NSFW content on reddit is not only sexual content, far from it actually. Reddit forces MANY subs that are controversial to be NSFW or anything to do with drugs, even support subreddits are marked as NSFW.
Even some r/political humor posts get labeled as NSFW. To be fair, politics in the US is far more disgusting then a lot of the content you see on NSFW sites.
I'd love that. If they're killing the way 1/4 of people use their platform, the company may as well go down for all I care. I really hope the dev of Apollo sues them for libel, so that I can write to all of Reddit's advertisers and say "are you really advertising on the platform being sued for libel for accusing a developer of blackmail?"
The reason so few people use Reddit through the mobile browser is because Reddit, like Twitch and numerous other websites, have stripped their mobile site to the point that it is "technically usable", and have limited access to certain types of content, even when logged in. Companies do this shit all the time and it's gross. I use a mobile browser for the adblock.
Primary reason for reddit to even exist is to answer some simple questions. Like googling, but if you want your solution to be written by an actual human, and not by a bot, you put "reddit" after your question. For an example: typing "How to farm worms" gives you 10 pages of random websites, but typing "How to farm worms reddit" gives you experiences of actual real life people farming worms.
@George Costanza the Russian Spy tumblr was already gone years ago, now its just P.M. Seymour, Oz Media, Kalbus (to an extent) and others doing vids on tumblr to prove it still exists.
If 4th of your userbase is using a different app that might be a sign to add the features of the app into your program to remove the need for the 3rd party. Just like piracy, it's a service issue.
"Why can I spend money on giving a better service when I can monopolize the market and instead reduce costs? That 7th vacation home ain't gonna buy itself y'know?"
And it's not like the App is new. It's been out for SEVEN FUCKING YEARS and all they've managed to do is make it worse. So bad people prefer third party apps.
@@Pers0n97 really reminds me of DeviantArt. People hated the new redesign and kept using the old one. But that wasn't good for them, so they removed the option and now you're stuck with the laggy, worse experience of the nes design. Just watch, any minute now they'll remove support for the old version
man, what happened to the internet. When I was a kid, the internet was the wild west, we were focused on individuality, the entire point of the internet and sites like RU-vid, reddit, etc was that it was user activity that brought you there, the USERS built the platform, WE built the roads that the websites use. It felt so liberating using the internet as a kid because the whole experience felt like everyone, even me could start a RU-vid channel or something and could become popular from that (I even tried that at one point as a kid). But it's so sad nowadays to basically see the internet being turned into corporate hellscapes straight out of Cyberpunk, the individuality that made it great is gone, now it's either conform and be the same or be put down by algorithms, you only do things for monetary value and clicks, nothing seems original and fun anywhere on the internet anymore, and whenever competition arises, the big companies do whatever possible to remove it. The whole system has become one big dance to appease shareholders. I just want the internet to return to the glory days, when it was just people, with cameras, doing whatever they thought would be interesting for internet people.
The old farts caught up to the new tech and want their piece of the pie, New platforms will come out like how facebook killed myspace and discord supplanted teamspeak And the cycle of the company will start again
all because of that god awful fucking trash word "feduciary duty" WE WILL DESTROY OUR PLATFORM TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS BECAUSE THE LAW DEMANDS WE PRIORITZE MAKING MONEY FOR OUR SHAREHOLDERS OVER EVERYTHING AND WE CAN BE SUED INTO REMOVAL/REPLACEMENT IF WE DO ANYTHING ELSE! what the fuck kind of dystopian trash shit is that?????
