I hate it so much. I'm tired of ecosystems.
We need to get away from content farms. Get away from shitty monetization driven efforts. Get away from shitty people moderating communities without giving members any locus of control.
Bring back the 90s web. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
God I hope Reddit sticks to this API nonsense and kills themselves in the process.
Part of me wants this to happen to Hacker News too. This community sucks, but for different reasons.
> Bring back the 90s. Bring back personal websites. Bring back people sharing their own content on their own terms.
Not sure if you remember the 90s like I do. The percentage of people sharing their own content on their own terms was dwarfed by that of content hosted on 'ecosystems'. In fact, I'd assert that the path to accomplishing the same is far less steep now compared to then.
Reddit died a long time ago, and it's time we let it go.
Good riddance frankly.
If you are into tech and what it provides for us but don't have your own website where you can post and design however and whatever you want, then what are you even doing? It's 2023, a .com domain costs $5 and HTML and CSS can be learned in less than a week.
We need to leave these massively-populated corporate data farms and go back to specialized media like content-specific forums and personal web pages. We've oversimplified and under-stylized our potential web presence as individuals for the sake of companies who farm our data. At least with forums the hateful comments are coming from people within your niche and the posted ads (if any) pertain to your interests.
Bring back web rings.
For what reasons? I am honestly curious if we share same thoughts
That said, the priorities of the community is frustrating as a lot of it's driven by venture capital and money. I know it's Hacker News, but that doesn't change the point that in order to participate in a higher level of discourse I have to tolerate a bunch of capitalist stans.
The community also has a profoundly noticable difficulty with empathy for people outside of tech.
The community also loves to self-congratulate itself for how much better they are than other communities while still having their own issues.
There are other aspects as well like when people are talking about X but then commenters chime in and start taking about Y or Z, and say it's so much better and completely go off course.
Lastly I cannot emphasize how much I hate the articles that make it to the top where they say "X is bad" only to try and sell me on a solution. I'm getting quite sick of that as well.
Again, the discourse is great and I love it. But I still think this community suffers.
You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.
All the primary mods on the big subs also have online social media marketing consultancies.
Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?
Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?
Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.
Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.
* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.
* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.
* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.
Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.
Mastodon is a good example and counterexample of this trend. Gab was the biggest Mastodon instance, largely populated by the kinds of people pre-Musk Twitter banned or limited (and their followers.)
But the second (post-Musk) wave wasn't people who got banned, it was people leaving because they didn't like Musk and/or his changes to Twitter. And Reddit's own userbase came from Digg in much the same way.
Imagine if Mastodon had been easy to migrate to, Twitter would have collapsed like a popped balloon.
Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.
Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it?
Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?
Reddit is dependent on free work. Moderators are a significant portion of that process, and they are the ones who depend on the API the most. If your moderators decide to do less work, your community starts going down in quality. If the community goes down in quality, they will make the decision that a smaller community is better than a poorly run community and someone else will capture that use case.
The question is if that will happen before an IPO. Given the climate, that IPO may be two years away.
To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments.
If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.
I promise you, Reddit won't be around in 50 years. And it may not be much in 5 the way they're disrespecting their core audience.
r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.
Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?
bogleheads?
One already exists in Lemmy.
I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.
This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit.
> Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.
Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI.
It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative.
But anyway...
...AI really is going just great. /s
Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.
Third party clients seem to be fairly niche with limited usage, I’m not sure why inexpensive access to an API is a required right for forum software.
I don’t expect this to affect my usage of Reddit at all, and wondering who and what it does affect aside from a small number of third party client users.
To be clear, I’m _not_ asserting that there is no reason. I’m just hoping someone can explain what I’m missing.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
They would rather direct users to content that Reddit wants them to see. High engagement content like quick meme pics, short videos or polarised political content that generates time on site and activity that looks good to investors. Profitable content like the awards programs. Not externally hosted content where the ad revenue might be going to YouTube or journalists rather than Reddit. Not comments discussions where a user might spend time reading rather than generating new page views.
This might be fine with you if you see Reddit as "that site for the memes", but for a lot of users, especially veteran users, it replaced forums and other sites for discussing hobbies or other content, and that content is both harder to enjoy as the official apps push you towards what Reddit would rather you see, and drowned out by the more casual content.
In addition, for many people, they would like an efficient experience where they can select what they want to dig deeper into and then get off the site, while Reddit would rather you doomscrolled for longer to improve their metrics at the expense of the user's time.
So it's been very clear for a while that Reddit's first party UX design does not gel with the aims of these groups, which, being veteran users and therefore having more time to get used to the site, are over represented amongst those creating content or in roles like moderation. And this has been mostly fine with these groups as long as they can just go to the refuges of third party apps, old.reddit and compact reddit and ignore Reddit's trend chasing. But compact is gone, third party apps are going, and it's hard not to extrapolate that to old.reddit.
