he seems really on defensive
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.
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.
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I think the reported number was like ≈10% use third party apps.
The real question is how much of the best content came from those users, how many of them are moderators, and how many will leave. Bc those people will have an outsized impact on the website.
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
He does seem very defensive, and aggressive. Reddit is all his data he owns so we’re the leaches who just don’t want to pay, he has been so magnanimous to allow us to waste his money all these years with our stupid API calls. It’s amazing they let this guy be the CEO, it’s like he wants to piss people off at this point. Reddit IPO has broken his brain. I was ready to start paying Reddit to keep using RiF when this started, now here I am free from that shitshow forever and ready to spend that money supporting the growth of Lemmy. Incredible leadership from spez.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but the whole “Apollo is a leach who adds no value” is fucking weird. Wouldn’t an alternative and extremely popular app be a huge advantage if you charge reasonably for it? Or even just buying out the app like they did with alien blue??? Makes no damn business sense to me to piss off your users on purpose
Wow. Dug in and desperate. That’s how it reads to me.
I appreciate that he apologized for framing this crisis as he has just let free API’s run for years, but he and they are really doing a horrible job of rectifying the community outrage. He didn’t answer the question about thr LLM’s, which feel like more of the root of the API issue. He’s acting like a child in a spat with Christian about Apollo. The deflection is painful to read when it comes to the IPO. Finally the time extension reads like a whine about other companies and his bad decision, rather than an answer why they cannot just incrementally phase this in, or postpone it, or something more tenable.
I think there’s no turning back from what was put in motion with #redditmigration they just handed tens of thousands of users to the threadiverse. Many will stay and help this improve and grow
Wow, his answers and arguments are really bad. Doesn’t acknowledge that AI scrapers abused their system, not apps to access and interact with Reddit. Practically says they will imitate Apollo. Admits that they unreasonable timeline was a way to coerce deals.
