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I think the difference that spez failed to realize when he decided to turn the enshittification dial up to 11 is that, unlike facebook, whatsapp, instagram, etc, we were not on reddit because of people we know. There was no peer pressure or awkward conversations. We did not rely on reddit as a means of communication that was irreplaceable. When the whatsapp drama happened, we couldn't really up and leave, because grandma doesn't know how to download signal. because the local market down the road has whatsapp set up for orders and doesn't really give a shit. the family group has important starred chats that we refer to, etc etc.

This is not at all the case with reddit. Reddit is where we went for content. But whether the content is on reddit, lemmy, or the back of a shampoo bottle in the bathroom, it made no difference whatsoever. In my jump from reddit I've had to explain to exactly zero people why I'm making this decision. You cannot do that with instagram or whatsapp; and it took me years to convince people that I will not use facebook (thankfully that's now a little more acceptable of a concept, but i digress). they wanted to play like the big social media boys, but they forgot that, in their core, they are not a social media platform.

Having mainstream news sources reporting on this -- especially more financially-oriented ones like Forbes -- is actually a pretty good sign. Even though I am enjoying Lemmy more now that I have tried it anyway.

What these guys don't realize is the "value" of their website is their users content. They tend to feel like they're the value, that they've done something great. You see this in both Musk and Zuck. They feel like they're the heroes of the internet. Except what is Reddit exactly, what is it's value? It is only the users. These guys parade around the knowledge of other people as if it's their own value and want to become rich off it. I'm sick of this Silicon Valley bullshit, honestly. That whole mindset is toxic from start to finish. And we see the finish on all of them: screw over the people who create the content for the next round of VC cash, or IPO.

I hope Lemmy or whatever comes next can resist this culture of "burn it to the ground for the payday".

I think the thing that blows my mind about the pricing model is- AI using reddit for training data doesn't need to up vote, downvote, subscribe, comment, or constantly ingest new data. They could ingest everything on Reddit once and be done, or come back every 6 to 12 months for an update. 3rd Party App developers need to download the same posts from the front page for every user, multiple times a day, constantly. They actually interact with a website. A $1 billion LLM ai might pay $1 million to download all the reddit data they need. Meanwhile Apollo might be worth less than $1 million as a business and is being hit with $20 million per year as operating expenses. The pricing model is set up in such a way that LLM's are in a much better position to either pay a pretty insignificant fee to get all the data, or just build a scraper since they don't need to support multiple users or website interaction. Meanwhile the price to app developers is impossibly high.

When the site treats you as product, but forgets you create the content they are trying to sell.

as if we would back down - or even need to

all glory to the Fediverse!

The stupid part is nobody really cares how much they want to charge to organizations wanting to train AI models. Literally all they have to do is offer a reasonable price for third party app developers. It's not that hard to have different price tiers for different use cases.

correct title should be ‘Reddit declares war on its users and community developers’

I deleted every comment, every upvote and every post I ever made on Reddit. Fuck /u/spez, fuck Reddit.

Eye-watering? That's such a strange way to put it.

So I'm the strange one here. I hadn't heard this phrase before now. Thanks for the explantations yall.

I’m really dying to find out if this blackout continues past the first 48 hours and if it has any impact on their decision.

It sort of doesn’t matter to me since the Apollo dev already said he wasn’t going to keep his app up due to how spez handled the whole situation.