A Reddit developer indirectly telling people that their API is inefficient for third-party apps as it requires X amount of requests to replicate Reddit. This reeks of bad infrastructure, engineering and design decisions on Reddit's part. I've worked on apps which required a huge amount of requests for the clients. Granted that most of these apps did not have millions of users, so that was acceptable. But as we scale, we always made sure to combine requests where needed. We also often end up moving from a traditional "REST" API to a GraphQL one that can make scaling even better, as one can more easily query for specific data without requiring to fetch from a database, service, etc. That and proper caching strategies. There are solutions to these problems and Reddit don't seem to take that into consideration. What's funny is that Reddit _is_ using GraphQL. But just very inefficiently. They didn't design the API based on their UI requirements but rather based on generic approach. There are tradeoffs to this, but seeing over 100 GraphQL requests in one go; that's just bad API design.
And, unfortunately, all too often it seems to happen like this; the huge entity with messy code and implementation and _maybe_ enough resources to fix it in this century will never try, and in trying for more money will inevitably kill itself off leaving everyone that liked it in the dust 😔 It's genuinely really sad to watch.
discord literally has a big post about how they solved the problem with insane amounts of queries/requests and how they made it infinitely scalable... literally all the dumb fucks at reddit need to do is read a literal fucking blog post.
discord literally has a big post about how they solved the problem with insane amounts of queries/requests and how they made it infinitely scalable... literally all the dumb cucks at reddit need to do is read a literal fucking blog post.
All the free money from investors is drying up. Entire generation of people grew up with an internet based on cheap interest rates and delusional investors. Gonna be interesting to see what these companies have to do in order to be sustainable and not go bankrupt.
"we're going public" is never something you want to hear from a company you love (or use often and hate) It's like hearing a loved one has cancer. All the priorities of the company shift towards making a greater profit and thats just...it. Now we'll watch as reddit suffers a _VERY slow and painful_ death. Just like all the others. =)
I never understood why every successful companies go public. It always looked like selling the golden goose to me... until I realize that everyone would sell out of billions in a heartbeat. Companies don't go public to get more money for their rapidly expanding companies, they do to cashout for more money than anyone would see in their lives.
As much as it's easy to say 'yeah good riddance reddit', I actually get most of my news, guides, info and updates for my hobbies through reddit and it's a shame to have to give it up with the end of the these third party apps. I'm NOT using the main reddit app because it's terrible.
@@PalashaGabarra Nah the forum style of reddit is better and the information is easily searchable from a search engine without needing to search or join specific subreddits
@@shadez123 This here, Discord's closed off nature of servers hinders so much easily searchable information. Really its either going through niche single use website/forums or a subreddit when searching for something.
Well, maybe people will actually be motivated to start their own message boards again instead of using Reddit. Honestly, I've always hated Reddit's UI and couldn't be bothered to use it, much less post in it, regularly. It is a valuable resource for knowledge, though.
Reddit didn't even have an app for the first decade they were around. They relied on 3rd party apps to help grow the userbase until they purchased the most popular 3rd party app, Alien Blue and turning it into the Official App and ruining it. They've relied on volunteer work to make this site what it is. They didn't have a native media host until someone created Imgur, they rely on unpaid volunteer mods to keep things running, they rely on users to generate all the content. Without the unpaid volunteers, Reddit would be a website only, text only, small discussion board/forum from the 2000s
Im gonna be deathly serious here. The entire reason I stopped using Reddit's official mobile app was because I got entirely FED UP with the damn thing. It would regularly crash, ran unusuably slow at times, would softlock, bug out, and it made the entire damn thing agonizing to use. Get rid of my 3rd party app, you get rid of me as a user. Deadass.
8:32 Gotta love the shout-out for Reddit is Fun presumably being "more efficient" than Apollo. Meanwhile, I opened Reddit is Fun earlier today only to be met with an epitaph in pop-up form (and funeral dirge accompaniment performed by my breaking heart) telling me it's officially shutting down June 30th. I paused and literally yelled at my phone when I heard Muta read the RiF name-drop in that tone-deaf-ass post. I am incensed. It's not the third-party apps' fault that Reddit's own app *sucks*. It's not the third-party apps' fault that I can't tap "continue in browser" fast (or hard) enough whenever I have need to open the comments in Firefox. And it's not gonna be the third-party apps' fault when I join the ranks of that small amount of sickos who use Reddit through their mobile browser - a group of weirdos that might soon see a ballooning in number.
