Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.

Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.

Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).

Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.

Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back.

But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ?

It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO.

The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show.

PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation.

Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.

life is better on Reddit with a 3rd party client.

Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.

Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.

I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on.

The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.

As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.

God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848

and here's a comment excerpt from this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...

> "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub."

So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.

It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.

Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that.

Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request.

Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests.

So really, what is a reasonable pricing?

They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.

I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data.

Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit.

You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs.

None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.

It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

Building and running a software company is not free.

Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other.

I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.

This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

And in this case, the grievance is against all companies that give away "free service". I also wrote up the thread about GitLab doing what they're doing should never be called free. And I believe that an interpretation of FTC guidelines actually does call this behavior out as bad.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one.

This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

- Cory Doctorow

Letting you download images, windows just showing "not genuine" instead of refusing to start etc..

Or are you referring to the '80s?

Is delivering an image of comparable cost to delivering text via an api?

I have zero experience in this area so could learn something.

The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it.

This is a universal truth.

Is it wrong to claim that, though?

Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out?

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.

I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all?

All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities?

There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse.

This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.

1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there.

Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest.

But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out?

It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)

I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace".

If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way.

My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"

That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot

The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.

Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it).

Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled).

If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.

But reddit was working just fine in 2017, when they had less than 200 employees (compared to their pandemic hiring from 700 up to 2000) and it was working fine at smaller numbers before then. Right now their revenue is about half a billion dollars. They take in more than enough money to run the site and have stupendous profits.

Reddit, on the other hand, makes <$1 per user worldwide.

So, a reasonable price would be somewhere between $4 and $200 per year

/s

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

I remember this very, very differently than you do, apparently

I am mentioning this only because I wrote this today and even as someone as knowledgeable about USB C as anyone possibly can, there are big unknowns here and automated aggregation of knowledge could help. But it doesn't.

But you know what, I actually asked ChatGPT for this, it recommends a dual monitor DisplayLink (!!) dock for this case. Complete trash. It concludes with "on such cases, it's recommended to consult with a hardware specialist" without telling you how to do that.

https://chat.openai.com/share/517b831b-db36-40c3-b7bf-7c1c0e...

But let's not tout my own horn. I just moved to Malta and I already knew the selection will be low and I will need to shop all over the EU and get the packages sent with a package forwarder. Now, the /r/malta sub recommends shipmybox and shiplowcost both of which are Malta destination only, focused on this special market, reliable and relatively cheap -- and near impossible to find via Googling. ChatGPT recommends shipito, myus and forward2me all of which are global companies. It's not much better than Googling especially given the forward2me reviews on ... guess what, Reddit.

When I ask ChatGPT about that it says "Forward2Me has generally received positive reviews and is considered a reliable package forwarding service" but https://www.reddit.com/r/amiibo/comments/xzlnsh/does_anyone_... https://www.reddit.com/r/internationalshopper/comments/ucww6... there are worrying reviews

https://chat.openai.com/share/0e14cf2c-8a19-4210-97aa-2a90a3...

How many more you want?

Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server.

The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.

I wouldn't personally pay for Reddit Premium so if ads are the only way to keep third party apps viable then so be it.

I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.

But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.

As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win

It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.

"Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.

What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry.

This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access.

Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.

That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.

I don't know what the right number is, but Reddit has made it abundantly clear with this move that they aren't interested in finding it.

Honestly, I doubt there is one anymore (for me at least). Any trust I had for their corporate leadership before has completely evaporated. If they were to lower the prices to a "reasonable" level now it would indicate that they either capitulated (but didn't get to do what they really wanted and probably will try again later) or they are just being manipulative and wanted to use this as a way to show "goodwill" by bringing the price down.

The concept of the fediverse these days has me hopeful for a time where we don't need to worry about these big dumb corporate interests holding our data and the control over it hostage. Any publicly owned (or private trying to go public) organization with a profit incentive is bound to make stupid, short-term decisions eventually, and this is just one of many of Reddit's forays into that arena. They will continue to get worse and worse, regardless of how effective the protesting is.

Are they?

I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere.

The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there.

Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.

Just saying, it's never fair to try and say any one party in this arrangement is just leeching off another.

Reddit provides a platform, Users provide the community, and third-party app developers make interaction between the other two easier. Third-party apps aren't even able to engage with certain reddit content because the API never exposed it, but people still choose them; That says a lot about how they feel about the official app, and the real value that third-party devs provide.

What's crazy to me is that Reddit could have easily achieved their goals by just investing in developing a really good native app that people want to use, thereby monetizing them while also building goodwill! This whole thing could be achieved and make them look -better-. But they are making stupid short-term decisions to be able to IPO and they chose the stick over the carrot.

It doesn't have to. An archive won't save Reddit if the action wants to move elsewhere.

If a particular topical community gets going somewhere else, the most popular information will quickly get recreated just through its normal operation.

Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.

> Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.

The site is really just a bunch of kluges barely held together with duct tape....

Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,

I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet.

Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.

And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy.

So, there's 1 for you.

Even so, this is the remarkable exception(-ish) to the rule, and the subreddit still seems to be pretty active , in fact with a lot more comments than Lemmy

Here's an example of a community:

https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending

Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success.

Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing.

The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama.

Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.

Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING.

But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels.

Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen).

>for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.

It will always be garbage

This is a hype road. There's nothing. There never will be anything.

It's just automated plagiarism.

The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content which this method can't ever create.

never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose.

And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website.

