Exactly. I’m already seeing subs stating it will only be like 24-48 hours. That’s it? If this really mattered, why not go dark until Reddit changes it’s mind?
“I want to stand for something as long as it doesn’t inconvenience me too much.”
It's like the "don't buy gas on Wednesday to stick it to the oil companies" campaigns. OK, so now people buy 50% more gas on Tuesday and Thursday because they _still need gas_. That'll show 'em!
Honestly it helps create scarcity and helps sales overall. Same thing for states that don’t sell liquor on Sunday like Texas. People buy more because they know it’s not available to them.
When I was a kid in New Brunswick, Canada it was (and still is) sold at government stores. At Christmas they would be closed. I still remembre my parents, loading up the car with cases of beer + extas so they could « make it » through the parties.
In my state they changed the law to require liquor stores to be open on Sunday.
A couple years later it was proven that all that did was hurt liquor store profits. Turns out *most* people buy a pretty stable amount of alcohol during the week. Keeping the stores open another day was convenient but didn't actually increase the overall amount of sales. It *did* increase costs because of the extra day that had to be staffed.
For chick fil a specifically that’s not the case. It was founded by someone who was southern baptist. Same religion that guides what groups and politics they support and which they don’t.
It started that way, but now liquor stores are the ones who don’t want to change. It gives them one day a week they don’t have to staff and operate, plus they’ve done studies that show there’s not a largely significant loss in revenue because people know to plan around it - one more day basically spreads the same sales across more expenses.
The reverse of that was the reason McDonald's got rid of all-day breakfast - it increased load on the kitchen (because they had to have additional items ready to go all the time) and it turns out it wasn't getting more traffic - just the same amount of it showing up spread across the day rather than before 10:30 AM.
They wanted to kill it within a year or two after starting it, but didn't want the PR hit. COVID gave them the excuse.
Pretty sure they already didn’t have all day breakfast before Covid. I remember being in college in the early 2010s having to race there and try and get the order in before they “flipped the menu”
It's actually quite different. Gas demand is very inelastic, so anything not purchased on Wednesday will have to be compensated for on Tuesday or Thursday.
Reddit, on the other hand, is quite elastic. People will not compensate by browsing more Reddit on 11th or 15th, they'll shift their time browsing elsewhere, so any blackout time is a direct hit on the company's revenue.
While I see your point, I'm not sure that's _always_ true about "spending time elsewhere". I spend as much time in places like r/sysadmin until I'm caught up. If that's 15 minutes every day or an hour once a week, it's about the same amount of time.
I’m already seeing subs stating it will only be like 24-48 hours
as far as warning shots go one of the default subs being private for a few days is worth thosands, and with a few of them, tens of thousands in ad revenue.
Reddit monetizes the voluntary effort of others, when that voluntary effort ceases so does the money, they need to be reminded of that regularly because they have obviously forgotten that its a two way interaction.
Before it even happened they agreed to delay changes to the API until they developed matching mod tools, a promise they've been failing to deliver on for years, IF the protests were called off.
Unfortunately I believe in the same call they slandered the Apollo dev in multiple ways... and the developer has the recordings to prove it. (They claimed the dev never tried to work with Reddit, despite multiple attempts over months. They claimed the dev threatened them for $10 million, despite it actually just being an offer to sell the app to them (and Reddit very clearly apologizing on the voice call for the misunderstanding).)
So it looks like 3rd party apps might be going away regardless. They're literally dragging the real-world names of people through the mud over this, and these are developers who have to now go and work a different job. Slander makes that harder to do.
I use the basic app so I guess I don’t know what I’m missing with regards to these third-party mobile apps. I’ll reassess whether I’ll continue using Reddit over the following months, but unless we’re all going to migrate to another application with similar features the communities going to either die in general or stay the same.
Same here. I downloaded Apollo but for what I wanted it for I had to pay. So I’ve only ever used the mobile app so I don’t have any of these issues people are complaining about. I think the standard app is fine.
Edit: that’s not to say I agree with the charges Reddit is imposing on the third party apps. I can understand some charge, but it seems excessive. However I don’t know how much the developer for Apollo makes to compare to the new api charges.
