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- cross-posted to:
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Wow, spez is taking on The Verge now? He thinks he’s a lot bigger deal than he really is…
It’s amazing hubris. Pride comes before a fall they say.
Pride comes before a fall they say.
[sees that Pride month ends June 30th]
GASP!
I hear fall starts for most of the northern hemisphere within just a few months of that
GASP!!!
🤔
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I don’t think this will be Digg v4 (though I could be wrong). The alternatives aren’t ready. But the foundation is being laid, and that’ll never go away. If they ever pull something like this again, that will likely end them.
And at this rate, they may do that next month.
The man speaking in this clip is Nilay Patel. Hes the Editor in Chief at The Verge.
He also used to be a lawyer before moving to journalism full time. So he knows Bullshit when he sees it.
I used to think that The Verge were just a bunch of Apple zealots who couldn’t even do a pc build video properly. They’ve come along way since then. Reddit would be absolutely insane to try and take on something like The Verge.
Side note , Nilay also has a podcast called Decoder where he interviews the heads of companies to get an idea of how they run and what their goals are. Its a pretty good show and I reccomend it. The one where Nilay takes on the head of Substack was hilarious
The hit piece Nilay did on Elon was fucking savage and one of the best things I’ve ever read on that site
Thanks for the link, that article is delightfully savage. I laughed so hard my cat came over to check if I was dying.
Wow, that was very on point. Great read.
“You just bought yourself for 44 billion dollars.” Really good indeed.
I found his point about how the content moderation is the product to be insightful, and I haven’t thought about it that way before. I wonder how he feels about Lemmy in that regard.
“A podcast about org charts.”
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You know what, I used to think The Verge was just a bunch of Apple fanboy journalism too. This coverage of Reddit made me realize they know what they’re talking about.
Thanks for the informations !
A transcript for those who prefer to read. (using flixier so forgive the lack of speaker indication and the few corrections I made.)
Transcription:
[redd]it is very unhappy that people are talking to us.
They have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism.
That’s straight up what they’re doing.
I know this is what they’re doing because we have a statement because they told us.
They told us Tim Rami, who runs coms at Reddit. This is the blanket statement will no longer comment on hearsay.
Unsubstantiated claims or baseless accusations from the verge will be in touch as corrections are needed.
Oh, my God.
I’ve been playing this game a long time.
We’ll wait for you to make a mistake.
So then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong is the oldest trick in the book and we are just not gonna fall for it.
So we’re just gonna print this statement in every story from here on out, like that’s the way it’s gonna go.
If they want us to get it right they can… They can tell us what is actually happening, but I will come back to we’re gonna take the people on the ground.
We’re gonna take the users.
We’re gonna take the moderators.
We’re gonna take the employees every time.
And if you think they’re wrong, you can tell us and you can explain why they’re wrong.
But we’re not gonna stop because you’ve you’re running like a 1920 press playbook.
Like whatever.
Like I’m we’re just gonna burn you every time and that it’s that attitude.
It’s this aggressive posture where people are worried and they’re coming to reporters and saying,
Here are our worries.
Here’s the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened.
And Reddit’s response is Shut up.
That’s what breaks your community.
Thanks 😊
An automated transcription bot for linked audio or video content (longer content, interviews, etc.) would be incredibly useful.
Thanks for the transcript!
Thank you!
This just amazes me. It seems as if their blinded by power. Actually thinking they’re the true and only Frontpage of the internet.
Spez here thinking that the content hosting is more important than content generation. Reddit’s value to the community or advertisers is a result of the users, not Reddit Inc.
The big difference between Reddit and Facebook/twitter is that they were content moderation companies and they failed because they didn’t invest enough in it to keep the platform from going toxic.
Reddit has free content generation, free content moderation and they still can’t make a fucking profit.
I mean to be fair, I imagine when communities were in blackout things were looking dire. I haven’t been to reddit since, but I imagine things are pretty much back to normal? So it’s clear he can sort of spit on the reddit userbase how much he wants. People will still come back.
Noooo, it has not returned to normal at all. When the protestors left, a flood of other people came in to take their place. It was enough to create a noticeable shift in tone. I would now describe reddit as a whole as barely left-leaning. Almost every sub moved a couple notches noticeably rightward.
