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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I don't like many things about reddit.
Having said that - this article is bullshit. Let me draw you a picture. You run a company that has a product. You give the users of your product a lot of freedom. That is naive, wishful thinking, goodwill, whatever. Your users start having an issue with the direction of the company. Your users start sabotaging your company. You find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
No matter what you do or do not do - bullshit articles like this will pop up.
Switch users to creators of said product and it is not bullshit at all. Reddit is only what it is due to the users contributions. The site itself is nothing but a medium.
I don't agree. Reddit didn't need to make their API costs hundreds of times greater than it actually costs them. If they made them reasonable, both sides could have profited. Apps would still live and Reddit would still earn money from the users using those apps.
Another thing, the whole point of Reddit is that you're giving the users a lot of freedom. The concept doesn't even work if you don't do that. Reddit can't moderate all of the subreddits themselves, there are thousands upon thousands of mods doing it for free. Reddit can't take on that job, it would cost so much they would be bleeding money.
Same as the other comment - irrelevant. This article is not about API pricing. Not about the blackout. It's about reddit trying to save whatever ruin there's left.
If you wanna focus on that part then the second part of my comment still stands. Reddit can't survive without the work of unpaid moderators and saying that it was a mistake to give the users freedom is kinda stupid. The whole point of Reddit is that users have freedom, remove that and Reddit doesn't work anymore.
Idk, this isn't simply about making and selling a widgit or service. It's an interesting other in which the vast majority of the product and service is created and run by the same users. Reddit just creates a space but people don't really care about the space generally. They care about what happens in the space that the users create and moderate. The users can just find another hangout which could eliminate the need for the space.
I'd argue it is exactly that - the space to post whatever floats your boat is the service they're selling. There are also a bunch of other transactions where you're the product, but that's not the point here.
Which is why I've switched to Lemmy. I'm under to illusion Reddit owes me or the moderators anything. Nobody from Reddit had ever forced anyone to moderate anything.
I've loved their service; I don't anymore - hence I'm here.
The rest of the world differentiates pricing based on type of usage, one thing is users/small devs, a totally different thing is corporate usage (AI scraping in this case).
It would have been more than enough for reddit to do the same and noone would have objected.
It's reddit who put themselves "between a rock and a hard place" by managing this in the most ridiculously stupid way possible, not the users.