Reddit API fee protests push into third week

I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who are continuing to stick with it + be supportive. I didn't expect anything beyond the planned end of the blackout, although I didn't expect thousands of subreddits to participate in that either. Either way I've basically cut Reddit out entirely. I used to scroll 2-3hrs a day and I'm down to maybe 10 minutes once or twice a week when I'm trying to find an answer to something. Attempting to fill my newfound free time has been.. fun

Even if reddit changes course at this point... I've found Lemmy. And it's just... better. And beyond that, it would take reddit years to recoup the goodwill they've lost with this.
- It is sad that we are going to loose a bunch of community knowledge that is on reddit if they go under but fuck spez and reddit
  
  Though I wish there was a backup of reddit so we can keep the community knowledge gathered throughout the years
  
  Edit: typo
Weirdly enough it got me more engaged with social media. In the sense that now I'm posting and talking with people on lemmy and mastodon more than I ever did on reddit. Weird how a place can get so popular it stops being a real community after a while
- I don't know that it has me engaging more but it feels more fun and meaningful now. Reddit had turned into man yells into the void for me. Now I feel like I'm talking to real people again on Lemmy. It's such a relief honestly.
- True, same experience here. It's nice to not see 1k+ comment threads filled with karmahoarders voted to the top.
- I think the strange part is feeling obligated to interact more. I'll upvote more than I did on Reddit. I post more than I did on Reddit. The goal seems clear, to make this place feel inhabited. The more bustling it feels, the bustling it will become.
  
  The other aspect is moderating communities. I'm not a mod, or at least I wasn't. But Lemmy lacks the breadth of oddly specific comms, and if I intend to eventually doom scroll again, modding a niche comm is a good start.
That’s what I’ve been doing here instead, lol.
- shhh let me pretend my attempt at self-improvement has been successful
It's annoying that so much of my search results rely on community discussions from reddit. I've pretty much ditched the site entirely and am getting pretty comfy here, but a lot of historical discussions on reddit simply can't be replaced and likely never will be.
- Well, no offense, but I don't want both of my arms broken to begin with, let alone what comes after!
I haven't been on Reddit since June 11th at 9:30pm central time. That's when the first of my subbed reddits went dark. I deleted rif, and haven't been back. I've just been wasting time here, instead!
Do you mean you're masturbating more or you took up painting?
- Or painting themselves masturbating?

Honestly? I've ripped off the bandaid and moved operations over here. It feel weird and treacherous just going back to check for zombie comments.

Y'alll are more my speed anyway. Prost! 🍻

It feel weird and treacherous just going back to check for zombie comments.

Well, replace "reddit.com" in the url with "teddit.net" and you can view content on Reddit without going to Reddit.
🍻
I did go on reddit the other day (didn't login) and seeing all of the deleted comments the admins have removed for talking about THE ISSUE is kind of hilarious.
It just feels more alive and real here... If that makes any sense.

Don’t go back. Even if Reddit makes concessions, the CEO has shown that he will do whatever he wants and doesn’t give a crap about the users of Reddit, you know, the people who actually make him money. Any site controlled by a CEO is at risk of this happening.

Not just shit controlled by a CEO, literally anything for-profit. For-profit software does not care about your experience. It cares about gouging as much money as it can from you. Open source software, the antithesis, is made for and by the people. It's there to be as useful and enjoyable as possible. Open source software has nothing to gain from forcing you to jump through hoops, unlike for-profit software. They put the hoops in place, then force you to pay them to fix the problem they deliberately caused.

And it's not like open software can't make money. Donations have shown time and time again to be enough for software and servers good enough to deserve them. See lichess.org for a wonderful example of an open platform that even denounces advertising openly, and yet survives just fine on donations. The problem is the for-profit income model.
If all the third party apps die, I couldn't go back even if I wanted to.

There's no way they can IPO with under the current circumstances. They'll not be able to strong-arm the volunteers into submission. I'm thinking there's a deadline, they'll drop spez and sell the company off to some place that gives a crap.

They'll sell the company off to some place that will give less of a crap and will need to monetize even more to recoup their investment. It will become Deaddit.
Wouldn’t it be enjoyable to watch receive news of that here on Lemmy 🤭
Reddit is now further away from a public offering than it was last year, Mr. Huffman said.

https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/85610/Spez-talks-to-NY-Times

I'm glad people aren't backing down, whether you left Reddit entirely for Lemmy like I have or keep trying to start fires over there, it all hurts Reddit's IPO.

This won't go anywhere as long as users aren't willing to leave reddit. Mods can be replaced, users can't.