It has cancer. Prognosis not good, when monetization was the root cause.
Uh, if what your saying is true, that sounds like an absolute victory for Spez. He never wanted good communities, he wanted communities he could market to. Having the idiot right wing that buys Chinese hats that says MAGA is absolutely the audience he wants.
In fact, if you’re all correct and the old social media is just straight going to the right wing and the left wing goes underground to techie sites like Lemmy, their voices will get magnified. Which is already happening with bud and Starbucks. Oh we are fucked…
Thing about the internet is the spaces are not set. You can’t conquer a country like you can in real life, because none of the space actually exists. It’s all numbers of users, because there is a finite number of them, and they can only hang out and contribute in so many spaces.
They move into one, another shrinks. People come here, this one grows. That’s all. Think of it less as some kind of strategy game and more of fluids flowing and interacting in a complex system.
Sure, but some places do have more influence on the public discourse than others. Lemmy will remain relatively uninfluential until it becomes more user-friendly, and/or more well-known. So any left wing stuff here is going to have less of an effect than it did on Reddit or other such places, for now.
I feel like once good Lemmy apps exit betas and go to the App Store it’ll be bigger. Memmy is great, super user friendly. Once people can get access to it without jumping through hoops (TestFlight, not that complicated but maybe more than what the average user is willing to do), and once the app is ironed out (already most of the way there), it’ll be a much easier shift for a lot of people
The over-politicization here is annoying tbh. I still use Reddit for two things. To check on a reality tv show’s subreddit and to check Cricket discussions. I hope they move somewhere else, but neither are let or right wing. It feels like you’re seeing something you don’t like and attribute qualities you don’t like on to it.
How is this comment any different from a right wing person saying:
He never wanted good communities, he wanted communities he could market to. Having the idiot left wing that buys Chinese hats that has Mao pictures is absolutely the audience he wants.
Because the right absolutely does buy maga hats and scam commemorative coins. The left does not buy Mao anything. Because we’re not a cult.
I get it. I’ve seen both left and right do that tbh. But what does it have to do with Reddit?
Right buys MAGA hat and is a cult so reddit is going right wing?!
It’s the same with Twitter. Apparently it has gone really right wing since Elon took over. But I’ve not noticed as I mostly follow football, tech, and music stuff.
Elon himself has gone really right wing, and coming out in public with some of the same hate and nastiness that Twitter showcases. There was a stink a while back because companies were seeing their ads posted next to full-on neoNazi content, which is absolutely the last thing a large company wants when they pay for advertising on a social media platform. I’m glad it’s not affecting you personally, but it’s part of why people are trying to move to p. much any other platform.
How funny would it be if it leads to a shit show where actual journalists start demanding their fair share of advertising generated off their articles?
Reddit can beat mods because of money, but these giant media conglomerates both have money and are hurting their own advertising numbers because 99% of redditors never read the article. They have motivation and opportunity to get legal
Yahoo moment
Frontpage is dead, too.
The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.
Same, their coverage has made me feel way less terrible about all of this. Just knowing someone is out there calling Reddit on their BS makes it easier for me to accept that Reddit is no longer a safe place for me and move on.
It’s also one of the very few that’s been pretty accurate about it, I’m impressed.
Still waiting for spez to tell us what thatis said in private that differ from what he did in public. That’s one correction I don’t see his comm guy doing.
Iamthatis has spez dead to rights and is handling it with grace.
he’s always been a class act
Steve Huffman is an absolute tit.
No. People like tits.
They’re pretty charming and it’s fun to feed them over winter, but the amount of excrement that results can be astounding. Better keep them at some distance from the house.
We’ll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We’ll be in touch as corrections are needed.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of this position, the statement also doesn’t make sense at face value, right? I think I understand what they’re trying to say, but aren’t those two sentences in conflict? Isn’t getting “in touch as corrections are needed” literally making “comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations”?
This is their “gotcha” move - if they don’t comment, it’s unsubstantiated hearsay. If they do comment it’s because it’s wrong.
It’s just a gotcha to them. If I read an article from The Verge and Reddit hasn’t commented on it, I’m not even going to remember that quote, let alone make that connection that the article must be unsubstantiated hearsay.
