What Reddit Got Wrong
www.eff.org
After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access...

From the article:

"Moving to the Fediverse

This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."

  • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    This, I did not know:

    Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.

    • mizmoose@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, there’s nothing special about an API. It’s just a shortcut for the app to use to get specific info from the server.

      • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Even worse, their official app uses the same API – and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.

        They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.

        • mizmoose@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn’t getting a slice.

          RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I’m willing to bet they’re next on the chopping block of his tantrum.