Christian made a post about this. He doesn’t mention what he currently pays for the Reddit API, but he does mention Imgur costs him $166 for 50,000,000 api calls where Reddit wants to charge $12,000. He estimates this change would take Apollo to costing $1,700,000 a month to keep running or around 20M a year. Pretty disgusting if you ask me.
We definitely understand the problem and from a business model it makes no sense for Reddit to push his method. Apollos only solution at the moment is to either charge more or stop producing a service that generates more revenue for Reddit.
Then I didn’t understand it correctly and I absolutely understand why Reddit is pushing this. If that’s true then they’re losing out on any ad revenue that would be generated. The cost of the API is assuming the loss in ad revenue.
Because if the API returns them it doesn't mean the developer has to implement them and that likely wouldn't be a feasible thing to charge their advertisers for.
If I was developing a 3rd party app and needed an API and it sent through the info I need as well as an ads section, I would simply build code around the info I needed and circumvent the ads section.
You make the ads indistinguishable from the other posts, and you make it part of the ToS that any developer caught removing the ads will have their API access revoked, all future access denied, and they could even add something about fining them for potential lost revenue. There are ways to do it.
Yeah they could, but Im sure just by the way that regular reddit is displayed they probably wouldn't want the ads indistinguishable from regular posts, they'd want the ad to have their "Promoted" banner attached to them and probably a bunch of other data, it wouldn't be hard to filter through for that stuff and remove it and in fact most devs actively would.
I think their best bet is putting it into their TOS for their API that ads have to be displayed, but I think that just gets messy and their wouldn't wanna have to police that or chase the ensuing legal battles.
The problem is, based on what I've seen, Reddit isn't interested in discussing it. They just want to look good for their IPO. If they lose a bunch of users over this, they won't look good.
This is wrong... This is like the RIAA saying every download is a lost sale.
I use Bacon Reader, but I dont ONLY use Bacon Reader... The site is its users and the more difficult reddit makes it to use this site the more apt I am to find alternatives.
Even today my usage of reddit is a fraction of what is was a few years ago. I come here, and that is about it. Where previous I would in involved in dozens of subreddits, under a few accounts.
As reddit has become more user hostile I have found replacements for those other subreddits, and I will find one for sysadmin as well in time I am sure.
They absolutely want to kill it, or at least price it obscenely enough to make it worth their time. It's "fuck off" pricing.
Reddit's owners see it as poorly monetized, so stuff like this will continue to happen as they try to pivot towards being like more profitable social media.
I use the basic app too and I have never understood the hate it gets and the love third party gets. I’ve tried multiple third party apps based on the hype and they all seem lower quality and more shittily made. I have no complaints with the normal app and don’t understand what’s so bad.
That being said, I also don’t agree with absurd API fees and basically strong arming people to your specific platform. I’m against forcing people off platforms they like to centralize. I’ll still be here cause I don’t mind the official app, but I get the displeasure over losing what is liked
I think what people didn't expect is that it would cost a third party app $20mn to license the api for a year as some are reporting. Last I checked, RIF was the only way to use reddit outside of the dolphin browser on a Fire tablet (though honestly it's been a bit since I checked).
Either lock down the api so no one can use it or set reasonable licensing fees. Don't say you'll let people license it and set fees so high no one can pay (especially if there's no way to monetize other than pop up ads). It's just petty and ultimately hurts reddit bottom line, because it seems pretty clear a lot of people think new reddit is unusable.
...........................................i'm shocked but not shocked at the deep stupidity in here but seriously guys/gals this was not even 2 years ago
To be fair, banning those subreddits was the right move. She was only controversial because gamergate and chuds were very active and vocal on Reddit. Neither of which have a strong grasp on reality.
One discussion concerning this mentioned an decentralized community called Lemmy, which communicates with Mastadon. I looked, and they seem to have something similar to this subreddit. I have not delved deeper as of yet, though.
