the API. That's not even that uncommon from what I interact with at work.

Not just "not concerned", it was literally their formal position that mods owned the subs that they modded. You couldn't remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive. If the mod was active and not actively breaking TOS then reddits response has ALWAYS been "if you don't like the way the sub is being handled, make your own sub and let the free market sort out whether yours or theirs is better".

They held that position since the founding of reddit and it was as fundamental to the platform as the ability to create your own instance with your own rules is here on Lemmy. Right up until it was starting to get in the way of the CEOs big IPO payday.

This is why all the "fuck the mods I'm with the admins" folks are so short sighted. The only reason bad mods can exist is because the admins won't remove them. They're fine with bigotry and power abuse. The current mods are just a sacrificial lamb

So they really are following Twitter's example. Twitter's lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It's stunning how stupid companies can be.

I doubt spez cares about reddit. He cares about money. If he has to throw the site under a bus to make some more money he will gladly do it

I worked at reddit during the Digg transition. We all were amazed at how utterly tone-deaf Digg was, how they had already taken some of their problematic features (higher karma users votes being stronger, votes being public, etc) to the extreme (letting companies literally purchase front-page space that wasn't marked as an ad, etc).

Fast forward 12 years and reddit is somehow upping the ante and being even worse. At least Digg 4 ran well on the browsers of the time. new.reddit can kick up the CPU on an M2 Max fully loaded with RAM

This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets.

Some of us were there when Digg died, ended up on Reddit. This whole scenario is not feeling too different. I think it'll take a little longer, the IPO might be the real catalyst, or the monetisation and cannibalisation of the platform that comes from new owners afterwards. But it's going to come.

Reddit sat for a very long time in the shadow of Digg until it made its final blunder. Lemmy's communities will do the same, a dual-power in the wings waiting for a catalyst to come.

Out of all the platforms to leave, leaving Reddit was ridiculously easy. There's zero lock in. I don't care about preserving my post history. My account is not connected to my real life. My conversations were with strangers. Deleting my account meant nothing to me and I was using Reddit since the very beginning.

It's not like Facebook where some events are only there and there are some people I can only contact there, and it's not like email where I have all my accounts connected to it and all my contacts have that address. Reddit had literally zero lock in for me. I'm not missing it one bit. Lemmy has fulfilled everything I got from Reddit. Only issues is that it's unstable from all the new load but so was Reddit when I first switched to that.

Omg I just popped into dig for 10 seconds and it's so bad.

I was an avid user of yahoo chats. Those were my peak 'get influenced by strangers' period. Was 10 or something in those and on basic neopets. Yup we move on.

I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)

They had no lockin. Other social networks are connected to your real identity and real life friends and connections. Or they have content creators that you could only find on their platform. Reddit had neither. Leaving it was the easiest thing ever.

Of the places I've been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn't just in the software but also in the community.

Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I'm trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.

The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.

yIlop! wa’IeS chaq maHegh!

Outnerd me! I dare you!

I think moderation and community will be much better on Lemmy. On Reddit you got some power tripping mods because they'd control the only sub with a clean name that got all the subscribers. There's no such monopoly on Lemmy so it will be the best communities that win. Monopolies corrupt in all their forms.

reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.

the content is the people. that's the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they'll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you're just a dick.

i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn't a word. let's make it a word.

It is basically "if you refuse to work for free, then we won't let you work for free. Ha, that'll teach them"

Because the goal was never to get some kind of fair price for using the API. That's why they priced it at "Fuck You."

Ultimately what they want is for people to stop using 3rd party apps entirely because 3rd party apps either don't show advertisements, or they show advertisements that give ad revenue to the developer.

They want everyone using their app because the valuation of tech companies directly correlates to the number of eyeballs they can serve ads to. Old.reddit will be next, and I bet they'll try to start blocking ad blockers after that.

Yeah I was trying to convey this feeling to my wife the other night. It's not just that I won't be able to use my favorite app (rif) anymore, it's that the CEO has been lying and gaslighting about what they've said. In that AMA thread where he said they want to work with devs who want to work with them and like three devs were like "hey we're fine with paying but you haven't answered our attempts to contact you" (not to even mention Apollo's Dev's bombshell recordings lol) really shows they don't give a shit.

I feel like they want that AI money and are furious all these models scraped their content. I get it but it's not even their content. Regardless of how you feel about artists being mad about their art being used to train models I think we can all agree that a site that merely hosts content being mad that the content was used is laughable.

thoroughly agree that the api stuff is just one symptom of a broader underlying issue

Absolutely. I was waiting it out to see how it would pan out, but after spez's AMA I dropped Reddit immediately. That was before I even found Lemmy as a replacement. Now that I'm here I'm not missing Reddit in the slightest.

It's that last part that's going to break their knees, lol

Make sure to point everyone to wefwef.app and Sync for Lemmy!

Also Lemmynsfw.com 🤨

(Mandatory plug: !animemidriff@lemmynsfw.com)

Edit: Fyi nsfw content isn't visible without an account

It's unprecedented for a major link aggregator that's basically king of its niche to make such a boneheaded self-destructive decision and drive its userbase to a newer competitor like this. Definitely one for the history books.

Good people do good things and get punished by bad people.

Bad people do bad things and get rewarded.

I have an article Aaron wrote about the Freemont GM plant business case that I read every few months to remind me of the point he was making. And every time I read it, I am reminded of the ridiculous sequence of events that took him away. Sometimes, it really does seem like only the good die young.

oof. Kinda dark and morbid. But I get it.

Conspiracy theory time. Huffman murdered Aaron and made it look like a suicide because he didn't want Reddit to sell out.

3 sites if you include Twitter . Twitter and Reddit seem to be in a mismanagement competition right now. Not sure who's winning

Heh, I go back to Usenet. Architecturally, Lemmy is closer to Usenet, but Usenet did not have an authentication mechanism.

Same.

That's how I got my username....

I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Newsvine -> Reddit -> Lemmy

I spent the most time on Reddit, but I think I had the "best" time on Newsvine. Their website was extremely slick, and the fact that they encouraged long-form articles from their users was awesome

Myspace, digg, tumblr, reddit, twitch, could maybe count 9gag and places like gfycat

Yes. At the end of the day it is always corporate greed and shortsightedness that does them in.

I remember the day that Slashdot sold out.

Steve: "Uh... hey Elon, I have an idea for your new Neuralink thing, can we talk about it? I'm positive it's gonna be a great success..."

They're ramping up bots to cover the loss of users.

Very very few people actually post, and a little more comment. But as bot posts became the majority, lurkers are going to start leaving as quality dips.

That would be a hilarious protest turn of events!

Traffic to the page for people to buy ads is down. This has been the trend for the past week or so. People are still using reddit, but companies aren't looking to advertise on it.