Soldato
I've only regained one subreddit today, which sucks but also I'm glad of and that's in read only mode.
Apollo / Reddit app, API shenanigans.
What do you mean "expects". That's literally what the community told him. The addiction to reddit and for the mods the power they wield exceeds their desire to force reddit to change./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23985505/acastro_STK024_01.jpg)
Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout “will pass”
“We absolutely must ship what we said we would.”www.theverge.com
CEO basically expects the entire thing to pass and then continue with normal operations afterwards. No hit to revenue either. Which is fair, 48 hours won't really do much. But it's a shame he doesn't seem interested in properly listening and interacting to the community and feels the path he picked is the correct one for the long term.
If they were serious they would have turned the subreddits off till reddit changed its fees to something reasonable. They failed the minute they gave a fixed period of time for the blackout. Though other subreddits would just come along to fill that space
They should have copied what the artists did over at artstation to protest. The spammed protest images for so long that artstation eventually had to respond (and also delete the posts).
Soldato
I wrote a post about this in the elon thread.
It is odd that they set the reddits to private, making them invisible, rather than set to read only. In my view in a protest you want people to see you.
It is odd that they set the reddits to private, making them invisible, rather than set to read only. In my view in a protest you want people to see you.
Kills any advertising on that board and related searches.
Associate
Wouldn't even have to delete it, just remove the Mods and reopen.
Caporegime
At this point everyone knows why its happening and as others have said, its starving reddit of advertising.
No, they would just kick the mods and replace them and maintain all of the content. As expected however most of the mods are caving in very quickly and reddit is controlled by a surprisingly small number of mods who manage loads of sub-reddits. A lot of them are power hungry weirdos who wouldn't give up that little slice of power they lack in their real lives for anything.
You're missing some nuance, here. Reddit effectively is a forum with a rubbish UI. New Reddit is a car crash, but at least Old works for now. Reddit (the company) provides hosting, and that's about it. The content they value so highly is all user generated. The moderation is done by volunteers for free. All Reddit is trying to do here is slap on an advert tax and charge millions of dollars for API access - all on the back of community content run by community volunteers and moderated by community moderators.
They can't 'just' take over the protesting subs. I mean, physically they can - of course they can; but good luck staying afloat for 24 hours. The site would be worse than *Chan overnight. Overrun with porn, spam, and God knows what. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, YouTube et al., Reddit isn't paying employed moderators to maintain community standards. Again, they rely on thousands of hours of unpaid volunteer work to make their profits. Good luck running your IPO when your 'taken back' site is just a torrent of abuse, CSM, porn, racism and bigotry...
There are 450million users. I don't doubt for a moment that the mods could be replaced pretty quickly to be honest.
Soldato
Do you really think these subs a lot of which have millions of followers would struggle to find some suitable mods?
Soldato
Yes and arguably the more popular the sub that harder it could be. All the auto-moderation bots that help keep subs under control will no longer work as they rely on access to the API. The more popular the sub, the more API calls the bot will make and the more it will cost to run the bot. How many people are going to want to take over a sub with millions of followers if they a) have to manually moderate everything or b) pay, and potentially pay considerable amouts of money, out their own pocket to have the auto-moderation bots when there's no revenue for them.
Soldato
Of course it will be easy to find mods, people love power.
How hard is to make a bot now we have chatgpt and it's plugins to do all the coding? If they are running these in house the costs are minimal.
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The kind of people who want to be mods simply for the power are the exact kind of people you don’t want as mods.
Caporegime
This is why they have basically been saying "don't worry, we won't shut down the moderation tools free access to our APIs so you can keep moderating our site for free"
They just want to kill the third party apps for users so that they control all access to it and can be sure of maximising advertising revenue. They know that no one is going to pay their silly API fees. They are banking on the fact they will be able to make more money from advertising and cut server costs.
Soldato
My bad, I hadn't realised they'd said bots would be exempt from the API costs. How generous of them.
Caporegime
I mean, you wouldn't want to make it harder for people to do your work for you. Its quit astonishing how little Reddit has to do in order to make lots of money and they still aren't happy.
Soldato
My understating is that Reddit isn't actually profitable at the moment, but that's just from reading somewhat unsubstantiated articles online.
Soldato
Yet somehow the 'CEO' is worth multiple millions, yes it's not billions like facebook etc, but considering reddit is basically just a huge forum it's not exactly bad....
Also if you consider they're not paying the people who post on the site and/or moderate, yet have numerous trackers and adverts etc I find it highly unlikely they're not making a profit, it's more likely, they're not seeing the profit they want, especially considering the valuation of AI which has been using it for it's learning process etc.
EDIT: quick check... reddit made around 350mil in 2021 and has around 2000 employees.... I know hosting costs a fair bit these days but if they're not making a profit on 350mil they're doing something wrong.
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I think they just keep raising funding to keep themselves a float.
It’s the hosting of videos and images and having a strong infrastructure to distribute this data that is going to be costing them a lot. And Unlike Facebook that has your real name and a lot of personal data to Monetise, they are confined to trying to figure things out based on your subreddit choice.