bardfinn
Why?
Many reasons:
Reddit was a party, now it is a business. As Spez said in the AMA, it is not (yet) profitable, and as is apparent, there are no more rounds of capital raising happening. They filed for an IPO two years ago. Will they have that IPO? I say, at this point, No. The mere fact that Spez said that it’s not profitable tells me that they’re no longer going for an IPO. Now, they’re just aiming at making Reddit into a real business, for the long term.
Third Party Apps using the API to serve Reddit content with subscription models or by running their own adverts alongside the content, and raking in cash — bottom line, they were stealing revenues from Reddit. Even though Reddit didn’t enforce any API TOS or AUP or user agreement, etc — the terms were still there in the main user agreement that use of the site and use of the API was personal, and not “scrape the contents of the site, slap your own brand on it, and pull in profit from that”. Not even if it had a better UI and better mod tools. It’s still theft, even if the aesthetics were clean. Even if it was “anti censorship”, even if it was “accountability and transparency”, even if it was for research and even if it supported, tangentially, moderator efforts. Even if Reddit mismanaged their API for a decade.
Reddit admins already prepared for this eventuality. They started preparing for it in 2015 when a bunch of “free speech” bigotry-oriented ecosystem subreddits blacked out “in protest” of Reddit shutting down a half dozen subreddits — subreddits dedicated to white supremacist hatred and violent misogyny, and which, we would later find out were run by a now-convicted White Identity Terrorist, European88.
They later prepared for it in 2018 and then when the founder of KotakuInAction figured out that the people who had been running KiA were the same people who helped u/European88 run thousands of White Identity Extremism terrorist subreddits and misogynist subreddits, and were in a conspiracy to burn the site down by drowning it in terrorist hate speech and making it into 4chan’s /pol/. He closed KiA. The Reddit admins reopened it and gave it back to the people who had been running it to drive misogynist hatred and recruit for White Identity Extremism groups.
Moderator is a Verb, not a Noun. The new moderator code of conduct and modsupportbot “moderator candidate” function makes it clear that moderators are supposed to be the people who actually take actions to steward a community, not people who claim a title and never take action, not people who abuse the privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that aren’t in the interest of the communities they serve. Not absentee founders.
Moderator teams tend to be cliques of 80% people with strong opinions about how the subreddit should be run but who take very few actions and 20% people who take a lot of actions to enforce clear violations of the Sitewide rules and subreddit rules. The 80% don’t recruit new moderators. The 20% can’t recruit new moderators. The 20% get burned out, they leave, the 80% still don’t recruit new moderators, and eventually can’t recruit moderators at all, moderation doesn’t happen, the community fails.
That shouldn’t happen. But it does.
Reddit is a forest; Subreddits are plants in that forest. Some are huge trees, and some are tiny shrubs. Anyone can plant one and grow it. But guess what happens when a huge tree is cut down? Suddenly, fifteen trees spring up to fill the air and sunlight and soil and ecosystem niche the fallen tree once had.
You cut down your own tree, Reddit doesn’t care. You clearcut a field, Reddit doesn’t care. You take down one of the core and oldest trees … ok Reddit might care, but they will deal with it.
You and a bunch of Reddit moderators who don’t want to recruit and manage and train and mentor dozens and hundreds of new moderators to replace the mod teams you’re burning out, to replace you, eventually — because, hey, we’re all mortal — are choosing to leave the site? Close your subreddits? OK, Buddy. A dozen of you, and the toxic, static, insular mindset and cliqueishness you brought to running communities, you’re gone — and in your place, 500 fresh faces. People with a passion for community, who don’t know you, don’t want to know you, and who will build communities in the forest.
Sometimes, forest fires happen, and can be good for the ecosystem.
