r/london's thoughts on the blackout

Hello /r/london.

We're back - for now.

I've decided to write something of my own rather than repost another copy of the official messaging and I hope you'll excuse me for it. Funnily enough, I've had a lot more free time than usual over the last couple of days.

I think there is a lot of anger and rhetoric going around at the moment, and while the anger is absolutely justified, it's getting hard to understand what's actually happening due to the fog of war. Background

In May, without warning, and contrary to many public statements made previously by current and former CEOs, Reddit Inc announced broad API policy changes that will price out most commercial third-party apps from continuing to operate.

Already, Apollo and Reddit is Fun have announced they will shutter on July 31st as these changes take effect. Other apps will likely end up joining them.

Reddit has done this for a very simple reason: as a loss making company, they need to a path to profit to successfully launch their IPO this year. One way to do this is to drive people to their official app because that's where they can monetise their users the best through buying premium, awards, showing more adverts, and whatever bullshit they're doing with NFTs. In particular, it's no coincidence that Reddit Inc launched new ad options just this weekend - I'm sure these new forms of ads are in no small part responsible for wanting eyes on their apps only.

Another issue is the rise of the large language models (ChatGPT etc.) which are clearly using social media posts as a large part of their training corpus. So, the social media companies have suddenly decided this is a valuable asset and they should charge for it. Something u/spez

(the Reddit CEO) and Elon (over at Twitter) are no doubt looking to cash in on.

It's not completely unreasonable for a company to want people to use its official apps. It's not completely unreasonable to charge for an API. What is unreasonable is Reddit's timing, pricing, lack of feature parity, and u/spez

's frankly insulting attitude to the community on which his company and its revenue relies. The Timing

Reddit Inc announced these changes in May, to be enforced from July 31st. This is far too short a timescale for apps like Apollo to entirely rewrite their backend to ensure compliance and cost controls with the new API policies. Many of these apps are one-person operations, many of them are part time projects. They cannot get this done on the timescale Reddit proposed.

Feels real like a rug pull man. The Pricing

Christian Selig of Apollo calculated he would have to pay Reddit $20 million a year just to keep Apollo running, which would mean Apollo would have to vastly increase their per user subscription cost. It's also very clear that Reddit's API does not cost them this much to run for themselves, as otherwise the company's total yearly revenue would be losses in the billions.

While they may be losing out on some ad revenue, there's nothing to say they couldn't right this by having an agreement with third party app developers that they must show Reddit's ads. Simples.

But no, they're not doing this. Lack of feature parity

The official Reddit app lacks many useful features for moderators, but most frustratingly, lacks good accessibility, which is a huge problem for users of /r/blind and others with disabilities.

Reddit have partly relented and allowed two accessibility-focussed apps to continue to use the API for free - RedReader on Android and Dystopia on iOS, but under a non-commercial agreement that Reddit can pull with 30 days notice.

This is not a long-term sustainable model.

They have also made exceptions for mod tools but they miss the point that many moderators work on mobile only, and the moderation tools in the official mobile app are not good in comparison with third party offerings that will now shut down.

No matter what you might think of mods, we are volunteers, who put time in for free to manage communities. Each mod is trying to do what they think is a good job in their spare time, for the benefit of their subreddit. Taking away our tools is not helpful, and many mods will likely quit the site or reduce the number of actions they're able to take as a result of these changes.

Boo-hoo, you might say, but without moderation, the subs would be chock full of hate speech, bots and spam (well, more-so than it is now, we do what we can). The only reward we've ever received from our work is to see the online communities we volunteer in thrive and grow, and the occasional t-shirt. u/spez

Spez, supposedly the professional CEO of a large social media company with over 2000 employees, has shown an abysmal attitude towards us throughout the discontent this situation has caused.

Among other things:

Dismissive answers in his AMA about the API changes
Severe mischaracterisation of his interactions with Apollo
Leaked memo shows he believes the blackout is meaningless
Complete refusal to compromise

When Spez returned to Reddit, we were promised a step change in user relations after the Ellen Pao debacle. I suppose ultimately, money talks, and he's been told by his board he needs to take these steps to support the IPO.

If anything it reinforces the point that these kinds of companies do not work for you: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product The blackout

We participated with many other subs in the blackout this week. Some large subs are continuing to stay locked down, but but we have to balance that /r/London is a community resource, not just a fun/meme/shitposting sub that people can do without for a while.

So we're reopening for now, and letting the large subs take the heat as many of them are staying shut permanently.

It's not over though. There's talk of further actions called for, and we may well participate.

Ultimately though, this may not be a fight we can win on Reddit. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this is the reminder that we can't trust social media companies to act in good faith towards their users.

I remember the Digg v4 debacle and the great migration to Reddit - nothing says it can't happen again. . Maybe it's time to find a new frontpage of our Internet. Perhaps it's time to start dipping our toes into alternatives.

Here are some:

https://kbin.social/
https://join-lemmy.org/
https://squabbles.io/
https://tildes.net/

I am not a soothsayer and can't tell you which platform might emerge is "next Reddit", but if we've learned anything from the fall of MySpace, Digg, and Twitter, and the precarious situation of Meta, it's that the next Reddit will come. Perhaps this time we'll learn some lessons about choosing a federated platform or a non-profit to run whatever comes next. Your thoughts

We'd like to hear your views on whether we should. Not running a poll this time, as they tend to get brigaded by people who aren't on the sub, so instead please just voice your thoughts in the comments.

Should we:

stay open?
keep our eye on things and participate in further blackouts if/when they occur?
participate in the indefinite blackout?

Honestly want to hear your opinions.