Casey NewtonI wrote about how Reddit’s years of making users responsible for content creation, moderation, and product development came back to haunt it today. https://www.platformer.news/p/reddit-goes-dark
Paul Haddad 
@caseynewton no inside sources? Would love to read about the internal details.
@paul do u have any good inside sources paul
@caseynewton I wish, I don't think I know anyone still at Twitter, never knew anyone at Reddit. Crazy times.
Bob Starr@caseynewton Absolutely accurate. The irony for me is I would often tell people Twitter needed to be more like Reddit in the way you spoke about moderation. If it could distill users into like-minded silos, as Reddit mostly did, there would be less chaotic broadcasting across the entire platform. What I never anticipated was how something as basic as API rules would destroy both.
@bobstarr @caseynewton Very little serendipity with silos.
@irizoris @caseynewton I get that, and you're right. A more open community would allow for random encounters. I just think the silos help mitigate some of the unruliness. Well, that and mods, which Twitter also lacked.
@bobstarr @caseynewton I've been on Twitter since January 2009, hovering around 1000ish followees and followers for the past few years. I tend to communicate with literary scholars, the eel historian, local gov in Nashville where I live, enjoyed Bronx Zoo Cobra back in the day as well as that Icelandic volcano years ago, medieval manuscript manicules in marginalia... It's a very different, much more enjoyable experience if you're not a journalist and under the radar. Zero unruliness for me, even now. I got a job in a Berlin bookstore thanks to a Twitter followee in 2011 and was recently recruited to Nashville's Vision Zero committee via other pedestrian advocates... Here too on Mastodon, I value the serendipity. Not sure how I do it but I like it. Oh, I also reread my tweets and delete a bunch almost daily if I no longer want them in public.
Chris Barlow@caseynewton I keep thinking about how a lot of the subs I love have similar or overlapping servers on Discord. I’ve never felt compelled to get over the friction of switching until now. Then history can repeat itself in like 10 years, nbd.
Chris Wu 🪐@caseynewton It’s been so frustrating reading news stories about this today and have almost none of them mention the unreasonable 30 day deadline. Glad you did.
Epiphanic Synchronicity@caseynewton The AMA would have gone infinitely better if he had just been blunt but honest, and simply said that this is about clawing back revenue because Reddit needs to start making money, and that he’s sorry but third-party devs never had an inalienable right to Reddit’s API.
People (including me) would still think it was wrong and unfair, but it would have blown over a lot faster and people would still have a modicum of grudging respect for him
GMLoggins@EpiphanicSynchronicity @caseynewton
Yeah, honesty would have played better. Now we're left with a bunch of yammer where something doesn't track. I smell a cleanup prep to flog themselves to the LLMs for money (while claiming the opposite of course). Not to say the LLMs haven't already got there, but this prepping IPO by backstabbing the communities and the ecosystem so abruptly is vile.
On top of that, from a user standpoint the Reddit app is unusable. Since they won't let RiF live, and they're acting all sneaky, I deleted every post I ever made on my 10yr old personal account (took hours over the weekend), and on my 3 yr old professional account. Logged out and won't be going back. It's not nearly as jarring as the Twitter migration since I've been on Mastodon now since last December. Hopefully, kbin can spin up some more bandwidth to handle the load.
The act of jumping social media ship is getting easier.
Will Clark@caseynewton Any thoughts on the inconsistencies in what Huffman seems to say is the issue versus what they're actually implementing?
For example, there's zero chance that Apollo itself costs "tens of millions" to support, but Huffman seems to be maniacally focused on Apollo. He also seems to act like the $500k/yr Apollo makes is somehow a material amount to Reddit.
@caseynewton If you do end up actually getting someone at Reddit to talk, maybe ask them why Huffman's plan to double workforce 2 years ago culminated in this nonsensible product strategy.
@caseynewton Maybe also ask why they weren't able to grow DAU after raising $250m. 👀
@robotdeathsquad I'm still trying to understand everything that has been said on the subject tbh ... a lot of digital ink has been spilled here by all parties
@caseynewton I read all 13 of his AMA answers and... they're bullshit? None of it holds any water at all. How is setting a price so high that no one will pay it going to generate revenue? What happened to their live video streaming? What happened to their NFT wallet? Why do their ads suck so much?
Also, are you familiar with https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/ ? Good window into the actual problems people have.
acute_distress@robotdeathsquad @caseynewton the only people who can afford it is OpenAI. I think they are the target.
