Monday, June 12th 2023
Reddit Communities Go Private in Protest Over Policy Adjustments
Thousands of dicussion communities on Reddit have now shut doors to public access—warning signs started to appear online over past weeks, with community leaders drumming up support for a protest against the social news site's policy changes, including a strategy to monetize access to a vast pool of user data. For example the highly popular r/hardware subreddit is now "a private community"—unregistered users are greeted with a succinct message on the front page: "This subreddit is temporarily closed in protest of Reddit killing third party apps, see /r/ModCoord and /r/Save3rdPartyApps for more information." News sites are reporting that close to a total of 3500 subreddits have joined the "blackout" effort. According to the BBC this includes "five of the 10 most popular communities on the site - r/gaming, r/aww, r/Music, r/todayilearned and r/pics - which each have memberships of more than 30 million people."
A group message was shared by a moderation collective last week: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love." A moderator (speaking to the BBC anonymously) said that the protest will be effective due to "strength in numbers," which will presumably grab the attention of Reddit's executive team.
They explained the though process behind the virtual march: "If it was a single subreddit going private, Reddit may intervene. But if it's half the entire website, then you feel a lot more pressured. This is a completely volunteer position, we don't receive any financial compensation, and despite that, we do like to take it quite seriously. Our entire community is supporting us against this change...It feels good to be able to have the power to say: 'We will not continue to moderate our communities if you push these changes through...If it's almost the entire website, would they destroy what they've built up in all these communities, just to push through this highly unpopular change that both the mods and users of Reddit are overwhelmingly against?"
Reddit's policy changes will introduce sizable charges for "premium access," which effectively kill off the need for popular third-party Reddit applications - such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync and ReddPlanet - that grant users the ability to browse the site via a customizable interface. Apollo developer Christian Selig claimed last week that the new premium model could result in him having to shell out $20 million to keep his app going: "Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work." He has since outlined plans to shutter the service: "Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit's recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years."
Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman commented on the subject of protests last Friday—his platform "needs to be a self-sustaining business" and he informed critics: "We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private...We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open accessible place for people to find community and belonging." A Reddit spokesperson also proposed to the BBC that Apollo was "notably less efficient" when compared to rival third-party interfaces. Part of the defense statement outlines that the firm spends "multi-millions of dollars on hosting fees" and reiterates Huffman's view that Reddit "needs to be fairly paid" for its services and continued support of third-party apps: "Our pricing is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs." Reddit has outlined policies in the past where external application developers would not be charged, but the spokesperson has declared that a few of them will require paid access from now on.
Sources:
BBC News, Guardian UK, Reuters
A group message was shared by a moderation collective last week: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love." A moderator (speaking to the BBC anonymously) said that the protest will be effective due to "strength in numbers," which will presumably grab the attention of Reddit's executive team.
Reddit's policy changes will introduce sizable charges for "premium access," which effectively kill off the need for popular third-party Reddit applications - such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync and ReddPlanet - that grant users the ability to browse the site via a customizable interface. Apollo developer Christian Selig claimed last week that the new premium model could result in him having to shell out $20 million to keep his app going: "Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work." He has since outlined plans to shutter the service: "Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit's recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years."
Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman commented on the subject of protests last Friday—his platform "needs to be a self-sustaining business" and he informed critics: "We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private...We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open accessible place for people to find community and belonging." A Reddit spokesperson also proposed to the BBC that Apollo was "notably less efficient" when compared to rival third-party interfaces. Part of the defense statement outlines that the firm spends "multi-millions of dollars on hosting fees" and reiterates Huffman's view that Reddit "needs to be fairly paid" for its services and continued support of third-party apps: "Our pricing is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs." Reddit has outlined policies in the past where external application developers would not be charged, but the spokesperson has declared that a few of them will require paid access from now on.