If their mobile app was good, maybe we'd all be using it. But as of right now, the app is extremely limited in how you're able to make a post. All the formatting that's given to you in apps like Infinity for Reddit is missing in the main app. The experience is dumbed down for no reason. When TikTok was becoming popular, they converted their video player into a buggy mess that resembles TikTok just to look similar to the popular app. Things have only grown worse over the years. The side-bar has moved locations every few months because god-forbid the UI isn't refreshed. Using third party apps saves you from these horrible design choices.
It’s kinda funny how everyone hates Spez, people on the right hate him because they think his platform censors too much, and people on the left hate him because he doesn’t censor enough.
@@gutsssz no, people hate the greed. Reddit cares about the lost ad revenue more than the user experience. It seems like reddit wants to increase revenue as much as possible before going public
The funniest thing is that the 3rd party apps were first. Reddit did not have an official app for a long time. Despite that the official app is legit the worst possible browsing experience from all the apps that exist. They did the pseudo-ama today and 4 admins collectively posted like 25 comments in that thread and some of them were not even answers. I for one do not care at this point, this is the last social media thing that I use and the official app is obnoxious enough that I'll just quit and read books instead or anything else really. I don't understand what is happening in 2023 but seems like all developers of any kind, both gaming and social media just love to ruin their stuff to nth degree. At this point a dead monkey without a brain would do a better job. I'm guessing this is the culmination of us letting devs test the limits till they realized that people don't take action and other devs followed suit.
@@YoungDeathWish I mean, I already do but now I'll just have to take a book with me if there's a chance I'll have to wait somewhere. In all honestly I'll probably miss browsing on a toilet the most lol.
Near 0% interest rates are over and so is a lot of investor funding. These sites gonna need to find a way to turn a profit or they're going bankrupt soon.
nah man, it's literally and PURELY AND ONLY all because of greed and that god awful fucking trash word "feduciary duty" WE WILL DESTROY OUR PLATFORM TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS BECAUSE THE LAW DEMANDS WE PRIORITZE MAKING MONEY FOR OUR SHAREHOLDERS OVER EVERYTHING AND WE CAN BE SUED INTO REMOVAL/REPLACEMENT IF WE DO ANYTHING ELSE! what the fuck kind of dystopian trash shit is that?????
I've never personally used apps and, frankly, I don't see the point to. If reddit doesn't let me use it on my web browser for my phone I simply will just not use it. I do not want apps on my phone that drain my battery and suck out my data. It's so annoying all these places have apps which are all in themselves just utterly useless trash in my opinion.
I'm a Infinity for Reddit user and seeing the app basically shoot itself in the foot is sad and hilarious at the same time. Sad to see Infinity go dark, but hilarious to see Reddit not thinking about they're fucking with the community (somenthing that's been proving does not fucking work, yet, it actually ends in a kinda Streissand Effect). So yeah, hopefully we're at a point of no return, where this whole thing blows up in Steve's face (fuck you Spez btw).
I've always wondered why these type of protest are so tame, i mean, 2 days it's not something small but why not an entire week or two? Imagine the amount of trafic that Reddit could lose (and potentially money) if the blackout lasted at least a week instead of a weekend essentially. If the objective of the blackout is to demonstrate discontent over a certain change maybe go all in and just do the week black-out?
