@paul Why only double down like they have so far?, they might as well triple down on the bad PR!

At this rate I wouldn't even be surprised if they did..

@paul a lot of moderators are speculating they’d try AI-based moderators, and in a sense, they’re already using AI — their internal content policy enforcement uses Perspective to triage user reports.

But Perspective just assigns confidence scores, it can’t understand intent, ethos, phronesis, etc. AI systems can’t read, they just seem like they can.

Their human internal enforcement gets user reports right between 66-75% of the time, first time, and >99% on escalation.

@paul I fully expect mass takeover of subs. I hadn’t considered AI mods. That will go poorly. So, yeah probably true.

And when the subs reopen by force, I expect the community will flood them with garbage to keep them unusable.

@paul It continually baffles me that Big Social CEOs don't see this obvious connection between premium subscriptions and API access. It would have been an easy win for both Twitter and Reddit to make their API free for paid users only. It's what Spotify already does. A third-party app ecosystem could continue to exist, but now it would drive subscription sales.

Maybe they're too afraid of AI scraping? But even that could be solved with per-user rate limits.

@paul it really should just turn into an all out boycot of Reddit. They can take over the subs, find other means for moderation, but they can’t live without the users.

But back in reality, they’re expecting this to blow over in a few weeks and it’s just a blip in the long run.

@paul I could stomach the API acces being tied to premium. Then I could have access to multiple apps across iOS and Android and not feel like I’d be paying multiple times for the API access.

Not ideal, but seems better. Unsure why as a business Reddit seems keen to push the cost onto devs to handle too, which puts third parties between Reddit and its users. Handing off user mgmt can really hurt down the line. Eg future prices changes, handling the subscription and it’s messaging is much safer.

@paul I am mostly consuming reddit through the personal rss feed, and that was broken since last year (I don’t get my personal subs and get pushed ones I do not follow, but it’s not front page either).

So I just unsubbed altogether 😹