I left...reddit honestly seems clunky now...I go back to watch it burn but it's not burning enough :( maybe instead of John Oliver they should be posting dragons or something jeez
- People should just start posting really unflattering images of spez or photoshopping spez
  
  That would really piss him off
I left. dl'd, and then erased all my content. This confirms the importance of Open Source.

I don't really get what protesters wants to achieve now but only a moron would go back even if they announced that there won't be any API changes, knowing what shit CEO of that shit company thinks about them. Stockholm syndrome is strong in these people.

The longer this goes on, the more convinced I am that this will actually damage Reddit significantly.

It took many years for reddit to take off to become a huge player on the internet. Digg, Twitter, and myspace where the big players in 2005 to 2010. Then people started to move to Facebook, Snapchat, and Reddit as they became more popular. It only a matter of time until Mastodon, Lemmy and other federated platforms take over. Especially if the community keeps growing and spreading the word.

Yes, it'll take time but this was a good kick in the pants.
Gotta spread the good word of ActivityPub!
Yeah does it seems like decentralized (federated or otherwise) systems will be the future of social media. There's lemmy (only four years old, the most popular I'd say), bluesky (another federated system), and plebbit (peer to peer, uses ipfs) to highlight a few. So there seemsto be a lot of exploration in this space.

I think reddit will be around for quite some time, but it'll never be the same, and die a slow death.
- Bluesky has a great write up about federation/decentralization in case anyone is interested:
  
  https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/6-23-2023-moderation-proposals
  
  Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences.

https://lemm.ee/post/314486

And now people are doing GDPR requests. Literally takes 3 seconds. Might as well!

Will edit with the direct link in a second. It's also a comment in the above thread.

Edit: direct link for GDPR is here: https://lemm.ee/comment/402687

why can't jerboa open those links?
- I think it might be because there is no "this is a Lemmy domain" in the HTML header and thus the Jebora Dev needs to register every website it can open manually and separately.

Reddit is a full trashcan nobody bothered to empty for 10 years. Lemmy it up!

This 🔥

Given that reddit is making it difficult for users to delete posts and comments [1]. I wonder if it will make it more difficult for them if instead of deleting the comments and posts, but we flood the posts and comments with garbage edits.

Something like this could be easily scripted out. Could use browser automation if you don't want to use the reddit api.

If they truly have the ability to roll back deleted AND edits on a post and comment level, then flooding the change history log with garbage edits will cause them to hemorrhage money in terms of cold storage (ie, Amazon S3) and database size.

They can't be infinitely storing all of the edit history. So at some point they have to purge the oldest commits at which point makes it equivalent to deletion of original post, except now they are keeping garbage and paying to keep that garbage stored. Have fun running your LLM on that junk.

Something like this:

original comment: "Some thoughtful comment here"
1st edit: <edited to hit max comment length with garbage content, maybe "lorem ipsom" placeholder stuff>
2nd edit: <edit one character in string>
3rd edit: <edit another character in string>
nth edit: ...

Again, this assumes they are even keeping the edit history. Would be nice if we can get insider information from a reddit backend engineer to confirm.

[1] https://lemmy.world/post/647059

Well, since we are here on Lemmy, it feels like that good damage is already done on Reddit side.

If the injury is a fatal one, only time and the engagement on the alternatives will tell.

Reddit will still be around for a good long while after this I'm guessing, unless the IPO offering goes completely tits up, it may be a long, slow decline, or none at all even. However, just given their attitude in all of this, they'll likely be pushing people away on a regular basis with even more bad decisions until they it hits a critical mass and people just migrate to the new popular site/app. Whether it's Lemmy or Tildes or Mastodon or whatever, another platform will likely take the crown from them.

Third week? Damn, i sweared i joined only two weeks ago

I've been weening myself off RIF and onto kbin. Once it's gone so am I.

Soon we'll have Sync for Everything ¹!

¹ Not you, Reddit.
- I can't wait for that, Sync has been my all time favorite
Haven't opened RIF since the 12th using only Kbin since. Don't miss it. Fuck spez.

Just wiped all my comments a couple hours ago with the help of PowerDeleteSuite. Didn't quite take the first time, and was surprised that it was a clean sweep the second time. From what I've read, I shouldn't have expected that degree of success.

Even so, I'll check back periodically to see whether they've been 'restored'.

I'll not contribute to that site any longer. I might still pop on over once in a while, eg, if a web search leads me there. But I'll be sure to have my adblockers/anti-trackers engaged.