The problem is that admins are willing to and have removed mods from subreddits before. It's not a stretch to think that they'd remove mods of the majors subs if they keep at it for longer. They'll just replace them with new mods who'll be more... compliant to what admins want
The Admins will just go in and undo it, replace or block the mods, and pretty much do whatever they want. It's up to the user to stop visiting the site. Then when the website dies they'll stick a piece of wood in the spokes of their bike wheel and be like "why did they do this to us wow"
RU-vid commenters trying not to act superior to every other social media platform despite being the most confidently wrong of the bunch challenge: Impossible
I used to think that online capitalism would be less egregious than the standard corporation but every month that just gets proven to be more and more wrong.
what kind of capitalism do you think you have exactly when every industry is monopolized by 2 ~ 3 massive corporate entities all owned by an even bigger corporate entity?
@@ytnukesme1600 i was talking about online. Every industry is a slave industry and it’s prob gonna be that way online as well. Twitch especially is trying to do that.
@@Merble tbh i couldnt care less about them, the issue is that it’s just going to get worse with other sites, including RU-vid imo. Especially since RU-vid might replace tik tok and twitch. RU-vid already doesnt really give a fuck.
To give a background: Reddit, since the beginning was always open, and encouraged third parties to use their API to create third party apps. Reddit never had an official app, until it bought out Alien Blue, which it later killed. So for the longest time before 2016, if you wanted to browse Reddit on your mobile device it was through a third party app. Fast forward since they released their app. Reddit started making restriction to their API, forcing third parties to change the name of their apps and how they interact with it. Reddit wants to go public, they haven’t said it publicly, but they plan on taking the company public - they have for a couple of years been trying to that. This whole API debacle is just them trying to shut down the competition to their official app, since their own app is trash to proper up their IPO.
That and AI Scraping, I guess the ethos & values of the once fair and reasonable team of staff have all moved on and we're left greedy corporate executives who couldn't care less about integrity or their reputation, they probably think of themselves as unassailable being the defacto forum of the internet which is too big to fail so they do whatever they like, same goes for Twitch & Twitter... I definitely feel a revolution coming though, when a small percentage of people do this and everyone hates it, there will inevitably come a time when majority will win the war just through sheer numbers and ofcourse loss of revenue due to that boycott will be what makes these idiots finally change their tune and be decent, fair and reasonable people again, either that or the entire community calls for CEO's etc to be removed and replaced with truly good people that are well known to be for the people.
I just love how funny and utterly pathetic these movements are, it's literally just "I'm so HECKIN mad i'm gonna stop using this website for a DAY !" and they set their little date for their protest and after a day or two everything is back to normal and literally nothing changes at all. Internet activists will never cease to amaze me.
I am actually still surprised that people didn't ditch Reddit after Spez was caught editing user comments without anyones knowledge. Like... people always complaining about power trippin mods, but it's the admin himself who is power trippin on his website. It needs to die, just like twitter and facebook.
sure but it's literally the best and only place to get good info on very specific things, it's the only way to talk to the entirety of the yoyo/cubing/lightsaber and many other communities
It's so weird to me that people like you say this because you are completely ignoring that no other place is good enough to get actual information on specific questions and subjects compared to reddit. Twitter is already long gone with recent changes literally all we have left is reddit. Once that's gone where will you ask questions to real humans? Instagram? Lol
God do I hope that Reddit actually diggs it's own grave with this situation and collapses completely, if only to put the fear of God back into the big-ass social networks that consider themselves too big to ever fail.
What makes the blackout feel disingenuous, to me, is how mods are are deciding to selectively permanently shutter less active subreddits, then parading those subs’ subscriber numbers around as trophies, All while the more popular subreddits of similar themes are not even considering that. leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
A theory I saw months ago annd stuck with said that internally, reddit is furious about how much of ChatGPT (and other LLM) is built from them without them seeing as much of a return. The CEO somewhat confirms this in today's AMA.
Yet all of their horrible data is already gone, this won’t do a god damned thing to make them any money. The fact that they think people would pay for this when they can just scrape it under the radar to build their datasets is incredible. OpenAI doesn’t even release their datasets, so Reddit would’ve have a clue if they just scraped the HTML code instead of using an overpriced API. Or, I don’t know, just didn’t use Reddit
@@yourmomsboyfriend3337 I imagine that behind the scenes the admins analyzed the API analytics and noticed huge amounts of API requests coming from lots of Azure instances (ChatGPT and it's sibling models run on Azure) and came to the conclusion of "that was OpenAI gobbling up our data!"