@caseynewton Apologies for spamming your mentions, but I found this quote from the leaked memo today particularly interesting:
"The only long term solution is improving our product”
I'd love to know how the API changes lead to that, in their mind, because that's the 3rd "strategy" we’ve heard in the last couple weeks.
Nour Agha 
@caseynewton Fucking with the same users you allowed to self-govern is the stupidest move ever and why Reddit will collapse far quicker than Twitter if they stick with that route.
Ryan Francis@caseynewton very much a the colonies aren't taking kindly to the new taxes from parliament vibe
Carey@ryanmfrancis @caseynewton CEO to the moderators: "You'll be back."
Matt ⎊ 
@caseynewton power to the users ✊
Andrew Bucko@caseynewton Based on how Reddit handled the situation (unreasonable timeframe, unreasonable price tag, their reaction to criticism), it looks like the decision was made to cut off 3rd party API access entirely and they tried to shift blame to the app developers when the plug was eventually pulled.
Shoq 🌿@caseynewton That last sentence. Boom!
Brian Dear@caseynewton "The real front page of the internet . . . is TikTok" . . . . hmm, we have very very different internets........
@brianstorms talk to anyone under 40 where they are getting their internet culture! one site comes up more than all the others …
Jesse@caseynewton @brianstorms Under 40 might be pushing it a little, no?
@misc TikTok is the most downloaded app in the United States
@caseynewton Not arguing that part!
maegul@misc @caseynewton There was a poll asking how old you were. It got a decent number of votes, and my memory is that the fediverse leans pretty heavily boomer/x-gen, with x-gen being the dominant age bracket.
It struck me because I'd never thought about what generation is on here, but the moment I saw the results I realised I had already picked up on what generation is here. On average ... this is probably the grunge/punk of social media, right?
It struck me because I'd never thought about what generation is on here, but the moment I saw the results I realised I had already picked up on what generation is here. On average ... this is probably the grunge/punk of social media, right?
HCMarks@misc @caseynewton @brianstorms TikTok has a surprisingly diverse audience and a significant portion of that is over 50. It’s not just “for the kids” - I see that in my stats daily.
@hcmarks @caseynewton @brianstorms Don't doubt it! To be clear, I was just raising my eyebrows at "ask anyone under 40" - as a late 30-something I get the sense that it's just not a *dominant* force among my peers as it is with younger cohorts, maybe even 5 years younger. Of course that's all extremely subjective, I'm open to being surprised!
@caseynewton Well, we live in an Idiocracy, what can I say 🙂
Gerakion@caseynewton Excellent writeup!
Slight nitpick: As far as I'm aware, only *non-commercial* accessibility apps are/were being considered for exemption. Which excludes (a lot of?) the most commonly used ones.
@gerakion ahh this is a good point, thank you
Nick Giordano@caseynewton @gerakion /r/blind put together a list of their frequently used apps, and many were commercial and would not be exempted
Mark Zimmerman@caseynewton Employees with stock options who want to build a nice nest egg for themselves, shareholders who want the company to drive real growth and value, and customers who want a smooth, consistent service less dependent on their own data to drive revenue.
These things run incongruently with free API calls for all. There's two sides of the trade, and if third-party app developers can find another platform that drives value for them, they should go there.
B-rad 🏳️🌈👨💻@MarkZimmerman @caseynewton there is a Grand Canyon of difference between free API calls for all and the proposed pricing. This idea that they simply have to charge this amount is beyond disingenuous. They have ulterior motives with this change and people would have far more respect if they just said what their strategy and intentions really were rather than hide behind this nonsense about API opportunity cost.
@itsonlybrad @caseynewton These third-party apps would have a tough time stomaching any cost because the amount of revenue they pull in for themselves is small and Reddit got jipped on the basic cost of entry.
Listen, I agree that those apps are objectively better in many ways, but charging an amount that would make sense for their developers and their users would mean Reddit makes an insufficient margin on this. I highly doubt that charging less would have garnered any less outrage.
Moving Pictures@caseynewton
Can't say I am weeping. The moderators are full-bore powermongers in some forums.
Can't say I am weeping. The moderators are full-bore powermongers in some forums.
Greg Stolze@caseynewton Good grief, it's Hasbro and the OGL with two more zeroes on the end.
RommelRico@caseynewton
> And I imagine this all feels particularly galling to users who already have deep misgivings about their work being used to train AI models over which they have no control, and from which they themselves will see no financial benefit. It’s one thing to build an advertising business around your users’ posts — and quite another to package those posts up and sell them as a SaaS product.
Well said! No need to imagine. That's how I feel.