Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
“The blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community.”
he seems really on defensive
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From https://www.redditinc.com/blog/https-www.redditinc.com-apifacts:
As of now, more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities (by DAU) are open
The 48 hour blackout that was popularized was a complete joke and reminds me of all the corporations that change their social media pictures to pride-themed photos for like 2 days then revert back to not caring at all. Reddit literally did not give two shits about 2 days of ad revenue being gone because they knew it would be back to normal before most people even noticed.
Once July 1st starts a lot of redditors will move to lemmy or other sites because of the third party apps no longer available. Corporate greed practices should die. Also I won't be surprise that reddit will add more bots in the comments.
Yeah, but I feel like Reddit has become the next Facebook. The young and techy crowd started using it first, and eventually boomers and non-techy people started using it. I would bet that the better majority of users don't care about any of the issues that are going on. They just want the content.
Now hopefully, the primary submitters of the content leave and Reddit's decline comes from a shitty userbase that doesn't actually contribute anything. But that's gonna take time.
Yes, tech-savy and high-literacy people are always the first to move when things go down the drain, I think those are the ones providing the most valuable content, the masses follow but that requires quite some time as you rightfully said.
It could even take longer for reddit masses to realize something has changed, if we consider reddit is full of reposting bots, there's so much content in there that they could go on for years before content "consumers" realize there's nothing worthy anymore.
idk, I think a few definitely will, however I think it will be like Netflix where people accept it until lemmy/kbin/fediverse as better options all together.
The problem with this is that Reddit, unlike Netflix, is a social media thing.
And there are two very different ways of looking at the 'value' of social media systems.
The first, and most common, is simply stating that the value is based on how many people are using it. The more people use it, the more valuable it is, and so first mover advantage is almost impossible to overcome.
Except... That doesn't really match reality, social media companies die, or stop being nearly as popular. Even ones that used to be wildly popular.
The big key is that not all users are equally valuable. You want to be involved in a network with people that you find interesting. Even if you never even post, you want to view media that you find interesting.
For memes, you want to meme with other people who appreciate what you create, and who create vaguely similar works.
For conversations, you want to have them with people that have something that you find interesting to say.
On any metric which is just about 'how many users', the loss of third party clients, even if it causes the loss of every single user of those clients, is a very tiny drop in the bucket.
The problem is that many of these users are very likely to be important users. They are the people who give enough of a damn about their experience to go looking for a 'better' interface, and giving a damn sure looks to me like a good indicator of caring enough to contribute in a meaningful way.
Same deal on moderators, all of Reddit absolutely relies on moderators, unpaid moderators, and those are the people who both really give a damn, and who have been quite outspoken about absolutely needing better tooling than what Reddit natively provides.
If enough of those 'high value' users leave, the value of Reddit to almost everyone else drops through the floor.
It doesn't go to zero, but it does make it much more likely that other users, the ones that maybe don't post a lot, but who do view a lot, will follow them.
And those users are the ones that view a lot of ads, and thus fund the whole thing.
You simply don't get this effect with something like Netflix, because the value of Netflix is what movies and shows they have, not what other users they have.
With the first blackout, any user who didn't bother to change remained on reddit. With July first, those on 3. Party Apps will be gone unless they actively surrender by switching to the official app.
U/Spez might think a majority uses the official app and that nothing is lost on 3. Party users who won't generate ad revenue anyway. However those users are probably the content creators that make the website worth a visit for all the "normies" that use the official app and costume ads
Also I won't be surprise that reddit will add more bots in the comments.
Without an open API, there's no way to verify exactly how many "meatspace" users there are on reddit. This is a key piece of information to hold that, say, facebook has always held close to their chest.
Advertisers ultimately pay for "impressions", and that number can be ofuscated and inflated (ie counting bots) to entice advertisers and IPO investors to continue to invest.
Turning off the API is turning off active user verification.
are you aloud to comment. many subreddits took that off. for me i'm still on reddit but only using RES. no more mobile. once old reddit is dead then usage will drop more