Na. Reddit is going public and wants to "clean up" so they aimed to extinguish Third Party Apps, like the video says. The Apollo developer made an excellent post explaining it. They were all willing to pay for API and even looked forward to it as it could get them some benefits. ALL of these 3p apps understood this and they were lied to by Reddit. Reddit told them the price would be reasonable and "nothing like Twitter" - and proceeded to give them rates so high they match Twitter. Had Reddit wanted 3rd Party Apps to stick around they would have negotiated. That's why Apollo shut down -apart from the absolutely unacceptable harassment, mistreatment and worse from Reddit. The devs realized it too, that Reddit just wanted them out. What Reddit did wrong is well, everything. They now have their entire site about to die. Good luck getting a stockholder to invest HAHAHA. If they even go public Reddit has devalued itself so much in such a short span of time it's almost impressive. Peak stupidity.
So instead their website is going to get mined, which is more expensive for everyone since bots generate excessive requests for a fraction of the data especially when avoiding detection.
Damn, i used vanced and now revanced for youtube, but never knew 3rd party apps for reddit even exist, kind of shame, because it would make my experience way better than it is.
It feels like Elon Musk opened the floodgates for each social media/streaming company to basically drop the facade of wanting to have a decent platform and just cut straight to the bottom line - money and they don't care what terrible decisions and collateral damage happens along the way.
if this truly was a operating cost problem at it's core then they would have tackled it differently even if you turn off all third party API access, you end up with the same load but through a different API, still about the same costs ... this is just the raaapey big tech mindset, actually surprisingly similar to what happened to Twitter years back
It doesn't matter if they backtrack, we know their intentions and they will have their way in the end. I'll no longer browse reddit now but instead just visit from search engine results.
I joined their blackout. It’s a HUGE blackout. They should’ve seen it coming, these changes may bring their end. I also wish Aaron was still here, I only know a bit about him.
@@TurtleChad1 i don't like the hypocrisy in their judgement regarding it, i'd have been fine with them deleting politcally charged subreddits if they were indiscriminate regarding it, but it's clear they were deleting based off political bias they're 'free to do so' but i'm also free to criticize it and not use the platform
Reddit started with a couple of guys posting random shit with multiple accounts to make it appear busier than it is and it's about to go full circle with a couple of guys posting random shit with multiple accounts to make it appear busier than it is.
Betting ten bucks this is at least 70% "we don't want you to use anything but our own app and a browser". PS: Reddit, your mobile app is a POS, I would sooner NOT go on reddit at ALL on my phone than either get bugged to use the app OR use the app.
What you didn't mention is that most of the 3rd party apps were created at a time when Reddit didn't have an official app. Reddit bought one of the most popular apps, Alien Blue, filled it with their garbage, and now they are going to shut down every other app.
I saw something about this heavily affecting the blind community too? Something about them using third party apps to be able to access Reddit for the audio captioning
The accessibility apps one was so mind blowing because they were basically banning all blind people from reddit with this and it was such aind boggling choice lol glad that was undone
Reddit Is Fun is such a good app. It actually didn't recommend me garbage subreddits contantly. On the official it would constantly recommend me subreddits I would never use, and even making it clear that I was not interested in the subreddit through the app it just completely ignored me until I blocked it. Even worse it doesn't even keep loading posts from various subreddits like RIF. I have never known an app to just not load content like it's just telling you, you've had enough content for the day. I'm uninstalling reddit on my phone. The app is shit and it just isn't worth using. I'm just going to stay with Lemmy + Mastodon. I don't need reddit anyway. It's just full of reposts and low effort content. Not like it used to be.