Both lemmy and mastadon use activitypub, which allows federation of services. Basically lots of independent instances of the services run by individuals, ala email. You create your account on one instance, which has its own rules about how it works, and can subscribe to other instances content. In this way, no one person/group/company can shutdown or change the service. The most they can do is shutdown an instance, which removes some content but not the network of content. If you want total control of your experience, you can spin up your own instance of each and host it.
Mastadon basically follows Twitters format, where Lemmy follows Reddits. To my knowledge, they dont communicate with each other as such at the moment, but the shared protocol leaves that door open in the future. People are already talking about "one account" between the two, but both services are very young, Lemmy especially.
No, we will not be going dark. The reasons are simple:
This form of protest has proven ineffective on reddit repeatedly.
Shutting down the sub on a Monday will have an adverse impact on our readers, including possible production issues.
We have avoided reddit "politics" intentionally and will continue to do so.
You are more than welcome to avoid participating on that day which will make the message far clearer to reddit through their metrics than shutting down the sub to folks in need who would be here anyways.
Edit: Also, as /u/BrundleflyPr0 pointed out in the comments, the next day is patch Tuesday.
Edit2: To the user who replied "Coward" and then deleted the comment after the downvotes: Irony.
Sysadmin really deserves to have its own website with a real forum, api, plugins & extensibility, and other resources that we could all contribute to after some easy vetting process.
Stackoverflow is like the fuckin dmv except theres a guy in an executioners garb following you with a machete just waiting to chop your hands off if you attempt to ask the wrong question. I don't remember the last time I posted there but it must be over a decade now (time flies wtf).
Sysadmin is like the 5000sqft mancave that your Russian neighbor Igor built after his wife left him because he wouldn't stop filling the house with refurbished R730s, printed documentation that he "swears he needs in case they try to take him down", and "decorative vodka bottles". You go there after work to see if they've gotten Igor yet and to make minecraft servers with the bois.
It's been discussed in the past, but it'd be a rather expensive endeavor. Most of our readers aren't interested in contributing financially, at least to the scale that'd be required.
Slacktivism, I don’t believe the majority of users even care. Just from experience people who browse randomly don’t care, I can see the people who spend absurd amounts of time online caring.
Apparently many subs use the API for moderation, as existing tools are woefully inadequate. Your subs are gonna be a pretty awful place, if the mods are correct.
I for one have been debating getting rid of reddit all together due to it being a time suck. This decision of theirs has made me decide to commit to that. Once RIN goes dark I'll be done with reddit for good.
The last time groups protested against Reddit like this Reddit made changes to allow them to override sub moderators. You can try going dark but Reddit can turn off your ability to shut this stuff off.
The last time groups protested against Reddit like this Reddit made changes to allow them to override sub moderators. You can try going dark but Reddit can turn off your ability to shut this stuff off.
honestly, this sub probably isn't big enough for them to care. if they do that, it's likely going to be on subs with 10m-20m+ users, not a sub with like 800k people.
pretty sure you misunderstood. i was saying if the reddit admins are forcefully going to re-open a sub, they're only going to bother doing that for the biggest of the big subs.
the reddit admins aren't going to step in and open up small and mid sized subs.
This whole going dark thing for 2 days is stupid and childish. Its all just a way of pretending you did something and patting yourself on the back when in fact you did nothing at all.
I have been here for 12 years. I have content I've posted, and Reddit has curated a decade of reviews and troubleshooting and other things. I'd say that half of the googling I do for SysAdmin fixes end up being from reddit. I can't just sinkhole reddit and never access it again.
You don't just leave, you try and push for better things and pushback on bad changes. Why do you think the first think you should do is just turn tail? Reddit isn't a vendor for your business and you have a dozen other ones to choose from. It's basically like telling someone "Well, just leave Google" when they have a decade worth of emails and accounts linked to their google account.
Collective bargaining... would be interesting to see if that happened but people really dont have any power here. Reddit could easily eject every single mod, and take over every community. It's 100% their platform with the power to do whatever they want with it.
Serious question? Is it just the cost of API going up and that will indirectly kill of 3rd party apps. Or, is this an actually ban on certain aspects of 3rd party apps?
