It's sad to see so many apps shutting down regardless of what Reddit decides to do post blackout. I suspect there's also an element of relief among these developers not having to spend so much of their time on this anymore.
this is a sad day for me as it likely means my reddit usage will drop to almost zero.
R. I. fucking P.
My vision:
Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month.
For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app that user is using.
With this model, creators make money, and the site hopefully is self-sufficient without ads.
Right now I have a working website, backend, payments, and payouts. What I don't have is a mobile app. If anyone is interested and wants to partner, my email is in my profile.
Site: https://non.io (feel free to play around with login hackernews, pw: helloworld)
Github: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio
API: https://api.non.io (slightly outdated, I need to do an update pass here)
One idea I’d love to see somebody implement: weight content that a user spent longer typing + editing higher as a proxy for thoughtfulness. Unfortunately this specific client-side metric can realistically only work on a native-only service with device attestation and no API, so that the metric can be trusted, but would be cool to think about other solutions to surfacing higher quality content (like TikTok did), as well as solving the inevitable authenticity problem as more and more online content will be astroturfed by LLM’s.
The problem with Reddit is that the interests of the users, mods, shareholders, and advertisers are not aligned. Their interests are being pitted against one another in order to generate profit through enshittification.
The way you make a better Reddit is by creating a cooperative model where the users, advertisers, and mods interests are aligned, and there isn't a profit motive for a shareholder group that takes precedence over the quality and governance of the site.
The web site and free app are ad-sponsored. Paid subscriptions first give you an ad-free experience, and secondly, give you and API key you can use in any 3rd party app. 3rd party apps make revenue from the subscriptions, giving them an incentive to create an ever-better user experience.
Mods earn a fee based on traffic and interactions with their subreddit. Not enough to call it a job, but enough for the community to show appreciation.
As a cooperative model, there are no investment shareholders, the site sells bonds to fund it that pay a deferred, fixed yield to get it started. Bondholders, have a vested interest in the success of the site, but have no say in its operation. Without shareholders demanding profits and growth, the interests of the users, the mods, the advertisers, the bondholders and the non-profit that administers the site are aligned.
The best things in this world aren't for profit, the hug of a child, a national park, a sunset and the stars at night. If you want a Reddit-like experience to stay pure, it needs to upset the apple cart and be a tech entity of a completely different model in order to avoid enshittification.
A lot of Reddit (like HN) is linking to 3rd party content, and not much of it is actually user-generated OC.
Nice site though - it looks really nice.
Make sure the community has proper and sane moderators/admins and stamp that down before it flairs up. Because it's the internet, it will always flare up if unchecked.
But I get it, that involves trust in judgement, and the internet attracts some very zealous personalities that don't have that. You'd need someone with a proven record to champion that cause. I'm not sure who that is.
Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)
Possibly use some amount of web scraping too
That’s a small needle to thread.
If the whole thing is lean, with minimal costs, no account reps, and essentially non-profit, it's a lot easier.
Of course, that means it goes one of two ways:
1. Never gets traction, dies after a bunch of work
2. Takes off and the people controlling it (rightfully) want to be compensated for their hard work, so they start adding advertising and focusing on monetization, which requires hiring more people, which requires a more mature business model, which heads towards IPO.
Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!
The current codebase was developed from scratch - zero forking - from what I can see.
HN is written in ARC http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html which is a language designed by Paul Graham.
Here’s a thread talking about the early days of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 and it mentions “The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767
Here’s Paul talking about the release of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
AFAIK this is the latest public copy of the HN code, but it is significantly outdated: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc
The hard part would probably be the anti-spam and other anti-abuse stuff that lives entirely server side. Maybe all it is IS the API endpoint, at least to start, so only the mobile clients can access? Doesn't solve abuse but mitigates it.
It's important that it's not an alternative, or else we'll be in this situation again a few years from now. https://join-lemmy.org will allow us to create a network of sites (or instances) that are still able speak to one another.
The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.
Given the quotes I heard, I'd be very surprised if you lost more money in say, 2 years of building and hosting a new site than trying to even support a month of API calls from reddit c. July 2023.
You can certainly make a decent front end for little cost (even if we're talking about paying competitive rates to a few talented mobile devs) and a small backend won't cost much more. It's always about the community to gather to make all that work. That's the hard part.
Is the reddit API complex?
Of course, "just add a backend" is easier said than done!
But not unachievable.
It's called platform risk, and while every company has it to some degree, if your business is solely dependent on a third party especially one that doesn't have (much) skin in the game (your game, not theirs), that risk becomes existential for your business.
I've seen it before where a company builds something cool, only to be shut down by the larger company who for whatever reason doesn't like what the smaller company is doing.
I just used redact.dev to delete over 10 years of reddit comments and posts on my 125,904 karma account.
Honestly just kind of done with mass market social media in general at this point, so it wasn't that hard to push me over the edge here.
The nice thing about redact specific to the reddit module is the edit before deletion, that way reddit can't keep monetizing your comments/posts. Useful for people who posted personal content as well, who thought their selfies or artwork or whatever got deleted with account deletion but remained up.
I've been saying, the current leaders are too big to fail or get disrupted by competition, but if there's a silver lining it's that in lieu of a better Reddit happening we may realize it's a good time to start being less online.
Upload it to new reddit open source backend, offer that to the app devs at a resasonable price
Fork reddit
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
It relies on old.reddit.com, which everyone assumes will be gone not long after the API changes. So use it while you can.
And no, I don’t feel bad for the workers because they can (and still have time to) unionize and stop the madness.
Apathy is real, and most users have it. Reddit will be fine.
Taking VC money and trying to extract more money from its users is going to change the site irrevocably.
And the biggest problem I have with Reddit is that the investors and employees are going to become rich off the backs of the moderators who are the ones that create the culture and the content for free. They get zilch except a thank you from the millionaires. And the mods are so dumb they don’t seem to realize this.
You could say that it's shame that things like Reddit don't last, I mean in the form of not serving the interest of investors. It could be such a good place. But to me it seems like this is the conscious decision of the powers to be. And so, no mistakes at all.
Why can't the same flow be used here? Just require users to obtain their own Reddit API key, and let the app be a thin client that doesn't ship with any keys owned by the devs themselves. I'd be happy to pay-for-my-own API usage.
I hope someone will be able to make them usable again. I've already seen some people start work on an implementation of the Reddit API to interface with Lemmy (though obviously porting the federated nature of the fediverse into Reddit is very difficult) but other workarounds would still be welcome.
I suppose you will be able to plug in the API keys for the official Reddit app into these alternative clients until the API breaks but long term a better solution is needed.
The next Reddit CEO will turn up and their grand plan will be to invert whether or not the company loves/hates developers using their API.
Then they'll try to convince developers to come back, because "this time I've really changed".
Facebook used to be more open. You could connect to Facebook Messenger using any Jabber/XMPP. They never reversed course, if anything they made it harder to use Messenger without the application.
I don't think the developers really thought Reddit would change their mind over a 48 hour blackout, but doing this now kind of removes the main reason for it. The mods are probably risking getting their subreddits taken away from them by Reddit by doing this, the app devs could at least wait until after to announce even if they already made the decision.