It must make them feel better saying it though.
Even if they do, every article about Twitter comes with:
Twitter responded to inquiries with the poop emoji, as they do every time.
This is worse, because reddit is saying if anything was wrong, they would have responded. So it looks like reddit just agrees with anything that doesn’t get a response.
Logically, yes, but in the context of journalism, it’s actually doing a company a favor to give them a chance to comment before the article is published. If a company wants to say “no comment,” or be rude, that’s a choice they can make, but a poop emoji is refusing to comment and being rude.
Imagine you’re writing an article about Twitter’s policies, and you know all your sources are angry, so you think you should try to get Twitter’s side. Maybe your sources are distorting the facts. So you send a polite email to Twitter, because you are a professional, and regardless of your own feelings, you want to present the facts. Twitter auto-replies with a poop emoji. No matter how you look at it, that’s inappropriate.
And at this point, I don’t think anyone is asking Twitter about the facts, politely or otherwise, lol. I’m not sure if a publication would even print a correction from Twitter, if they bothered to submit one. If you tell the press to screw off and not ask you for facts, you will find it very difficult to get them to publish anything you say ever again, even if you want them to. Reddit isn’t there yet, but that’s the kind of fire they’re playing with.
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Yes. It’s a horrible way to deal with the media and falls apart with even a little bit of scrutiny, but I never said it was a good strategy.
“We will not tolerate any lies being told about us. If we hear any, we’ll let you know.”
Right, but essentially that reads that everything is true and they couldn’t find anything wrong. Since they didn’t contact the Verge. It’s confusing because at least to me this is them rolling over and giving up.
I think it’s spez’s attempt to make a “cool” statement, like Hans Niemann’s “chess speaks for itself”
What I took from that is that I can assume everything that The Verge is saying about Reddit is true unless Reddit says otherwise. And they haven’t.
To be honest, though, given that Reddit has been caught lying on multiple occasions recently, I wouldn’t be inclined to believe their “corrections”, anyway.
I also don’t understand how not commenting is supposed to discredit Verge. And what does the Verge guy mean when he says “so we’ll just print this statement every time”? How is that going to help them?
Not commenting = not providing The Verge with any information, so The Verge doesn’t have anything that comes directly from reddit that could reflect negatively on them.
Reddit only reaching out when a correction is needed is done in bad faith. The hope is that, by saying “you got this wrong, which is not surprising because none of the information you’re getting is coming directly from reddit,” the reader comes to the conclusion that The Verge isn’t reliable and nothing they publish about this topic should be trusted.
By printing that statement, The Verge is undercutting reddit’s attempt to discredit them. It basically tells the reader: “If we got something wrong it’s because reddit has decided that it’s more important to hope we make a mistake (that they will try to make into a big deal), rather than communicate clearly to make sure the true story gets published accurately.” In other words, reddit hopes The Verge screws up, so they can spin things and convince people to believe reddit instead of believing The Verge. The Verge is saying "we see the game you’re playing and we’re not gonna play it. And we’re telling everyone that you’re trying to play this stupid game.
Thanks for the great explanation!
Sure thing, glad you found it helpful!
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Saying it once was enough i think.
(Or you fell into a bug.)
weird. submitted it once. got triplicated somehow.
TIL the fediverse has an echo.
Echos and operate at different timelines with the synchronization differences between different instances.
Oh ok, my bad😅
Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn’t really care for the ‘politics’. Now I get here and see there’s a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money’s the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.
There’s also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.
So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesn’t care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.
Maybe, the problem with old reddit is that it’s as much about the comments as it is the content. Comments are hard to advertise on. Where card style scrolling content is great for advertising. Scroll a couple cards with a 20-60 second engagement, look at an ad, scroll a little more. . …
However, I don’t see this as being a great way to farm content for language models, the content engagement tends to drop significantly with the endless scrolling so my guess is that it’s a short term play to prove they can sell ads before the IPO.
Third party app users only made up ~3% of total reddit traffic. The revenue potential there is miniscule. It was never about the money, but about control.
I don’t trust reddit reporting that value accurately. Not saying it is a huge percentage, but they likely doing some things to minimize the numerator and maximize the denominator.