RE: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

Works great, but you have to baby sit it was it'll occasionally display an error, and you have to click a button...

I'm enjoying the extra free time I've reclaimed from reducing my Reddit usage. Been investing it into little side projects and also fixing up little UI/UX issues on sites like kbin.social

I was hoping to get free time back by ditching reddit, but now I'm spending a lot more time in the fediverse, mostly here and Calckey. At least the content and vibes are better here.
I've gotten a lot more serious about playing TotK every waking hour, but to each their own.
- ESP32 Home projects here!
  
  Air quality sensors for now, maybe better presence detection next.
- I've been thinking about jumping into a long JRPG or something just because I have the free time.

I don’t see why anyone would be still trying, other than perhaps mods of major communities who want to hold on to their power or prominence. For typical users, who cares. It’s like knocking and knocking on the door of an ex-friend who locked you out of their house.

A lot of mods are community founders. They care about their community, not reddit. Reddits just a middleman getting in the way.

Imagine a group of friends. Reddit is the friend with the best house for parties, but is kinda a dick. The mods are the social ones that brought this friend group together in the first place. Reddit is being stupid and making dumb rules that mostly hurt the mod. The mod is trying to either get reddit to relax the rules OR convince the rest of the friends to leave. Truthfully the friends should leave, but reddits house is so nice and they're comfortable. The mod could leave, but they're afraid all that will result in is losing their entire friend group. The whole situation sucks all around.
- Thanks, that's a more precise analogy. Definitely we were never metaphorically 'friends'with reddit - the best times on the site have been when I didn't really know who was running it or care and they just stayed out of everyone's way.
  I can see why mods of any size would want to preserve their existing community, because it's true that most people won't migrate together. With reddit's attitude it seems hopeless at this point to me, though. Perhaps if they had a change of leadership, but it seems likely to only get worse if they IPO and are further corporatized.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Personally, there are a couple of reasons for me. Though, I have already purged my account and deleted it. First, I spent a long time on Reddit. It was a part of my daily habits for more than 12 years. Though, I think getting a way from it is not a bad thing in the case of the reason. The second reason that is more difficult to change with anything other than time is the communities. There are a lot of smaller niche communities on Reddit that really only have a home there. It's this one that bothers me the most out of the whole situation.
- i also think a big reason for mods of the big communities could be something similar to the sunk cost fallacy, you dont want to ditch something you spent a shitton of hours into
I MISS MY PODCAST SUBS :(

seriously, I was most active in those communities. Lemmy/Kbin are great for general info with comments that I mainly used reddit for, but the smaller communities with OC and memes that only those 50k people understood is gonna be fucking hard to recreate here.
- Create that niche! Others may join and participate.

We don't even need to be worried about 'failed' protests lol, things be will be pretty fucking obvious when nobody comes back in a few days when the mobile apps shut down. Shame Reddit.

I kinda don't even care, I'm enjoying my time here. That's really all that matters, isn't it?

I'm going to predict that at the 11th hour they walk back the pricing to a reasonable number, as it attempt to 1) save face and 2) to be able to point to their investors and the media that they tried negotiating.

It's too late.

Yeah, I think that's a possible way that this goes down. I also think that if they did that it'd be a mistake. I think Apollo, RIF, and the other 3rd party apps are gone. Even if reddit announced yesterday that they were going to keep the API free, let alone negotiate a middle ground, I think 3rd party apps are gone and not coming back. On the 3rd party level I don't even really think it's the cash grab that's the problem, it's the lack of communication and trust. Even if reddit were to bend over backwards to try to keep them, I don't think there's anything they can do to make up for the lack of trust this has created in reddit's leadership. Same thing goes for the mods. The mods are arguably reddits most important users. They make the site usable for everyone else and if reddit was ever to become profitable I think the people spez would have to thank for that would be the mods who made the spaces that people wanted to come be a part of. They can't trust reddits leadership either. It doesn't matter what shiny new toys reddit may try to roll out to make their job easier, it doesn't matter what exceptions they try to carve into their new API policy. Common thread here is noone wants to sink their time into something that might change as fast as reddit has shown it can. Being a 3rd party dev or a mod takes a lot of time out of your day. Faced with the choice of leaving or laboring for a company that clearly doesn't respect the value you add to their service I think that most would choose to flee the sinking ship.
- I think there are other motivations which will bring devs and mods back to reddit. Devs like the large user base and frankly I have no idea what motivates the volunteer mods other than a misguided sense of purpose.
- You wrote really good stuff, but please use paragraphs next time. Holy crap wall of text.