A coordinated blackout on Reddit to protest the new Ugandan anti lgbt legislation wouldn't make as much sense or be as effective. There are regularly posts voted to the front page of reddit about these new laws and other human rights issues and what you might be able to do to help if interested.
These different issues don't have to be in competition and aren't analogous to each other.
Nuke reddit (only on the edge extension store it looks like) is giving their frontends a workout.
You certainly raise good points about the policy change itself and about the ensuing debate and my own view is certainly closer to yours than to "not care / no position." I'm just not talking about it here, my comment was my stunned reaction to steve huffman's abominable public behavior.
They could Elsevier a bunch of researchers who get institutional grants, but that’s not going to be a predictable, dependable, forecastable revenue stream.
For anyone with experience in pricing data services for partners, and anyone with experience with auditable, publicly owned businesses (like Reddit is trying to become, through IPO)
the API TOS & the “premium” firehose pricing is about having all the costs and cost centres of their business operations either justified by a revenue stream, or having a potential revenue stream assigned to those cost centres, or having a business case justifying the existence of that cost and cost centre, OR having a pricing model on that aspect of business which justifies it only being operated as a distinctly separate business model from the main business.
If that happens, then they’d likely spin it off as a subsidiary business, or a licensor, and operate it in a way that locks down their liability from privacy violation cases or GDPR violation cases etc.
In short: Reddit isn’t doing this for an “AI Gold Rush”. Reddit is doing this because they have to structure their business operations in a way that limits liabilities, minimizes or justifies cost centres, and maximizes profit streams.
To get people to buy the stock. To show that the company is profitable and is leveraging all their assets.
My only disagreement is to say that some subs will be going dark permanently, which does work. Otherwise, carry on, and thank you for your service to the community.
That's an effective end-run on Godwin's law. Well played, sir.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand, and to be frank, I get enough LGBTQ propaganda firehosed at me every other which way, thank you very much.
I could speak (or write) for half an hour about how the API changes are a net benefit, & how they will force Reddit to internalize the support systems & anti-abuse infrastructure they’ve dumped on users for a decade, as well as improve user privacy. I have a position.
My position is simply summarisable as “This is a Chaos Ladder Festival which will rob oxygen from the rightful problems that should be protested”.
This is Pride month. The anti-LGBTQ legislation going up around the US has a precedent in post-Weimar Germany. The people promoting these blackouts over “Reddit is ending abuse of their API” sure aren’t protesting hatred and legalized harassment. This should be a month where people are politically organizing on Reddit to defeat hatred. This convenient dead-cat-issue now has stolen all the protest oxygen.
But let’s sidestep that approach to the issue for a second.
There’s a very pertinent point buried in this protest: the official Reddit websites and app are nigh-on useless for visually impaired people to use. The app especially is garbage. You know what would never get protested widespread by hundreds of subreddits? Reddit being unavailable to the visually impaired. It’s practically a footnote in this protest. It’s included as an afterthought, a backshore to prevent challenges to the good faith and legitimacy of the protest. Blind people aren’t getting usability out of this protest; the unusability of the new website and the app is a direct result of the development frameworks they use to abstract the development of the website and the app. The framework devs aren’t going to change their frameworks.
Yet another thing is that two-day boycotts … don’t … work. It’s “we’re going out of town for a weekend”, except at scale. It just shows Reddit that some moderation teams will participate in a power-flex protest that is a result of some folks angry that Reddit is no longer their golden goose, no longer laying golden eggs for them.
p.s. I