I wouldn't be so concerned with reddit if the communities I go to have other sites. Reddit is one of the big bastions when it comes to making forums still relevant. I miss forums.
the fact they made a statement saying "reddit was never intended to support 3rd party apps" is ridiculous. like yeah, thats almost every site/company. its the users who will make that push. but paywalling it behind stupidly expensive API access is a straight braindead decision
Look Mutahar, you didn't have to call me out on the mobile browser thing 😂 Thanks for another video as always, I was curious about what was going on. I've been on reddit a lot more recently and one of the subreddits I was on went on a blackout, while another was considering.
Reddit is 100% in their rights to do this, but they are shitheads for doing it and obviously are trying to bump up their valuation. I am an Apollo user and I hate that I'm going to have to use the official app with all its intrusive ads and random posts from other subs to advertise those subs inside of other ones, and just the lack of features.
Louis Rossmann talked about this and brought up an interesting point Websites like Reddit have never made profit, and have been running off investor funds since inception. This was fine when they started and interest rates were basically 0. But now the investors want returns, and their incredibly low api prices have to be the first thing to increase. They have already maximized income from ads, and more ads would just kill the platform. Many more websites will begin increasing their prices very similarly soon and it WILL completely change the 3rd party tech space
Louis isn't a developer. No one said the API must be free, the issue is, the price is incomprehensible. I think it was $0.34 per 1000 calls. That's insane. If investors and boards smell blood in the water line this on other services as well. They are bound to be defunct.
Any chance they're dumping the 3rd party APIs in order to take it vertical prior to IPO as an additional revenue source? Nicely done vid. - just me in Palm Springs 🌴
After almost 20 years, we were bound for a new round internet company self-destructions like what happened with MySpace and Digg and left us with the sites that created the current hellscape that is the internet today.
Great video. It sucks big time for anyone using these 3rd party applications for their reddit experience. Hopefully,knock on wood here, that reddit keeps up the third party applications.
I’m pretty sure Reddit is going to implode since they just kicked dirt in the faces of mods. The thousands of people that keep the damn website tolerable.
Mods are an outdated antiquated method anyway. No other social media has mods who work for free. Honestly the site will be a lot better if they do away with the neckbeard mods who get their only semblance of happiness by a perceived position of power online
Those loser power tripping mods deserve more than dirt in their face, I couldn’t be happier over Reddit deciding to do this. Maybe these losers will actually be forced to get some sunlight.
30 days?? I'm an IT admin and we won't even push a major upgrade an internal app to production in 30 days. You need a couple weeks just to brain storm, test options, confirm design choices with impacted teams, construct a roll-out plan, update documentation, and only then do you begin testing. Then you test until all the bugs are worked out, which of course involves fixing the issues that inevitably arise. And only then do you push to production. The meetings alone in the planning stages can take 30 days, especially if it involves any vendors or third-parties. Communicating changes to users requires more than a couple weeks of runway. Absolutely unreal timeline
Kinda sucks cause looking up tutorials for stuff on yt, you cant tell if a vid is fake or not because they removed dislikes, or if you’re looking to download a program for something you dont know on yt whether its a virus because youtubers can delete comments and youtube doesn’t show dislikes
If you think Nintendo is destroying itself, i don't know what world you living in. No matter how much people hate Nintendo's anti-consumer practices, it doesn't make a lick of difference. People will continue throwing their money at Nintendo because Nintendo's games are almost always bangers and they have been for 4 decades straight.
The reason Reddit has so many 3rd part apps is because up until a few years ago Reddit didn’t even have an official mobile app to begin with, fun fact: the current official app used to be one of these third party apps before being bought by Reddit.
I used the official app phone app for maybe a total of a single day before I uninstalled it because the experience was really that bad. It was slow and often failed to display text properly and there was a 50/50 chance that either a video wouldn't play or the comments wouldn't even load. The app consumed an absurd amount of RAM and decimated my battery life, good design guys. I'm just a causal lurker god forbid how awful it would be for power users. Infinity was my go to because it loaded posts exponentially faster than the reddit app and you could actually use it with signing in to an account.