Sure, there's no inherent right to free third party client access. And you can obviously switch to any service you want, or start your own. The point is that Reddit is taking away features and workflows from users which have been available for longer than most users have been on the service. Moreover, the cost is specifically being put on clients rather than users: you can't pay for Reddit through your favorite client, the client itself is being forced to pay.
If you've been using Gmail with Thunderbird exclusively for the last decade, and Mozilla is suddenly faced with paying a billion dollar API bill or shut down Gmail access, imagine how shitty that situation is for the end user.
The hope is that, despite being a small percentage of total users, third party app users represent a large volume moderators and high value contributors. If that's the case, this change will hurt Reddit enough to potentially roll it back.
What will probably happen is Reddit will tell us all to pound sand and we'll find alternatives.
Devil's advocate: are your current usage patterns making money for Reddit? If not, then your reduced usage will be considered a win by Reddit, all things being equal.
I'd say people using the native apps are generally unaware that there's even an alternative. This whole shebacle will - if nothing else - change that to some degree.
Curious, have you always just used the native app/website and never tried 3rd party clients?
The question is: Who is using these clients, specifically?
1. Visually impaired people. The official reddit app has terrible screenreader support
2. The longest-term & most dedicated users to the site, who are responsible for the content that everyone else uses & who want a) ad-free browsing; and b) a better experience than the official app, which sucks
3. Moderators who require better functionality on mobile than what the official app gives
These are all communities that matter a lot, even if it's a small % of users.
It's similar to how Twitter shut down several tools only used by power-users to force a small number of people into using their first party app.
Obviously, Twitter/Reddit wants the revenue associated with supplying the app. But it's not clear if it will be worth pissing off their user base.
Reddit's "new" UX is so dismal that they keep "Old Reddit" alive so that they don't lose their mature users en masse. On mobile, I would not even try to wrestle with Reddit's own - I depend entirely on the "Reddit is fun" Android third party client.
- I'm not sure how niche third party clients really are. Reddit started as a community of tech-savvy users who would not put up with the crap the official site/app is doing. There's probably a reason why reddit kept old.reddit.com online for so long.
Bots are a huge part of what makes Reddit decent. This API change will kill them all.
I feel like that number is not that small. Apollo for iOS (which is not only a fantastic Reddit client, but an exceptional example of a great iOS app in general) has about 1.5 million monthly active users. And that's only a single client.
As you can see in your replies and in many posts on Reddit, people using these third party clients (which are soooo much better than the first party clients) are likely to dramatically reduce their usage without it or even stop completely.
The eventual loss of better user experience is saddening, but I'm not sure I fall into the category of not using it at all, because it's where I learn about a lot of useful stuff on life, personal finance, frugalism, unfiltered review of a product I haven't used yet etc. I hope this decision doesn't break the site.
It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.
notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server<->server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing.
notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is:
distributed: peers backup/serve content
anonymous: but don't trust it to be
psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities
immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content
mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content
PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavyI know it's not popular here, but look at the success of TikTok. It attracts users because it's fun. People go there to laugh, enjoy themselves, and share stuff they've made. Sure, there is lots of politics on there too that users engage with, but that's not the main lure for them.
Once I send this post out, do I own it? Can I claim some sort of compensation for my comment being used in an AI training set?
Does HN (or whichever site I post the comment on) own the comment, and therefore should be compensated for the comment's use in said training set?
Do we both own the comment, and both have rights to its use?
I think this is a really important question worth answering by future UGC-based platform incumbents.
Sometimes other legislation, like EU right to to be forgotten, GDPR, etc. overrides that and they have to take it down, but otherwise they could pretty much do whatever.
However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduction but overall, the writing is on the wall: Reddits corporate priorities are no longer aligned with the community’s.
"Go dark indefinitely until change happens" might get someone's attention. This is barely a blip on the radar, and even if there's a minor revenue impact, Reddit knows it'll be over in a day so they can obviously weather it.
Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance.
I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing their future for short term gain. It's the only path to being eventually rid of them.
And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.
I disagree. Especially somewhere like reddit where the power lies in a relatively small pool of moderators (ie. a couple of hundred people), who aren't well controlled by Reddit the company.
These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.
And I'm sure reddit-clones have been approaching the moderators with lucrative offers to do just that...
Reddit isn't a cozy corner of internet subculture anymore. It was instrumental in getting the orange buffoon elected, for crying out loud.
That's not quite true. Reddit has the power in this relationship. See for example what happened when /r/NoahGetTheBoat tried to rebel
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoahGetTheBoat/comments/13c9fx4/rem...
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For all those reporting this, it isn’t coming down. If it makes you uncomfortable and you’re in the US, this is part of US “gun culture.” Work to change it.