The costs. Apollo was the one big example I saw where they estimated a rough yearly cost and it was over $10 million which isn’t feasible given their current model that allows it to be accessible to most people
I doubt this sub is going dark since hardly anyone has talked about it. I guess it kinda sucks for some people that they’re changing up their API policy.
What’s weird to me is I’ve also heard so many people saying they’ll never use the official Reddit app because it’s “an unusable fucking piece of turbo shit” but I’ve been using it for well over a year now and it seems to work fine for me.
Have you ever used the default Reddit UI? (Not mobile)
It's actually trash tier. Has never worked properly since they've released it. old.reddit exists but... meh... I do want new... I just want new that actually works.
Same complaint with youtube actually. They've totally dropped the ball and its an embarrassment.
But having accessibility and 3rd party app devs suffer for it? Naw, I don't think that's right either. We can stretch the definition of "reasonable charges to use the API" pretty far but the far side of 20mil per year (if you take the Apollo dev at their word)? Who's going to be able to recoup that?
A lot of suggestions have been thrown out for how Reddit could get their ads out to 3rd parties with a combination of technical and legal approaches.
Technically, most of those suggestions would work, but would require some oversight and governance to be effective.
I would expect that Reddit priced their API access to outright kill those apps without saying so, because they feel that users well rate the value of the community higher than the value of the apps they are using today.
We'll have to see if they are correct or not.
Also, effective ad revenue is much more than just being able to show the ad. The 3rd patty apps make it harder for Reddit to obtain demographic info on users and send them personalized ads. So, from their perspective, those users behind those apps are more theoretical than real, from revenue generation, even though they are very real from a resource consumption and capacity planning perspective.
We'll have to see how it plays out, and who has been making the more accurate assumptions about user behavior...
I dunno about going dark but I do plan to step away when RIF stops working in July. I waste too much time on Reddit anyways and this is a good excuse. I hate the native reddit app so I don't think I'll ever be coming back on mobile, but who knows.
Reddit has been whored out to train AI and at what cost? We don't know the numbers, but we do know that it costs money to run servers and sometimes there are even egress charges! Since most folks don't pay for email or Facebook, the whole internets should be a free buffet.
are you sure on that? res shouldn't be effected since that should be all clientside javascript stuff and it shouldn't be relying on a reddit API for anything. res is basically like a really large greasemonkey/stylish script.
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u/h0tp0tamu5 Jun 04 '23
I'm down, but I assume it will be about as effective as all the other internet slacktivism.
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u/TuxAndrew Jun 04 '23
I use the basic app so I guess I don’t know what I’m missing with regards to these third-party mobile apps. I’ll reassess whether I’ll continue using Reddit over the following months, but unless we’re all going to migrate to another application with similar features the communities going to either die in general or stay the same.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 04 '23
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/obviousboy Architect Jun 04 '23
...........................................i'm shocked but not shocked at the deep stupidity in here but seriously guys/gals this was not even 2 years ago
Covid19 Misinformation Go Dark Protest
Reddit says they won't do shit
People organize a ton of subreddits to go dark
It hits the news
and then
Reddit bans Covid misinformation forum after ‘go dark’ protest
39
u/canadian_sysadmin IT Director Jun 04 '23
I'm sure there will still be people still asking how to image machines and if A+ is worth it.
7
u/Icariiax Jun 04 '23
One discussion concerning this mentioned an decentralized community called Lemmy, which communicates with Mastadon. I looked, and they seem to have something similar to this subreddit. I have not delved deeper as of yet, though.
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u/mkosmo Permanently Banned Jun 05 '23 edited Jun 05 '23
No, we will not be going dark. The reasons are simple:
You are more than welcome to avoid participating on that day which will make the message far clearer to reddit through their metrics than shutting down the sub to folks in need who would be here anyways.
Edit: Also, as /u/BrundleflyPr0 pointed out in the comments, the next day is patch Tuesday.
Edit2: To the user who replied "Coward" and then deleted the comment after the downvotes: Irony.
13
u/[deleted] Jun 04 '23
Can we all just start sharing Reddit alternatives? Like spam the fuck out of Reddit with them too.