I use Reddit daily for sfw and nsfw purposes. It's a great platform because it is so easy to filter the bad and I personally love the format. That said even though I never used third party apps, I fully stand by the moderators that are getting fucked over by Reddit's terrible new policies. I will miss Reddit dearly, but if they want to make stupid choices then they should suffer the consequences Edit: Watched further in the video. I'm disappointed Reddit is going public because the best part of it was that it was a private company without the interests of greedy shareholders affecting it. Guess that's not the case anymore. I guarantee they ban nsfw stuff within two years and that's going to be the final nail in the coffin for them.
@@zadovrus1624 I turned off the feature that recommends subreddits on your homepage as soon as it was made, and I never look at the popular section because I don't care. So that never really affected me. I only look at the home section which is subs I specifically choose to be displayed.
As a RIF user, i would happily pay $1.99 a month for a subscription. The interface is so simple, minimal and straightforward. I downloaded the official Reddit app and to say it sucks is an understatement. You can't even read the comments without it injecting all kinds of other posts and comments and shit... Just let me read what i wanna read! Instead of giving third party devs the time they need to reconfigure their apps to collect a subscription fee, Reddit just decided to nuke them instead with an impossibly short deadline. Sorry Reddit, it was fun while it lasted, but after over ten years and over 100k karma... I'm out. Way to digg your own grave.
i used to browse reddit pretty much daily, back around 2014-2015. i exclusively used Alien Blue, a 3rd party iOS app. Reddit bought out Alien Blue and by 2016 had basically shut it down to replace it with their own official app. since then my use of reddit had quickly declined to about once a month if they were lucky. They already took my app from me, and now they are taking it from others 7 years later. i can guarantee a lot of people will drop the platform simply because their means of access got taken away, the way reddit is doing it is just going to push more people to leave out of sheer anger towards reddits tactics
Thanks for the quick scroll through r/gaming, had no idea portal reloaded release a coop update. Well I know what I am playing over the weekend with my buddy!
Going corporate and launching that IPO is going to be the death of the website. We all know what happens when companies are forced to listen to the shareholders and not the community
Hey Muta ... is there anything to ponder or worth beard-scratching about... the small irony that... Reddit was (essentially) co/founded by Aaron Swartz.. who was grossly over-charged (criminally) for essentially downloading user generated content in the form of research papers and documents which probably definitely should be public domain, and which, on the grounds that they believed he would misuse or distribute them they ... well, you know the story of what happened to him.. and here we have Reddit looking to close API access to their own content which similarly at least, the community who created it has the right to read and reply to and access, and using any client they like up until now, thanks in large part to Aaron and people like him. Both Twitter and Reddit are having a massive shutdown of API access, making it prohibitively expensive and forcing virtually all third party apps out of existence, both due to the mass scraping of their data for training AI's ... but isn't the responsibility of the Terms of Service of a website to dictate what you can do with it ? When Swartz slurped PACER and then JSTOR and JSTOR didn't like that, they threw the force of a thousand feds at him, destining him to a lifetime in prison just for ... PLANNING to MAYBE breach the Terms of Service.. and ruined his life. So .. to these companies I say .. go focus your anger on the companies who already did slurp your data and use it to create products. I realise that once the genie is out of the bottle it's hard to put back in and you may be worried about your own users doing it in the future, but legal remedies exist for a reason, and how far are you going to go in a vendeta against the community of open source and third party developers, because YOU DO understand that any of them could pull an Aaron on you in a heartbeat and slurp your whole site for any purpose ? They could recreate Reddit from scratch in an evening, with or without its data. They're a big community. Who are you mad at ? OpenAI et al ? Or your own users ? Or the developers ? Work it out and think about your actions guys. Why did Reddit or Twitter or other sites even HAVE API access to make them basically an open platform in terms