But yeah, definitely about control. They could have monetized users on third party apps with more reasonable API pricing. People would probably have barely noticed and that’d be new revenue for reddit that didn’t exist before.
If they charged 1/3 of what they are for third party clients to access the API and required Reddit Premium for API access…. They could have made a mint! Plus they could have reported huge upticks in subscribers to their service. THAT would have looked good to Wall Street for an IPO.
Instead we get this fuster cluck.
Yeah, that would have been smart. But Huffman has publicly (and unwisely) admitted that he admires Elon, which means he is currently not at home to Mr. Smart.
Please correct me if I’m mistaken but isn’t the reddit dataset used to train LLMs from before Chat GPT became widely known? I was under the impression data from that point onwards was poisoned and not useful for training purposes
I can’t seem to find it now but I remember there being a ~90gb .zip megadb upload that got passed around a lot on machine learning reddit subs that was a snapshot of reddit before x date
Reddit totally has the potential to compete with tiktok in the mindless scrolling for a much more massive audience.
They can consolidate all their users and better track their routines and serve them more mindless addicting content which advertisers love.
I expect there will be major changes to how the app works in a few months to the point it becomes completely unrecognisable. Kind of like how musical.ly turned into tiktok overnight
It’s not clear to me that this decision is financially healthy for Reddit. Even aside from the consequences of upsetting a lot of users (which has already made advertisers unhappy, since they prefer to advertise to people who aren’t upset; there’s been a noticeable decrease in ad spending on the site lately), Reddit only makes money from this move if anyone actually pays for the API, and/or they can force more people to use the official app. Whether they get more takers for the app, I don’t know. We’ll find out next week. But I don’t think a lot of people are going to pay for the API. Most third-party apps can’t, and neither can a lot of people who might use the API for research.
Basically, only big companies can afford the new prices, and if big companies pay, Reddit will make a profit. But big companies don’t become big companies by paying for overpriced commodities. API access for sites that have similar content costs a lot less than what Reddit wants. So, of the big companies that could pay, Microsoft is quietly modifying its products to avoid paying (you can’t upload from their hardware directly to Reddit anymore, for example). Google is introducing a service that is meant to take traffic away from Reddit, I doubt they’ll want to buy overpriced API data. AIs have already slurped up a lot of Reddit data, and can just scrape the site if they want more. The API is not the only way for bots to get access to Reddit’s data, just the easiest. Probably someone is going to pay for API access, at least in the short term, but I really don’t see this going well in the long run. People just don’t buy products that cost more than they’re worth. Even if Reddit’s data was worth the inflated price they’re asking, the API is not the only way to get that data. And I am pretty sure it’s not that valuable to anyone except the people who can’t afford it.
Third party apps are the only ones who need API access to survive, and therefore the ideal customers for Reddit’s API, but Reddit would rather fish for the customers that aren’t there than do business with the customers that are. Or, were, until a few weeks ago. Now–not so much. Christian Selig could have put a significant chunk of change in Reddit’s pocket on an ongoing basis if they’d negotiated a decent price, since Apollo was doing well, and Selig wanted to work with them, but no, Reddit had to ask a price Selig literally couldn’t pay, so Reddit gets nothing, users lose Apollo, and no one is happy. Infinity is going to try to make it work, but I doubt that’ll be much money for Reddit, and I doubt it’ll last more than a year, tops.
To be fair, in theory, charging for API access would give Reddit an additional revenue stream, which is probably what Huffman told investors. But no company that actually makes money from selling API access does it at this price point, or without, y’know… trying to keep customers instead of chasing them off. This is how Twitter did it, and Twitter is losing more money on a regular basis than Reddit has ever made. But it’s not my business, so what do I know… [/Kermit drinking tea]
I think the rationale is that while a few users might leave, the vast majority doesn’t care enough to make changes. With most 3rd party apps gone, more people will use the official app, providing Reddit with a lot more very valuable data they can sell while showing more ads. All this directly benefits Reddits bottom line. We live in a bubble where the exodus might appear much larger than it is. Most users just want their silly memes. The few tens of thousand users who left are barely noticeable. Major subreddits shutting down is actually annoying and that’s why Reddit is fighting against that.
I mean. My account has been a daily driver for the better part of 17 years. The name is original enough that if I went a week or so on an alt I would get requests for takeover from others.