>God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.

if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed).

You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.

At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.

If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.

you should tell that to reddtors. I believe they complain quite a bit about reposts, the same questions being asked, bots, and more.

The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.

There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table.

Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort.

I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.

they haven't done so because they have chosen not to. they are still choosing not to.

this is a calculated move by reddit to extract the highest amount of money possible from 3rd party app developers, and the users of these apps are who is going to suffer. reddit waited until API use was counted on by some portion of its users before they pulled this lever. it's predatory.

Stochastic parrot: inherently no new content

Reddit: some new content.

Was it, though?

Sure, I'm not going to minimize the benefits of discoverability, avoiding the need for users to create yet another account, and taking the burden of infra maintenance off of someone who'd otherwise have to stand up a server to host phpBB or whatever.

But ultimately we don't strictly need these things. Isolated/fragmented web forums were doing just fine before Reddit came along. Maybe adding a little friction to the process of a first post to a new forum is a feature, not a bug.

> Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it.

Yes and no. Ultimately, any time you hitch your community to someone else's platform, you incur the large risk that the platform owners will make changes that you don't like. It's not even "neglect and mismanagement": Reddit's owners have been doing what they believe increases the value of Reddit. Whether they're wrong or right about what changes accomplish that ultimately doesn't matter: those changes might not be what makes users and moderators happy, and users and moderators don't have much power to affect change. This protest/blackout may end up achieving the desired effect, but think of the time, energy, and effort wasted around all of it. Better to spend that time working on solutions that allow communities to own their slice of the platform, and have final say as to what happens with it.

So, what's the line? How much noise are we welling to dig through to find "some new content"? I'd argue reddit has enough noise to at least bring the question up.

in context of reddit, we clearly do not value that control at all. these last few weeks have shown how much control we truly have.

>Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work.

we solved that problem decades ago, though. I think even Reddit has RSS feed support (well, for now. I don't think it's native). I think leaving the centralizing to an underlying format is a better approach than expecting a benevelent dictator to always look into the best interests of the user while also seeking profits (or alternatively, an eccentric billionaire who cares not about profits).

Some inconvenience of signing up with an account is short term, and not exactly a huge barrier to begin with. I made 3 new accounts this week on various alternatives, barely took 10 minutes total.

The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.

Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)

That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.

Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:

Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":

<quote>

Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.

TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.

And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.

(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)

Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.

Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.

That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.

I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

</quote>

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...>

Links:

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.

And in this case, that one person happens to be me.

Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple.

I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever.

What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you.

The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.

Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?

Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?

> Was it, though?

The great thing about Reddit is how it removes almost any friction from creating and joining new „forums“. The less friction or transaction cost you have the better. Without Reddit I’m not sure we’d have dedicated forums of people posting their grilled cheese sandwiches or Babylon 5 GIFs

I've contributed code to the project.

(OP, FYI.)

Plus, I subscribe to about 30 subreddits, most of which pretty niche. Could I replace them with forums? Sure, and I do have fond memories from phpbb forums around the turn of the millenium, even moderating a few as a teen.

But then I'd have to check about 5-10 different forum sites daily, each with subforums for different specific topics. It adds friction.

It's much more convenient just opening reddit whenever I have a few minutes to scroll my feed and see what's up in my niche communities.

Reddit also gives the power to users to create niche communities. R/xbiking comes to mind, which is about a very specific bicycling subculture consisting of using vintage mountain bike frames from the 80s and 90s with a mix of modern and vintage parts to create cool all around bikes... Sort of. Anyways, to my knowledge this subculture did not exist anywhere before Reddit, and I can hardly see how it could have sprung up on bikeforums.net, for example. Petitioning the forums admins for a new subforum for a community that hardly existed would have been difficult, and the sort of posts R/xbiking sees would probably have been closed as offtopic in other subforums. Much easier to create and organically grow a new community on Reddit.

Personally, after being a bit reticent, I am now hopeful for fediverse based solutions (kbin and Lemmy notably) to replace this.

Both sites serve - image, video, and text(comments or posts).

Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.

Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.

Realistically, it's the best comparision there is.

Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort.

This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

> Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.

Did you even take a second to look at Imgur before confidently saying something so incorrect? The homepage clearly references tags, with individual posts a la subreddits.

Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.

Are all those people sales? If no, then those workers seem like mostly a waste of money. If yes, and they're still not profitable, then turning the company into 90+% sales is not the path to profitability either.

Do you have any non-sales explanation for what those people are doing that actually contributes to revenue?

It's not like they opened more factories and need more workers.

Though maybe they look at increased revenue and use that as the reason to hire more people because growth good, in which case any complaints about lack of profitability should be derisively laughed at.

They have tags. Not subreddits. Tagging systems are completely different from how a subreddit works. In my experience a tagging system isn't that expensive to run. Comparing tags with sections seeems completely bonkers and very naive.

> Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.

In my experience, to make complex data like Reddit's highly available you need to do a whole bunch such as making subreddits separate buckets so to speak. The aggregation almost certainly has a substantial costs. This isn't some dinky MySQL database with few thousand posts. It seems absurd to compare a site with a single feed (Even if it has tags) vs a system that has a personalised feed.

I'm sure the team who build and maintain the feed mixer are happy to hear you could build it with just a database query. I'm sure they'll be reaching out so you can show them this database query.

It seems a lot of people want Imgur to be more expensive to operate therefore fair that it can be more expensive to use. While the reality seems to be the reverse.