of third party access ? SHRUG .. Aaron. AI will get its day of reckoning about where it gets its data, I'm sure we can all agree. But Reddit shouldn't be too hasty to make this its own day of reckoning when it comes to user generated content. To maliciously out-price the people who are essentially its own users (at least by proxy of the creators of the apps they use to access the site), they might not be just cutting off their nose to spite their face here, they might actually be starting an ideological war over data rights. Developers are largely individuals, but they are organised .. they are brought together in places like StackExchange and GitHub and what's that other one ? Oh yeah... REDDIT. There's a lot of them too. And they tend to care about issues like access to data. Free software developers tend to care a lot bout free software and a free internet and free access to information, especially the information they created. They don't need money to create a new Reddit. Most of them aren't even motivated by money. They do things because they believe in them. A literal hundredth of the developers on Reddit, maybe a thousandth could literally get together and create Reddit in its entirety over a weekend. But that's not what I'm here to say. I think it's just really important that we all take a moment and a deep breath and remember Aaron Swartz. He died over this. He believed in an internet where sharing information between websites was not only beneficial, it was fundamental to creating a thriving internet, and he created the tools to make that possible. He believed there should be rules and licenses and agreements that allowed people to share code, share information, and to create the things like Wikipedia that we have today, and he created those too. And he is, officially speaking, the co-founder of Reddit. And, the JSTOR data ... that was user generator data too, in a way.. wasn't ? See where I'm going ? Aaron Swartz didn't think companies should be able to take user generated content and wall it up and charge for it and profit from it at the expense of the people who were IN the data or who created the data. And I think a lot of us don't. User data rights .. is sort of a thing that is part of Reddit's history, and to people who still feel that the loss of Aaron Swartz to the world.. co-founder of Reddit, creator of RSS and the Creative Commons guidelines and much more... well, that story is part of the history of the internet too. It was the day that Big Data took from the world one of the most significant and important people in the foundation of internet as we know it. Just snuffed him out with their lawyers and money and feds. A life too great ended far too early just to protect some company's profits on data that they didn't even create and which was created for the betterment of humanity. I'm just saying, it sorta feels like they are k-lining Aaron Swartz from the world all over again. Not everyone knows Aaron's story. Not everyone would even care. But a lot of people DO remember it. The Stallmans, the Torvalds, the Raymonds, the Swartz' and all the others like them ... oh we remember what happened alright. We definitely remember what happened that day. This probably won't be the hill these folks all gather on for their final battle for ownership of the internet, but Reddit sure would be a symbolic website to fall as the first casualty of that battle.. if it were to happen. I have no idea. I'm just an old internet developer musing out on the internet. What do I know ? But I remember. I don't want to be trite or make any Digg related jokes here like many have or would. Because this is serious. People have lost their lives over this before, and it's a history that very much involves Reddit. Mostly what I wanted to say was .. ."Isn't it ironic ?" and bring up Aaron because ... it seems very appropriate right now, wouldn't you agree, Muta ?
I actually mod the Call of Duty and Forspoken subreddits and can absolutely vouch that the mobile app is awful, it’s how I do 100% of the moderating and everything takes 5x as long, with so many bizarre design decisions.
This is pretty much going to spin up a race to convert all these 3rd party apps into individual domain web-sites; which could in turn out compete reddit.
Reddit is one of the only places I can actually find reliable information on anything, them doing this and going public has me a little worried, I'm gonna have to find somewhere else.
Update: Reddit had gotten even worse. There are more ads now, a new "video" tab to try and imitate TikTok and there's a promoted section in trends that's like double any other one.
I don't mind the desktop website, it works good, my ad blockers block everything, I prefer RIF for mobile, but I just won't check it while mobile anymore. I'll just check in at home, unless they change that as well.