I haven’t been on since it all started. And I won’t close the account. Just let it sit.
Go one further, edit and delete all your posts.
They’ll just restore them. Comments from seven years ago from people who did not intentionally purge have been coming back.
Mine haven’t yet. I think it depends on what you use to purge them. I used the Power Delete Suite fork by pkolyvas which adds a 5 seconds delay to comply with rate limits and so far it worked.
EDIT: yeah I just checked again, I found like ~5 comments that were brought back. Going to do this again, fuck them.
EDIT 2: actually many of my top comments were brought back, seems like they bring back only highly voted ones. Fuck them again.
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And dangerous. Sometimes people delete information for a reason.
Not to mention the EU privacy laws touching on the right to delete information posted online, even if a company’s terms of service say you don’t have that right. I just don’t understand why they would bother restoring data that bots already have, since it’s been free since it was posted, and will continue to be free until the end of the month. (And even then, it’s still going to be possible to scrape the site for free).
I purged all of mine and since then every couple of days a few of them would magically reappear in my comment history again. I do feel bad for doing that though. I’ve found so many old gems (answers) on Reddit through Google searches that I wouldn’t have found anywhere else.
This is true. I’m about to modify my script to just put in a “this person is no longer on Reddit” disclaimer instead of deleting them.
i don’t suppose you’d send it to me when you’re done?
i’ve been looking for a script that adds to comments rather than overwriting them, so i can put “this user has moved to lemmy” without losing any information
PowerDeleteSuite might work for that, I’ve been using it for awhile to edit all and delete comments. I’ll try and see if I can edit all without deleting…
EDIT: Yes you can edit all comments without deleting.
Here’s the link to it: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
EDIT again: There’s a new fork of that project that adds a 5s delay to help it work better. The original is now hampered by reddit’s bot detection stuff.
newer fork: https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite/
oh nice, thank you. i could have sworn i checked reddact, shreddit and pds, but i guess not
i think i’ll be doing this tonight
edit; i may be dumb, but i can’t figure out how to do this. for clarity, what i’m hoping to have is:
original comment text, something witty but too helpful/productive to permanently delete
due to recent actions by reddit, this user has moved to lеmmy. come join me at join-lemmy(dot)org, or try кbin, squаbbles, or tildеs
pds can edit comments on mass, but only by overwriting; not adding to
Please don’t do that unless you are replicating them somewhere else.
Gosh I HATE when I I stumble upon a reddit thread from Google when trying to solve a problem or something, and the comment which may have been the solution is removed or edited by one of those redact bots.
This is exactly the point of the deletion. Very few comments are actually crucial to the sum of human knowledge, proud as we are of some of them, but anything that makes Reddit more annoying decreases their chance of being profitable. And at the end of the day, people have a right to delete online comments if they want. (Also, most of Reddit is backed up somewhere, anyway, so anyone desperate for a specific post or comment can probably find it. ;) )
I would mass edit all of my comments but I’ve helped contribute to community knowledge of reddit throughout the years and I don’t want that to disappear
If their was a way to add an extension to my existing comments during mass edits to keep the original content but also add to it then I would
I felt the same way, but those communities are already collapsing.
Almost everything is archived, so the more people delete, the more other people will use archive sites for informative instead of Reddit proper.
Try searching for almost any computer related information on Reddit. The subs either private, or much of the discussion has already been vandalized.
You’re right for sure, it’s a major loss for free information, but the avalanche is already rolling.
I believe there is an “append” function in the API. I’m on Mobile otherwise I’d look it up
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Man. Nilay’s ego can be a bit irritating at times, but he’s damn good at holding brands to account. Their editorial policies around background information, NDAs and transparency are likewise much stronger than lot of publishers these days.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
For real. My brother is one of those people who is like “they aren’t gonna die from this so why should I care blah blah blah”. He thinks if protesting won’t have the immediate impact that people want then those no reason for it to happen
Effective protest means accepting going without and inconvenience.
In an instant gratification society, that is anathema.
Mods aren’t going to put in the unpaid time just to make Hoffman rich.
Don’t understand how people can still use Reddit and ignore all the ickiness.
Preach it brother!
Throwing everything out of the pram