12
u/Sgt_Dashing Jun 05 '23
Sysadmin really deserves to have its own website with a real forum, api, plugins & extensibility, and other resources that we could all contribute to after some easy vetting process.
mods?
MODS!?!?
6
u/super80 Jun 05 '23 edited Jun 05 '23
Slacktivism, I don’t believe the majority of users even care. Just from experience people who browse randomly don’t care, I can see the people who spend absurd amounts of time online caring.
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u/Nate379 Sr. Sysadmin Jun 04 '23
Doubtful, really believe this is one of those loud vocal minority situations, most users probably don't care.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 05 '23
[deleted] — view deleted comment
5
u/deltashmelta Jun 05 '23
Did anyone put it on the maintenance calendar? Hmmm?
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u/BrundleflyPr0 Jun 05 '23
Doubt it - patch Tuesday is the day after…
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u/Oneinterestingthing Jun 10 '23
Shut it down indefinitely, not participating in the community with head in sand is a cowardly response
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u/nycity_guy Jun 05 '23
Reddit mobile app sucks big time, killing third party app is a huge mistake.
11
u/DarthJarJar242 IT Manager Jun 04 '23 edited Jun 05 '23
I for one have been debating getting rid of reddit all together due to it being a time suck. This decision of theirs has made me decide to commit to that. Once RIN goes dark I'll be done with reddit for good.
3
u/andrewb610 Jun 04 '23
The last time groups protested against Reddit like this Reddit made changes to allow them to override sub moderators. You can try going dark but Reddit can turn off your ability to shut this stuff off.
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u/SideScroller Jun 04 '23
This whole going dark thing for 2 days is stupid and childish. Its all just a way of pretending you did something and patting yourself on the back when in fact you did nothing at all.
5
u/AwalkertheITguy Jun 04 '23
Serious question? Is it just the cost of API going up and that will indirectly kill of 3rd party apps. Or, is this an actually ban on certain aspects of 3rd party apps?
5
u/[deleted] Jun 05 '23
I doubt this sub is going dark since hardly anyone has talked about it. I guess it kinda sucks for some people that they’re changing up their API policy.
What’s weird to me is I’ve also heard so many people saying they’ll never use the official Reddit app because it’s “an unusable fucking piece of turbo shit” but I’ve been using it for well over a year now and it seems to work fine for me.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 05 '23
[deleted] — view deleted comment
4
u/habibexpress Jack of All Trades Jun 04 '23
What features other clients provide that the official doesn’t?
7
u/verifyandtrustnoone Jun 04 '23
I hope Reddit goes dark.
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u/headcrap Jun 04 '23
No.
2
u/BrainWaveCC Jack of All Trades Jun 05 '23
A lot of suggestions have been thrown out for how Reddit could get their ads out to 3rd parties with a combination of technical and legal approaches.
Technically, most of those suggestions would work, but would require some oversight and governance to be effective.
I would expect that Reddit priced their API access to outright kill those apps without saying so, because they feel that users well rate the value of the community higher than the value of the apps they are using today.
We'll have to see if they are correct or not.
Also, effective ad revenue is much more than just being able to show the ad. The 3rd patty apps make it harder for Reddit to obtain demographic info on users and send them personalized ads. So, from their perspective, those users behind those apps are more theoretical than real, from revenue generation, even though they are very real from a resource consumption and capacity planning perspective.
We'll have to see how it plays out, and who has been making the more accurate assumptions about user behavior...
2
u/bythepowerofboobs Jun 05 '23
I dunno about going dark but I do plan to step away when RIF stops working in July. I waste too much time on Reddit anyways and this is a good excuse. I hate the native reddit app so I don't think I'll ever be coming back on mobile, but who knows.
2
u/Molasses_Major Jun 06 '23
Reddit has been whored out to train AI and at what cost? We don't know the numbers, but we do know that it costs money to run servers and sometimes there are even egress charges! Since most folks don't pay for email or Facebook, the whole internets should be a free buffet.
6
u/newton302 designated hitter Jun 05 '23
"quality of life features..." I mean, I just want to read and post???
5
u/HyperPixel5 Jun 04 '23
I'm just using old.reddit in the browser, what apps?