Two day protests don’t change corporate behaviour. There has been one protest that successfully coincided with Reddit changing its behaviour, and that protest built over nine months in the contemporaneous instance, and began 5 years earlier. It succeeded largely because it was protesting terrorist hatred and violence, and Reddit could either come to terms with it, or lose advertisers & audience.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity, only bad managers. Reddit’s in the headlines! People will come check it out. Free publicity.
In summary:
The two-day and/or “indefinite” blackouts are a good holiday, and a solidarity speech act with our co-moderators & communities.
I doubt they’re going to change the behaviour of Reddit, Inc.
Because at this point, it’s profits or bankruptcy.
I think about the Tower of Flints.
That’s why they use the volunteer mod model, and why they keep us at arm’s-length, and mandate that we cannot receive any compensation of any kind from anyone for moderating.
That said —
The mod code of conduct gives them avenues for removing mods that violate it; there’s also neutral admin-developed tools that identify users who are already active in helping the community out as potential moderator recruits.
So mods that close subreddits maliciously — with an intent to damage Reddit or to demand that they disburse money to a third party — could be removed from mod privileges, and replacements found.
Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.
Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.
There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.
Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.
Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.
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.
As for liability, the Ninth Circuit in Mavrix v LiveJournal held that if an agent of a user-content-hosting ISP (social media) has the means and opportunity to moderate, they also have the means and opportunity to interdict reasonably known copyright violations, and failure to act on those would jeopardise their DMCA Safe Harbour.
And there’s a lot of registered copyright holders that will 100% line up to be a creditor on statutory damages.
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
So the NSFW changes seem to be prompted by regulatory threats & Reddit getting the approaches covered, & this also seems to confirm that the API shutdown for many third party apps is because the API was a golden goose for those developers, laying golden eggs - both in user content & in giving those app developers the opportunity to run their own adverts alongside reddit content.
They didn’t lock old.reddit out of new features; it’s a really unwieldy codebase, and making changes to old,reddit is like shaking a wooden water tower. It holds up the water tank as long as it’s a static load, not dynamic. I’ve had to read / maintain / debug source code in my career - and I’ve read the old open sourced Reddit code, and it is … well, it’s not designed for building up and out. It’s not even designed for maintaining over time. It was designed to get a message board running with occasional weekly downtimes, and a lot of “you broke reddit” and a bunch of RSS feeds and API endpoints, and no view to end user experience. It was built with the same mindset as building windows 3.1. Coding some of the features would be like backporting their support code to windows 3.1 - but not as libraries, as device drivers.
So, my understanding is that third party apps are supposed to have the user authenticate via OAuth (or some other means), and then the app requests content from Reddit’s servers under the user’s authentication, because the user’s authentication is what determines whether the user can see the contents of i.e. private subreddits and mod privileged post/comment views, & take mod actions.
My understanding is that anyone using a phone/tablet third party app isn’t going to even get close to the 60 items per minute limit that existed.
It’s also my understanding that moderators would hit the 60 items a minute limit if they were using Toolbox to action a bunch of comments in a post, or were actively clearing the mod queues of several large, active subreddits, simultaneously.
The only way I can imagine that Apollo would be charged premium firehose api access is if Apollo was being a man-in-the-middle between Reddit’s servers and their user base — if Apollo was running a server, which server was authenticating as the users, and then the Apollo server was sending material back to the phone/tablet client app.
Which … should not be happening, for oh-so-many reasons.
For one, if Apollo is doing that to remove Reddit’s advertisements and/or insert their own advertisements … that would be shenanigans.
If Apollo is store-and-forwarding user data — are they complying with California user privacy & GDPR requirements?
etc etc etc
If I’m using a third party app to access Reddit, I do not expect that the API calls made by the app to go through the app publisher’s systems.
So I’m really not grokking how this state of affairs is a crisis for a third party app publisher, unless the third party app publisher architected their app in a completely upside down fashion, or is pulling some sort of MITM shenanigans, or the publisher completely misunderstands what the changes to the API will mean.
In short, “where’s the fettucine?”