Edit: Good lord people, yes I can see that the post was removed by Reddit. We can’t influence Reddit admin actions, but we’ve reached out for clarification on the removal.
Edit2: Reddit has clarified the removal, and it will not be rescinded. Not much else to see here.That was a fight we had "won" on the days of MP3 (very painful), SMTP, MKV, among others during the 80s and 90s. The fact that people are now more willing to go back to install "real software" (in the form of phone applications) instead of web apps is an opportunity.
See Snapchat for sexting. Instagram for insta-thots (Facebook has parents these days on it), and YouTube which originally was used for hosting copyright infringement (still is).
I strongly disagree and I can give you a clear reason why.
Internet forum / niche communities serve a few purposes, and the advent AI (I know, bear with me) destroys their existing moat.
A reddit serves the following purposes:
1. Persistent store of timeless information - ChatGPT style models have made this redundant. I
2. Updated store of current information - The problem with current information, is that it's generated where the users are. It is a chicken and egg problem, but that's exactly what makes it so dangerous. It takes 1 viral moment for people to pull off a critical mass of exodus, and you're never getting your users back. Like a siphon that will keep draining until your reservoir is fully empty.
3. fully realized niche hang-out spot - 20% of people create 80% of content. The 20% are embedded deeply enough in internet culture, that they can make a consensus move to another platform, and the other 80% will follow. (only applies to niche hobbies)
4. 9gag replacement - This is easy to disrupt and has been disrupted many times before. Reddit itself has already destroyed any sense of uniqueness that its platform had. No meme platform has managed to stay cool for more than 1 generational cycle. Reddit will be no different.
Previous reddit exoduses didn't work, because it involved banning a certain extremist/morally dubious communities. The alternatives were terrible, unmoderated and struggled to migrate the timeless information over. The next exodus will be normal users. Timeless information migration has already been completed by ChatGPT.
My favorite subreddit has already migrated to a 3rd party website. Moderation is a lot easier with LLMs. The last remaining piece of the puzzle is for a semi-competent new competitor to show up. Let's see if it actually happens.
This was only possible because ChatGPT-style models were trained on data scraped from Reddit using the (then) free API. While it may seem like bolting the barn door after the horse has run out, Reddit can ignore this and become obsoleted by models that keep ingesting the latest user comments, or at least earn some money out of it.
Reddit refugees, used to a finally manicured echo chamber, will of course find it toxic. However, it doesn't suffer from the problem of Gab and Truth social in that there's enough fun stuff mixed in to make most of the content funny and reasonably entertaining and not just overly serious excessively doomer politics.
Rumble seems to be doing pretty well too. However, nothing can replace Reddit for the unbelievable variety and ontology of adult content.
I, too, want to be hopeful, but how do you think this can possibly happen?
Metcalfe's law is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vecto...
TLDR: The more people share a method of communication, the more value that method of communication has. Social networks organically evolve towards monopolies.
Anecdotally, HN is at a sweet spot for me. It's large enough that I'm just a person in the crowd (which I value), but it's small enough and the interaction is limited enough that I don't feel I'm likely to receive persistent, ongoing harassment. (I catch plenty of trolling, but it never feels personal really, I don't think they'll recognize me in the next thread we bump into each other.)
The first step in my plan is to implement a read-only API proxy which does not use Reddit.com's API but instead scrapes the necessary data. This should cover 80% of the API traffic, if it works then third-party apps will be able to transition their apps to this new API. So if Reddit does put their API behind a paywall there will be a way for developers to avoid at least some of the ludicrous costs.
I already have next steps in mind, but they really depend on what Reddit does. I sincerely hope they reassess what they are doing with their API.
The real problem you will run into though is that Reddit will restrict what you can access without login. They already tried to flip the switch once on requiring login to access NSFW content, and had to backtrack at least temporarily. I'm not exactly sure why they had to, but supposedly they have now added some missing feature to their web version that allows upload of NSFW content on desktop, so maybe they're ready to unpause. And the official API will block NSFW so I think that's returning. And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.
> And once you login, scraping will earn a ban. Reddit is also very over zealous with IP bans.
Argh, that would suck. Not as bad as losing my Twitter but still. That said, they explicitly say in their API docs "We're happy to have API clients, crawlers, scrapers, and browser extensions". So at one point in time they were happy to allow scrapers.
They should step up their game if they really want to voice it. Delete all the posts and the accounts. Then if decision is reversed come back with new account.
You want to strike? You strike until there is a real financial harm to the company and shit gets changed. Otherwise, keep your useless opinions to yourselves.
Just before I stopped using, some stranger messaged me (in the same language) and offered to sell me video sex with a young person.
Reddit has become a prostitution platform.
There's nothing wrong with reddit finally being a bit more serious about their content which is awesome compared to a lot of what is today's internet.
Maybe if they focus on making money they 'll stop their childish grandstanding and culture war