Note that these are just quotes from the disastrous AMA he held last week, not new comments that have been made.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I just posted it elsewhere, but that's only the beginning. They also announced their intent to turn reddit into an even more ad-infested hellhole than it already is: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/investing-in-what-makes-reddit-unique-introducing-contextual-keyword-targeting-and-product-ads
This is the future of reddit everyone - abandon all hope ye who clicketh here: https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/image2.gif
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable - Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO
Translation - we don't have control of the 3PA and they are getting in the way of moooore profit, so we want them gone.
What a shitty job at astroturphing there.
"Won't someone think of the corporations! The evil third party apps (that we admitted were less than 10% of our userbase) are (somehow) bankrupting us! They're using so much API (even though our website uses at least 5x the API calls)
[Translation: There's 10% of the people we could shove ads in front of who are getting around it and I want to sell this sucker so I can buy another vacation property]
They're using so much API
I’m 100% convinced the reason they think 3PA API usage is unusually high per user is because all the high engagement users use 3PA, because their app actively repulses people from wanting to spend time on it. It seems like such a classic product misinterpretation of the stats, I’ve seen this from the inside as a developer before, ironically also at a company trying to IPO and failing spectacularly by completely misreading the room and their users
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I'm 90% certain that this whole thing is due to to Reddit's new marketing execs saying "we can't run ads on third party apps", and then deciding that third party apps need to pay up for their supposed "projected loss in ad revenue".
It's the piracy fallacy: "Somebody is using my service without giving ME profit, and so we're gonna go into a self-destructive tantrum". "Ignore the fact that nobody ever wanted to pay us for that anyways."
We don't need that kind of greed in control of our online communities, good riddance.
Something like reddit doesn't long if it's not profitable. He's not in the same reality that we are
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LMAO giving r/BuyItForLife as a good example of where to put ads.
I know, right? I hope BIFL will rip advertisers there a new one by suggesting alternatives.
It is already infested with covert ads posted as content, anyway.
Dang, after reading that, somehow I'm even more glad I overwrote all my past comments and posts with a protest message. You do not get to monetize my speech down to keyword targetting, reddit!
The way that's written is so blatantly and shamelessly "all these people volunteer and provide an amazing service for free! :D look how much money we can make off this free labor without giving any of those volunteers a single cent, and while sabotaging the service!"
If you want to auto-overwrite your comments and posts, or just delete them, check out Power Delete Suite or Redact by June 30th, before the API change breaks these tools.
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Well I just spent the last hour deleting all my old Reddit posts from the last 7 years or so and then deleted the account.
I will be no part of this continued data mining and making money off users hand over fist, making billions of dollars from data and the actual data source gets nothing.
#ragequitreddit
I guess in your case it's already too late anyway, but if someone else reads this: you don't have to delete everything by hand. There are tools available like shreddit or Redact.
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Yeah I’m done having ads shoved in my face constantly. Corporations ruin everything and this was just the push I needed to remove one more attack vector from my life.
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No way. I don't care if Lemmy doesn't succeed I'm never going to tolerate that shit. I stopped using Twitter when they killed third party apps and forced even more ads into their piece of shit app.
Even if lemmy stays small I don't care, the community is better here, the apps are open, I don't see any ads, fuck Reddit, fuck spez, this is what a community should feel like.
And no ads for bags of fucking water either.
Agreed. Beyond just no ads because I go out of my way to block them on my network and devices its nice to browse new and be able to have discussions instead seeing complete shit posts or popular ones with 1,000+ replies already.
Replies like "This is so fucking stupid" with 50k upvotes.
That summarises the reddit commenting and karma experience for me, any comments I've made that blew up over 1k were just incredibly stupid comments.
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Well ok then, fuck you and goodbye :D
The bright side of all of this is finding out more about the Fediverse and how cool it is
Ya that sounds fkn horrible.
The sad thing is there's a right way to do everything they want but this ain't it. Spez is litterally digging a hole using the bricks he could be building with.
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Just goes to show that they were intending to kill 3PAs from the start.
That's the only logical conclusion. Wouldn't really make sense otherwise.
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"Hold on, dear investors! I'm confident that we can simply steer our ship straight through the middle of the massive iceberg!"
Ironically, had the titanic hit the iceberg straight on it probably would have survived. Swerving at the very last moment was what made it sink.
Be gone with your counterintuitive realism, getting in the way of an entertaining metaphor!
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We're sticking to the Fediverse as well so
and here i was, truly believing that they would reconsider. as of right now ~4000 of the planned 6600 subs have gone private, if that isn't enough then oh well
Bear in mind this article is from a couple days ago right after the AMA happened and before subreddits started closing.
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I'm hoping that a lot of the subreddits that has gone dark would remain dark indefinitely. Granted, the Reddit admins might try to replace the mods on a lot of the subreddits - but at that point the community may not be the same anymore.
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I find this post at a moment when the show has already started (as can be seen on https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ and https://reddark.untone.uk/ )
But the article is 3 days old. It seems many did not expect that much unity from subreddits going dark. 2.5 billion affected subscribers is quite something!
I'm still in hopes they change their mind in light of recent events. Don't think they will though.
2.5 billion affected *subscriptions
Many are overlapping people's subscriptions of course.
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Honestly, a 3 day, partial shutdown is less than 1% percent of their annual online time. The strike has got to last much longer imo
I am super happy about the subs going permanently dark
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Watching hundreds of subreddits go dark on the hour every hour is very cathartic. The twitch stream started with a couple hundred and now it’s at 15,000 viewers. Looking forward to the Wikipedia write up on this, at least I hope there’s one.
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They really want the fediverse to grow. I appreciate their dedication to the cause.
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They weathered the fatpeoplhate tantrum, I'm not really sure why anyone thinks a blackout would faze them.
That said I hope lemmy can grow into a mature social content aggregator.
I'm gone, and I won't be back.
Chatted with the moderator teams for the subs I am a part of. Two of them agreed we'll go dark indefinitely, and we have joined in on that via ModCoord's post.
The largest with just under 1m users is still thinking about it, but I'm fighting for it.
We need to push them where it hurts: active users for their ads to be used on.
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What does reddit plan to do with all these communities going dark?
They should remain dark until changes are made. A strike with an end date is pointless.
Just saw on Reddit there are 300+ subs going dark indefinitely. That is what needs to happen. Sure Reddit could come in and find new mods but damn might end up being a decent amount of work/chaos. They should screw up their automods and delete the backup logs. Still probably wouldn't be that hard for an admin to rollback but still the more pain the better.
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They're just reporting on the AMA, they don't know anything we don't already know.
That article is terrible, incidentally. It didn't cover what really happened with the Apollo dev and just parroted spez's talking points as facts.
Also, fuck u/spez.
Well. It's his right then.
It's also our right to walk out of the crumbling house. Unlike FB and Twitter which still has core (and over reaching) followers that still remain there, Reddit may face a slow burning death.
Oh well, it's a fun ride. Goodbye to the communities and hobbyists.
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