68 Comments on Reddit Communities Go Private in Protest Over Policy Adjustments
The third party apps that are being killed are not just for moderators - they have millions and millions of daily users. Those users aren't bots either - it is a realistic count on the people that are being forced out (as the reddit app is big, uses a lot of phone resources, harvests a ton of user data, and has the awful modern reddit ui, and people just wont accept it).
If you use the reddit app and the new reddit ui you likely won't see the issue. It is the older user base who have been there for 5-10 years who use the third party apps and the old.reddit ui. Those are the people who are feeling the pain, in addition to all moderators.
Reddit wants to kill third party apps so they can get more data to sell, and serve more ads. That's all. If they genuinely wanted to cover the API usage cost they could charge 200x less than the proposed pricing.
Something like discourse or xenforo would be better, but of course reddit is a prebuilt hosting platform which makes it a lazy to set up a community, hence my discord concern as thats the same lazy approach from the technical side. Even a move to these platforms I assume all old archived content would go *poof* on reddit once subreddit closed, so hopefully all this gets resolved.
What a great POV!You could've just said you don't know what you're talking about.
It's API access for 3rd party apps that are superior to the reddit app, and moderation functions that are apparently so much better than those available on reddit locally that it isn't worth moderating without them in some cases.
If you think this doesn't affect the average user... you just don't realize how many people use 3rd party apps because the reddit app is dogshit.
Even Reddit's app on Android is, as some people have said, feels like you stepped back to Android version 2.3 Gingerbread because of just how damned laggy it is.
If Reddit's own app had even half the quality that many third-party apps had, we wouldn't be having this issue at all. But no, Reddit's app is half-ass attempt at shoving out an app.
A large number of subreddits use the Reddit API as a moderation tool, because its better at searching / listing posts than the official apps. By increasing prices of the Reddit API, they've not only made 3rd party apps unusable, they're also about to make these 3rd party moderation tools unusable and unaffordable.
Reddit was Reddit because, despite all of the crap with the official app and tools, with enough grit and work, you can make your own tools, your own interfaces, your own CSS for your own Subreddit. All of that extra effort is being thrown away with these changes, and now we're all going to be stuck with the awful experience that is vanilla Reddit.
The chatter I've heard most is Lemmy personally. This is the first time I've heard of Tildes.
Honestly, this seems more sustainable than most of the other front-runners. I'm kind of bearish on ActivityPub in general. The website needs an identity and a leader. Tildes is approaching this with the correct slant, describing the site's philosophy and its donation model first and foremost.
There's no reason for these social media sites to grow to the point of exhaustion. I think most of us are just looking for a community where we can talk and share news on a variety of topics.
Of course, they won't do that unless they are forced to step down, and rather tell people how bad it will be, the whole "trust us!" thing
The sub-reddits participating in this are basically censoring all content, and in the end, I imagine that new sub-reddits will pop up replacing those that stay "closed"
I use the old.reddit ui without any third party apps fine. My guess is the vast majority of users do not use third party apps, were even aware of the, much less care. While there might be high nominal amount of users who do use third party apps they are almost certainly minority relative to the overall userbase. More users are going to be inconvenienced by the minority pushing their protest than Reddit's actions.
If profiting is the issue than would you agree if Reddit carves out better terms if not exceptions for non profit open source third party apps that would be a fine compromise? After all if profiting is a negative that should apply to all parties, if not even more so third parties.
Beehaw (Lemmy Instance) is trying to be somewhere in between Tildes and a full Lemmy. They just defederated from Lemmy.world, cutting off access to one of the biggest servers so that they have more control over the users of their liking.
Lemmy.world seems to be close to Reddit in terms of overall philosophy so far, and might be the best starting place for anyone trying to experiment with this new system.
Lemmy.ml is the official Lemmy for... lemmy development. Probably a bad idea to register there because programmers usually don't want to be full time admins or moderators.
-------------
There's a bunch of boutique servers in the Fediverse. Apparently there's a server just for leftist views from the MidWest, for example. So I guess you can run a server with whatever recruitment rules you want.